Not really. I don't even smoke, but I am dumping twelve pounds of baking soda into my pool skimmer, which is lots of fun too. Imagine the look on the cashier's face when I threw all twelve up on the counter. "What does this lunatic need all this baking soda for?" she probably thought to herself. She didn't say anything out loud though because people around here are so polite. You're probably wondering why yourself now that I think about it. Well, it turns out pool alkalizer and baking soda are one and the same. Otherwise known as sodium bicarbonate, it's a buffer that will help stabilize the pH of any aqueous solution, including chlorinated pool water.
Without buffering the pool water, pH swings can be pretty wild as chemicals are added. According to some of the reading I've done online, extreme pH excursions are very bad for some of the pool's components, particularly the metal bits, so stabilizing pH is very important. The winterizing kit suggests that the pool chemistry be up to snuff before adding the winterizing chemicals, so I'm trying to quickly get everything in balance before I attempt to winterize.
A little side note: I've probably used literal tons of this stuff making solutions in bio labs over the years. It also turns out that living creatures need a steady pH as well, and so any time you're doing in vitro experiments, you need a buffer like sodium bicarbonate to stabilize pH and keep those biological cells and molecules happy. Okay, enough biology, back to the pool.
Since I've procrastinated so long on closing the pool, I've lit a new fire under my butt about getting the thing ready to do so. All of the big box retailers aren't selling pool chemicals any more since it's so late in the season, and I needed to up the 'total alkalinity' of the pool from the 20 ppm it was at yesterday. The chlorine reads good after shocking the pool yesterday, and the pH is right down the middle at between 7.2 and 7.4, so this is the last bit of chemistry that needs addressing. Yesterday I used all the alkalizer left behind from the previous owner, which raised the alkalinity all the way to 60 ppm, but it was still outside the recommended range. The suggestion chart on the side of the container says I need between 12 and 15 lbs more to get it to 120 ppm or above, which will put it right where it needs to be.
Looking online yielded not so stellar prices to have the alkalizer delivered to my house. On a hunch I looked up baking soda on Costco's website and it turned out it was cheaper per pound than the alkalizer was online. I decided to run to the local Lowe's grocery store and check out their price. Even in this small form factor of only one pound, Lowe's turned out to be price competitive, so I snagged twelve of them to save myself the drive across town to Costco. The gas would've cost me more than the price difference anyway, not to mention my time.
Well, that's it for this post. Maybe not as much fun as my title suggested, but now if you find yourself desperately in need of some alkalizer late into the fall or in the dead of winter, you know you can go to the local grocery store and grab some baking soda as a substitute. Then maybe you can get baked next to your pool if you're into that sort of thing. Until next time, Steem On!
