Soda Ash vs. Sodium Bicarbonate for Raising Alkalinity

As you can see here, I've got an article up here from poolhelp.com, and it's written by Kim Skinner many years ago.

I guess he did this in 2019.

And it talks about the concentrations of sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate.

And we are all used to raising alkalinity with sodium bicarbonate, which is the recommended product for that.

It's also recommended for acid washes on plaster surfaces, that you put a, a high concentration of bicarb in the water and rinse it off so that you neutralize the acid.

A lot of people don't do that, but it's really helpful on startups as well.

Soda ash, however, is a very different product, and soda ash is a lot more concentrated for one thing, and it's really made, i-in my opinion, this is Eric's opinion here, it's really more effective on commercial pools where you have an operator who is there all day, every day.

On a residential service route, or for homeowners listening to this, I guess homeowners would have more time than a service pro, but it's really a function of time.

It takes time to dissolve soda ash and add it slow enough that it doesn't spike your LSI too fast.

Because if you add soda ash, it just clouds up the water.

And what's really happening there is you're introducing carbonate ions at a high pH.

And so those carbonates are going to bind to calcium ions that are in the water, and the high pH is going to convert bicarbonate ions into more carbonate ions.

So it kind of happens both ways.

It's similar chemistry at the surface of why plaster dust is created.

So if you have hungry water filling a plaster surface, it pulls calcium hydroxide out of the surface.

The high pH converts bicarbonate in the water into carbonate.

Boom, you get plaster dust or calcium carbonate.

So what I'm getting at here is these are two very different products.

I personally recommend sodium bicarbonate for residential pool pros.

It's going to, uh, be a lot more effective for raising alkalinity.

Uh, not soda ash, just because of the cloudiness problem, and then you don't want to have to have callbacks because you clouded up a pool.

And again, if you were there all day and you could get it in slowly, it'd probably be okay.

But soda ash is mainly used for raising the pH without making a huge difference on alkalinity.

And so let's find out why.

And I'm going to read this, um, th-this little segment here.