Rudy & Andrea: pH of Pools - what they neglected to tell you

This is the one where Rudy & Andrea discuss a few things and then dive deep into pH.

• Pool Owner Responsibilities
• 9/11 Reflecting Pools Arrest
• Jupiter Splash Pad Electrocution
• pH
  • When Sodium bicarbonate can be used to lower pH
  • When Sodium bicarbonate won't work
  • Why a 'pH ceiling' theory is short-sighted
  • How a swg increases pH
  • What pH really stands for

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Transcript

Andrea The Pool Girl (00:02.304)
Oh, that was a very scary face. Halloween's over, why are you making scary faces? Well, that's true. But you know what? Oh.

Rudy (00:09.651)
Only by a few hours. Hey everybody, welcome to the Talking Pools podcast. I'm Rudy Stankiewicz here with my co-host, Ms. Andrea, the pool girl, Nanini.

Andrea The Pool Girl (00:23.467)
That's me. I'm the, I'm the cohost. Hello. What's up? Hello. Thank you for joining us. Um, it, it is the end of spooky season, but you know what it is the start of.

Rudy (00:35.022)
Boot weather.

Andrea The Pool Girl (00:36.609)
Scorpio season.

Rudy (00:39.086)
Scorpio season, see I was going with the boot thing, thought for sure that's where you were heading.

Andrea The Pool Girl (00:40.299)
which is also my birth month. It's my birth month.

Rudy (00:47.757)
Ah!

Andrea The Pool Girl (00:48.6)
And this one's a big one for me. So I'm going to.

Rudy (00:51.59)
I was never sure. I know the Bible listed the year that the Antichrist was born. I didn't know the month.

Andrea The Pool Girl (00:59.708)
They don't list the year. They don't put any dates in the Bible at all. Have you ever read it? Anyway, yeah, so it is my birth month and it's gonna be great.

Rudy (01:12.834)
Cool, so you've been having horrible, rotten, no good, miserable days. That's been going on.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:21.51)
I've had a rough, like week or so, yes.

Rudy (01:24.894)
Is it leaves? Leaves are falling. Everybody's going through that.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:28.795)
Uh, we have had, we have had some shit windy weather. Yes. Not so much really like rain storms, but it does, it, you know, the wind whips through and these people with their fucking plants all over the place, they all end up in the pool. So, Oh my God. Are you, so are you, do you want me to bring this up? The fucking oak trees, the pool that made me cry the other day. Oak trees hanging.

Rudy (01:34.414)
So some folks are out.

Rudy (01:43.79)
I hate plants near the pool.

Rudy (01:53.47)
You did have a pool. Make you cry.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:56.423)
Yeah, well, I mean, it's like, you know, I and I put this in the post and people are still sending me pictures of their like worst pools ever. Like, yeah, I would like I said in the post, like, I know this isn't the worst pool ever. Like, I've even gone up to pools that are worse than that. But it was a weekly service pool, like just one time a week. You know, there's no cleaner or anything. There's three. There's three or four huge, huge oak trees.

directly over the pool. There's one oak tree that is literally like four feet away from the pool, from the water.

Rudy (02:33.09)
So what you need is a chainsaw.

Andrea The Pool Girl (02:35.443)
Well, yeah, so part of the problem and part of the reason that it looked so bad is because the homeowner had already done that. He had already cut not completely down, but and I did make that joke to I made that suggestion to him and then was like, oh, I'm just joking. He was nice. I mean, yeah, he just took a few branches off big ones. And so, you know, they shit all in the pool because apparently I heard I didn't know this, but I heard that if you start cutting back.

Rudy (02:42.606)
cut the tree down.

Rudy (02:50.502)
We just took branches off.

Andrea The Pool Girl (03:04.491)
oak trees in particular, like they will get shocked, like not like in the pool, not how we shock a pool, but they like go into some stress and they just like drop their leaves and acorns and stuff like that as a reaction.

Rudy (03:19.01)
Did you say shock, Apul?

Andrea The Pool Girl (03:23.643)
I was making a joke. That's the only time it's acceptable. But yeah, so they the so he cut down. He cut what for what? The trees?

Rudy (03:27.682)
Wha- How fucking rude.

Well, if he caused all the leaves to fall and just left them for you to pick up, that's fucking rude. I don't care how it happened. That should be an extra charge. Two hours at this pool?

Andrea The Pool Girl (03:39.062)
Well...

Andrea The Pool Girl (03:45.336)
An hour and 45 minutes exactly.

Rudy (03:47.038)
Is that, and that was included in the fee that you charge?

Andrea The Pool Girl (03:51.011)
I don't know. I don't charge people. I'm not. I'm just, I just show up to clean the pools. I have nothing to do with the rates and whatever.

Rudy (03:58.85)
Did they warn you?

I'd have been pissed. That would fuck up your whole day.

Andrea The Pool Girl (04:03.619)
I was very upset. It really did and that's what happened. That's why I got so upset. Like I said, it's not the worst pool that I've ever seen, but it took me a hell of a long time to clean. I wasn't expecting it to be that bad. I was expecting it to be bad because it has been consistently bad since I've started doing the pool, which it's a brand new build by the way. That pool is only like six months, however long it takes to do a startup. That's how old the pool is.

because I got it right after the startup was done. So yeah, and the homeowners were all like worried about the staining and stuff. I'm like, I can fix that. That's not the issue, but you guys are gonna have to do something about this tree. So then I told him to get a cleaner. He's gonna have to empty it, you know, just, basically everything that I wanted him to do, he agreed to do, aside from cut down the fucking tree. So.

Rudy (04:56.358)
I think homeowners and facilities either way have a responsibility to call ahead of time when shit's going to be extra fucked up. That way you can at least plan your day a little bit better, prepare for what you're walking into.

Andrea The Pool Girl (05:01.611)
He's going to twice a week.

I agree.

Andrea The Pool Girl (05:11.611)
I told him that because he told me he was going to be cutting back more of the tree. And I said, let us know when you do that. You know, because then at least I won't I can clear my day, you know, an hour and 45 minutes, I could have done another four pools in that amount of time, you know. So I was sitting there and this is when this is when you called me and I was all upset. And then right after that, I called my boss because it was like 2pm and I still had 10 pools on my list to do.

Rudy (05:25.63)
Yeah, I bet. Yeah.

Andrea The Pool Girl (05:40.759)
And, you know, like I said, there was like some windy storm stuff happened through the whole area. So like his pool wasn't the only one that was trash. Like I went to a couple of other pools that took me normal longer than normal just because of the, you know, debris and shit from the wind. But anyway, so, yeah, I was two p.m. I still had 10 pools. I was really upset. And then I called my boss and I was like, can I please get some help? Because I'm going to be behind the whole week and.

So I got some help today, which was good.

Rudy (06:13.646)
It's good that your boss gave you help. Again, still, they should call you ahead of time. An act of God, anything along those lines, or act of homeowner, whatever you wanna call it.

Andrea The Pool Girl (06:23.725)
I just don't think that people know to do that. I think it's just, yeah, I don't think it was done, I don't think they just was like, fuck the pool girl, because he came out and was like, yeah, no, he's like, I'm really sorry, blah, blah. He's like, I was just thinking my pool person's gonna hate me, and I was like, ha ha.

Rudy (06:28.534)
Really?

Rudy (06:33.814)
It wasn't... malicious.

Rudy (06:44.118)
Well, why didn't he think that yesterday and make the fucking phone call?

Andrea The Pool Girl (06:48.223)
I don't, I don't know. It's just not something that people, I think, know that they should do. Say, it happens when they pressure wash too. Nobody gives you a heads up.

Rudy (06:50.222)
know either. So anyway.

Rudy (06:57.506)
So is that something that you would include in a service agreement? I did with the pressure washing. I included that in my service agreement that they had to let me know beforehand that they were planning on having their deck or their house or their screen enclosure pressure washed. So do you think this should be in there?

Andrea The Pool Girl (07:13.167)
I would the next time if I had my own business again. Yes, I think it should be for sure. I mean.

Rudy (07:19.07)
If your pool's gonna be extra fucked up, you need to let us know ahead of time, right in the service agreement. And it will be charged at an additional fee. This shit's not included.

Andrea The Pool Girl (07:30.135)
So I have a lot of people that will clean their pools after the hurricanes because they know that that's gonna be an extra charge if I'm there, you know, doing this massive cleanup. So that will happen a lot, you know. But like I said, I just think a lot of people tend to not be aware of the benefit to us that letting us know ahead of time that something like that happens.

Rudy (07:41.678)
I'm okay with that.

Rudy (07:51.996)
Is this your-

Rudy (07:57.867)
Now is this your only?

Andrea The Pool Girl (07:58.079)
But that's not even like abnormal. That pool looked like that last week before he even touched the trees. That's just the normal way that pool looks. So it's not even like.

Rudy (08:06.754)
So how long have you had this thing?

Andrea The Pool Girl (08:11.187)
I told you already, how long does it take to build a pool and do a startup?

Rudy (08:17.034)
It depends on who the builder is. Some of them apparently three or four years.

Andrea The Pool Girl (08:19.111)
Okay, so I've been to the pool probably four or five times.

Rudy (08:23.174)
Okay, so you're looking at this, your life is just gonna suck every day you have this pool.

Andrea The Pool Girl (08:28.839)
Yes. Except for like I said, now they're going to go to twice a week. I don't know if it's going to be me going two times.

Rudy (08:36.046)
Hmm. I don't know. I would talk to your boss about, you know, we always talk about how much time you should spend at a pool. How much time is too much time to spend at a pool? At what point in a normal cleaning is too much time?

Andrea The Pool Girl (08:46.867)
Well, they told me, he told me, because I sent, as soon as I got there, all those pictures that I posted, I sent straight to him. There's actually like 15 more of them. So I took a picture of everything at that pool before I even started, and I sent them to him immediately. And so he called me later on after, like I had already been there, because I was there so long that I wrote up a work order and the mechanic showed up to fix the fucking problem that I wrote up.

Rudy (09:15.934)
I thought you were going to say you were there so long that your kids called in a silver alert.

Andrea The Pool Girl (09:22.864)
I'm not 40 yet. That's that'll happen at the end of the month. No, but like, you know, anyway, so yeah, it was just real. But he oh, this is what I was saying. Hold on. Excuse me. Oh, what I was saying is he told me. Don't worry, you know, don't worry too much. Don't don't kill yourself. Basically is what he said. And I was like, huh? It was well too late for that.

It's a bit late for that. But he's like, no, everybody knows that it's not your fault. It's not like you caused any of it and everybody knows that the tree issue, so.

Anyway.

Now it's getting, like I said, twice a week, a cleaner, and he's cutting back the trees, which is gonna fucking suck while he's cutting them back. Honestly, I don't even think that's gonna matter at all.

Rudy (10:21.042)
Interesting and is this the only tier worthy pool that you've had this week or have there been others?

Andrea The Pool Girl (10:28.883)
This week, that was the only one. Um, like I said, in my post, there's only like a handful of pools that I can think of where I fucking cried. One of them was a similar situation where it was going to, I knew that it was going to take me like two hours to clean this pool based on previous experience. It was actually a lazy river style pool that had a bridge going across the middle of it and you had to, there was no way, like you had to take the vacuum out and walk around, you know,

walk around the bridge, there was no way to like do it with sleep with without taking the vacuum out of the water. So that made shit. And then there was trees all over the place and it would get trashed. I cried at that pool.

Rudy (11:05.207)
Now.

Rudy (11:09.906)
I know you threatened, you threatened to go to your pools in a Halloween costume. Did you do it?

Andrea The Pool Girl (11:18.255)
I did not. I was, nope.

Rudy (11:19.562)
You didn't, did you? Did you dress up? At all?

Andrea The Pool Girl (11:23.708)
No, I didn't.

Rudy (11:24.926)
No, not even last night.

Andrea The Pool Girl (11:26.919)
Nope. I, my child dressed up as a character from, um, this thing on YouTube called Ride the Cyclone.

Rudy (11:36.205)
Okay.

I don't know what that is, but I'm sure it was cool.

Andrea The Pool Girl (11:41.659)
I didn't know what it was until she showed it to me either. It's like a play.

Rudy (11:46.91)
Okay. We didn't, do you get a lot of, a lot of trick or treaters where you are?

Andrea The Pool Girl (11:48.319)
Like a musical. It's cool.

Not typically, no. My house is located in a kind of a, not a good spot.

Rudy (11:54.27)
No, I didn't get a lot either, but I dressed up. I dressed up as Art the Clown from the Terrifier movies and then before that from All Hallows Eve. Do you know who Art the Clown is?

Andrea The Pool Girl (12:03.867)
I saw your pictures, no I don't know who that is.

Rudy (12:05.898)
He is a scary clown. In my opinion, he's probably the scariest clown because these movies are definite torture flicks, which not my favorites, but I do appreciate Art the Clown. In either case, so I dress up, I'm opening the door like this, giving out the candy. So I open up the doors and there's this seven-year-old girl, seven or eight, she's dressed up like Little Red Riding Hood, and she looks at me and goes, "'You didn't scare me. "'Pennywise is better.'" I was like, I think I love you. I wanna adopt you.

Andrea The Pool Girl (12:14.573)
Ah, I'm not into those.

Andrea The Pool Girl (12:30.751)
Mm! Aww.

Rudy (12:35.826)
So love the attitude. That's cool when you can, when that can happen. So are you hearing about all these things with reflecting pools?

Andrea The Pool Girl (12:36.774)
Aww, that's cute.

Hehehe

Andrea The Pool Girl (12:49.832)
all what things.

Rudy (12:51.406)
There's things involving reflecting pools that have been going on for a little bit right now. I'm trying to find the one here. They found a guy drowned in a reflecting pool. I'm trying to figure out which one it is. Hold on a second.

Andrea The Pool Girl (13:06.879)
No, but did you hear about the people that were electrocuted at a fountain in Jupiter? Well, I don't know the details because I didn't read the articles, but I can tell you that I drive past there quite a bit. I think it was one of those, you know, how they have the fountains with like where the water shoots out of the ground and the kids complain and stuff. I think it was one of those.

Rudy (13:11.811)
No, tell me about that.

Rudy (13:29.815)
Yes.

Rudy (13:34.954)
Okay, so it really did.

I saw another- uh.

Rudy (13:42.974)
Eenie meenie miney moe.

Andrea The Pool Girl (13:45.015)
Keep seeming like you're really loud.

Rudy (13:48.202)
I am. I'm boisterous. Bois-

Andrea The Pool Girl (13:49.905)
I know, but like hurting my ear loud

Rudy (13:55.182)
So alright, I can't find the other one, but there was another one. So here you go. I'll just start with this one. So a couple of weeks ago, and I'm only hearing about this now, so I'm a little bit late to the game, but I don't think anybody else has talked about it just yet. A 33 year old man in New York City at the 9-11 memorial reflecting pools. Have you been there? Dives into the pools. 30 foot drop.

Andrea The Pool Girl (14:00.18)
Another one.

Andrea The Pool Girl (14:16.007)
Oh, I think I did hear about this.

No.

Andrea The Pool Girl (14:24.352)
He dove?

Rudy (14:26.302)
He jumped, and it's not that deep, breaks his fucking leg, starts to crawl toward the other drop that's in the center, you know, like the big gutter? Which is another 20 foot drop. He doesn't make it in there, but he does get arrested and they haul his ass high. They say he's mentally unstable. I think that I agree.

Andrea The Pool Girl (14:38.038)
Yeah.

Andrea The Pool Girl (14:42.387)
Why?

Andrea The Pool Girl (14:49.695)
Well, yeah, I mean, that tracks. Uh, that's interesting.

Rudy (14:55.138)
So yeah, 9-11 Memorial, a lot of people caught it on video, jumps the side, 30 foot drop, fucks up his leg, gets arrested, and then they take him to Bellevue, which is a big psych hospital in New York. Which to me sounds about right. That's where he should be.

Andrea The Pool Girl (15:02.661)
Ugh.

Rudy (15:14.314)
Agreed? Can you imagine? It's kind of disrespectful if you think about it. So I, as much as I, I mean, I hope that there's, it wasn't malicious.

Andrea The Pool Girl (15:29.972)
Yeah.

Rudy (15:31.934)
at the are you okay? You got nothing to say on that one? Are you in shock? Are you in awe or people just don't surprise you anymore?

Andrea The Pool Girl (15:40.131)
Uh, people don't surprise me. Well, I mean, if he was mentally ill, there's really no point in trying to figure out why he did it. If it was something like, you know, he wanted to take a dip and he thought it would be deeper or something like that, you know, that would at least would be funny.

Rudy (15:55.554)
It's kind of interesting if you look at the titles to the headlines. So it's like one of those, um, man arrested after he jumped into nine 11 Memorial pool in New York. Okay. Kind of bland New York post NYC.

Andrea The Pool Girl (16:06.835)
Like, was he trying to like, unalive himself or something? Was he like trying to drown?

Rudy (16:10.306)
Don't know, don't know. New York Post, NYC man jumped into the 9-11 memorial pool, has mental health issues, family say city refuses to treat him. And then, then we get to the Daily Mail, horrifying moment, bloodied man 33 slides into 20 foot central void of the 9-11 reflecting pool.

Andrea The Pool Girl (16:22.333)
That's sad.

Andrea The Pool Girl (16:30.171)
Oh no.

Andrea The Pool Girl (16:34.359)
Oh, so they probably had to like they drain it. Do they drain it?

Rudy (16:35.81)
They definitely dress that up a little bit. Yeah, I don't know. I doubt it. They treat it with bromine. I do know that from our earlier thing that I did.

Andrea The Pool Girl (16:44.787)
Really? Bromine and it's outdoors?

Rudy (16:46.934)
Yeah, bromine. I know, right?

Andrea The Pool Girl (16:52.343)
Hmm. Does it have algae a lot?

Rudy (16:56.886)
I've never seen it have algae. There is a video that shows the people how they're cleaning it on YouTube somewhere about how they go about it, which is pretty interesting. There's like a doorway down at the bottom that just leads into it.

Andrea The Pool Girl (17:08.799)
maybe because it's in New York and it's colder than it is here typically. Cause I've had, I've had people, well, what do you mean a lot of bromine?

Rudy (17:13.807)
Or maybe they just put a lot of bromine.

Rudy (17:19.978)
I mean maybe they really have, it's a really good system with a lot of high tech stuff and they just really keep up on top of it, in which case then it works.

Andrea The Pool Girl (17:27.775)
Well, all the, so I've, I've done a couple of spas and fountains where they used, they were on bromine and they constantly had algae and they never had any residual reading of anything.

Rudy (17:41.566)
Okay, well I'm saying that, you know, this was a big investment for the city, this memorial. They spent a lot of money. I'm sure, and in fact, I know a little bit about the equipment that it takes to operate it. And I'm telling you, it is some next level stuff. They actually control it from Jacksonville.

Andrea The Pool Girl (17:46.892)
Mm-hmm.

Andrea The Pool Girl (18:02.992)
Oh, interesting.

Rudy (18:06.474)
There's a pump manufacturer, no, fountain company over there that did the design. And I think they're controlling it from there, or maybe not. But in either case, it's got some top notch, top level, off the charts, off the cuffs, beyond belief, space age shit going on in there. Which it should have, because that's what it deserves.

So you don't seem yourself today. You seem like you need to be kicked or like you've already been kicked, one or the other.

Andrea The Pool Girl (18:37.413)
I just don't really feel all that good and I was very tired driving

Rudy (18:42.958)
Gotcha. So one of the things that we talk about are the inconsistencies. You like to talk about infighting, but I think the inconsistencies lend toward that. So your portion of it is people just aren't open-minded and people don't understand that there is more than one way to skin a cat. And that applies to

Andrea The Pool Girl (18:54.291)
Yes, I've mentioned it a couple of times.

Andrea The Pool Girl (19:07.425)
a pool.

Rudy (19:08.81)
It applies to the chemistry, it applies to the pool, it applies to the way it's built, it applies to a lot of different things. Then there is some stuff that's just fucking stupid.

That shouldn't be done.

Andrea The Pool Girl (19:19.743)
Right. But there are some things though that I think that we all need to like, I don't know if standardize is like the right word, but we all need to be like, these are the undeniable, unarguable, irrefutable things that we can all tell people and not look like idiots who fight amongst each other.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Rudy (19:48.062)
Right, like the same books that the doctors in the hospital get, it doesn't list just one way to fix something.

write their materials, list all the correct ways to fix it, and then the doctor chooses.

Andrea The Pool Girl (20:01.575)
Right, but doctors, but then, but the doctors and nurses don't argue with each other about, or maybe they do, I actually have no idea. They argue with each other about the chemical names of things, like, you know, and like, you know what I'm saying? Like, I don't know, like, do they argue that fucking Advil is, or Tylenol is acetaminophen?

Rudy (20:14.882)
the chemical names of things. Give me an example.

Rudy (20:28.726)
No, I didn't mean, I meant in our industry, give me an example of something that you're talking about.

Andrea The Pool Girl (20:31.315)
That's what I'm saying.

Andrea The Pool Girl (20:38.333)
Um, well the only thing I can think of right now, the only thing I can- Pchh!

Rudy (20:39.83)
know about Advil and fucking acetaminophen? The fuck is that shit? Do I look like a fucking pharmacist to you?

Andrea The Pool Girl (20:47.519)
The only thing I can think of is the example that I gave to the group chat about a specific incident where I, I was telling someone else on a post because someone had asked a question and I was telling them the formula for, and this was way before we had our little argument about it, but I was telling them how to do the combined chlorine and how to get the number and how to get the dosage. And here comes fucking,

Rudy (21:11.808)
Okay.

Andrea The Pool Girl (21:16.951)
captain argue pants over here and wants to, and literally was like, and literally his comment was, you need to go get a CPO, like go take the CPOs. I'm like, what I'm telling this person that you're arguing with me is what they teach in the CPO book. So that's stupidity right there. And even if the formula is wrong or whatever it is that's wrong.

Rudy (21:21.39)
That's not me.

Andrea The Pool Girl (21:43.879)
Even if you like whatever, it's still set it in the book and that's what I was going by. So I wasn't wrong.

Rudy (21:47.822)
I'm not going to argue that. The books that are out there need to be some type of a standard. The 10 times formula is the standard that the industry goes by. So if that's what you're referring to.

Andrea The Pool Girl (21:58.771)
And then this guy was telling me that I was wrong and that I should go take the class, which was fucking stupid. You know what I'm, like, that's my whole point is like, yeah, there are different ways to do things and there's different ways to treat stuff, but there should be, like, we shouldn't be arguing about, like, pH ceiling and like, which one to do for, you know what I'm saying? Like, which chemical to treat first. Like, that should all just be.

accepted rules, you know, accepted steps. Be like, everybody knows you do this, and then this, or however.

Rudy (22:37.77)
Or you could do it this, and this way, or that, and that way, all of those things work. The end justifies the means, but then there are some things that'll never get you to that point, and those shouldn't be done. So that's the problem, is that everybody hangs on and clutches to their way, and doesn't accept that there can be some other way to get from point A to point B. But that's not the person's problem, that's a problem with

The education in the industry.

Andrea The Pool Girl (23:11.936)
Right?

Rudy (23:12.982)
because they're not, you're being taught there's only one way to do something, in which case then you do hang on to it. Now the reason people wanna fight for it because they're so passionate, I'll go with that, some people are just assholes. There's that too. But there are a lot of people who are really passionate about their beliefs and I don't fault them that, but it is nice to encourage everybody to be open-minded because if we've learned nothing else in the past five years that a lot of the research out there is not thorough.

is not actually research that's been conducted in the pool industry, or in the past 40, 50 years. So we do need to be a little bit more open-minded. There are different ways to do things. And I wanna talk a little bit about one of those ways after this break.

Andrea The Pool Girl (24:04.855)
Nice.

Rudy (24:07.286)
That was cool, right? We're gonna talk about pH and alkalinity and shit like that.

Andrea The Pool Girl (24:12.627)
Oh good, I kinda already brought that up a little bit.

Rudy (24:21.878)
We do have two open contests still.

Andrea The Pool Girl (24:24.823)
Excuse me.

Rudy (24:25.89)
the Cover Art Contest, and then the B-Rudy's Wingman Contest.

Andrea The Pool Girl (24:31.703)
What is that?

Rudy (24:34.306)
for the Aqua leadership retreat.

Andrea The Pool Girl (24:39.645)
Oh.

Rudy (24:41.71)
Okay. All right.

So there you go.

Andrea The Pool Girl (24:50.76)
Nice.

Rudy (24:52.834)
Those are our sponsors. They're the folks that enable us to come to you every week.

Andrea The Pool Girl (24:58.039)
Thank you to our sponsors.

Rudy (25:00.574)
and share whatever is going on. They allow Andrea and I to fight in front of you every week. So that's what you get from that.

Andrea The Pool Girl (25:09.907)
Sorry about my text message. Yes. Hold on, let me mute my phone.

Rudy (25:12.834)
So.

I wanted to talk a little bit about pH and total alkalinity, and some of the means that we use to raise and lower them. And it might seem general, but that's OK, because sometimes we need general. Because I did bring it up a little bit ago, kind of briefly, a couple of weeks ago, that, for example, sodium bicarbonate can be used to lower your pH.

Andrea The Pool Girl (25:46.859)
What?

Rudy (25:48.686)
Sodium bicarbonate can be used to lower pH. Now you tell me when, in what scenario.

Andrea The Pool Girl (25:56.938)
No.

Rudy (25:59.174)
Just just now

Andrea The Pool Girl (26:01.28)
No.

Rudy (26:05.274)
If the pH is greater than 8.4...

Andrea The Pool Girl (26:12.587)
which we can't measure on our test kits unless you use this.

Rudy (26:15.234)
But there are test kits that can measure this. If the pH is greater than 8.4 and you add sodium bicarbonate, it will bring the pH down because the pH of bicarbonate is 8.4 or 8.3, depending on which you use or what you look at rather, but within 0.1. In either case, if it's greater than 8.4 and you add bicarb, it will bring the pH down, but it will increase the total alkalinity still.

Andrea The Pool Girl (26:18.167)
Taylor.

Andrea The Pool Girl (26:43.799)
Huh. So if it's like 8.6, it'll just bring it down to 8.4.

Rudy (26:45.666)
So there are things like that.

Rudy (26:51.118)
pretty much if you add enough of it.

Andrea The Pool Girl (26:53.847)
So it's not gonna like bring it down to 7.6 or anything like that. Oh.

Rudy (26:58.546)
No, never gonna bring it down lower than that, never gonna bring it up higher than that. No matter how much bicarb you add, you're not gonna get the bicarb to bring your pH up above 8.4. It doesn't mean that it won't be drawn past 8.4 eventually, but the bicarb itself isn't gonna do it. That's like, and okay, there's really, is there a practical application for that? Probably not, but it's good to know the chemicals that we're dealing with. Like here's another one.

When the pH is less than 4.5, what chemical do you use to increase it? Well, that's better yet. pH is less than 4.5, total alkalinity is zero. What chemical are you adding?

Andrea The Pool Girl (27:45.327)
I would be adding bicarb because that's all we ever use.

Rudy (27:48.958)
and that bicarb you add would automatically convert to carbonic acid upon hitting the water that had a pH 4.5 and would increase nothing.

Andrea The Pool Girl (27:59.095)
Hmm.

Rudy (28:01.058)
So at that point, the chemical that you should use...

Andrea The Pool Girl (28:05.951)
soda ash. So I actually have a applicable story for that scenario where one of the first fountains that I ever did was in front of a hospital and I don't know the numbers because you know I was just using a tailor kit and the pH was yellow and so the alkalinity turned red immediately as soon as I turned my put my green drops in. So it could have all have been

Rudy (28:07.122)
Soda Ash or

Andrea The Pool Girl (28:35.815)
zeros, you know, don't know what the pH was like, like I said, anyway, that's one of the times where I added liquid chlorine and the whole thing turned blue. And then the I told the managers and they went and I remember the one saying that they were adding that they kept adding bicarb tried to get the pH up. Or I mean the total alkalinity up and it wasn't doing anything. And it just kept turning blue every time he added bicarb but it wouldn't

Rudy (28:37.646)
could have been.

Andrea The Pool Girl (29:05.083)
rise like the pH, not there, the alkalinity wouldn't come up. So then they started to use soda ash and then it came up. Just like you said.

Rudy (29:10.978)
Okay, what's another scenario? What's another scenario that they could go with though? Now these were fountains, right? So there was turbulence. They could allow the turbulence to bring the pH up above 4.5 and then adjust it with bicarb. That would work, right? So that's the other thing that we can do in that scenario is rely upon turbulence. Now there is a practical application for this.

Andrea The Pool Girl (29:19.191)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Andrea The Pool Girl (29:31.851)
No. They wouldn't have known to do that.

Rudy (29:40.65)
When would the pH ever be below 4.5?

Andrea The Pool Girl (29:44.627)
when someone just keeps adding acid and gallon after gallon after gallon and not checking anything. Ha ha ha.

Rudy (29:49.678)
Okay, that's the moron factor, but when...

Rudy (29:56.406)
When in a treatment would it be less than 4.5?

Andrea The Pool Girl (30:01.647)
I don't know like acid wash a no drain no drain

Rudy (30:03.798)
A no-drain acid wash. Yeah. So we add all the acid, we bring the pH down super, super low, we bring, we zero out the total alkalinity because even if you look at the way the total alkalinity test works, so those first two drops you add in this drop test, this titration test, the first two drops are a chlorine neutralizer. Each drop neutralizes 2.5 parts per million of chlorine. Then you add your total alkalinity indicator.

And like you said before, if there's total alkalinity present, it turns green. If there's none, it turns.

Andrea The Pool Girl (30:39.883)
red immediately. And here's an example of more infighting because I remember having a conversation with Wayne and he says, you can't have a zero alkalinity. You can only say that it is less than 10.

Rudy (30:41.555)
Exactly.

Rudy (30:54.462)
Not true. Because at a p- Because I told you moments ago-

Andrea The Pool Girl (30:55.931)
Ah, see, this is the whole problem. This is the whole problem. If I can't trust Wayne, I can't trust you either, see?

Rudy (31:04.862)
I told you moments ago, and I'm going to show you why, that at a pH of 4.5 or less, you can't have total alkalinity. It doesn't exist. So the way that test works is you're adding one drop of reagent, R-0009, at a time. And what's the chemical there?

Andrea The Pool Girl (31:08.287)
You guys are both telling me something different.

Andrea The Pool Girl (31:25.919)
sulfuric acid brah

Rudy (31:27.81)
you're adding acid. So the goal here is to drop the pH to the point that total alkalinity can no longer exist.

Rudy (31:39.007)
And that's when you get the red color.

Andrea The Pool Girl (31:41.591)
so it is zero.

Rudy (31:43.798)
Yeah. And there's a lot of other things that we're not up to speed on as a whole. Like for example, the fact that the pH scale is not closed ended. If I was to ask you what the scale runs from to what you would typically say, what

Andrea The Pool Girl (31:47.799)
Can it be negative?

Andrea The Pool Girl (32:02.103)
Isn't it like 1 to 14?

Rudy (32:04.918)
0 to 14. But you can have negative numbers.

Andrea The Pool Girl (32:06.616)
Aha. But, no.

Can you have negative alkalinity was what I just asked you. Oh.

Rudy (32:14.374)
No, because it either is or it isn't.

Rudy (32:20.738)
That's all there is about total alkalinity. It either is or it isn't. However, things can always be more acidic and things can always be more base.

Rudy (32:31.254)
If we look at what pH actually is, pH is the measurement of hydrogen ion activity measured in the converse.

Rudy (32:46.418)
So the lower the number, the greater the hydrogen ion activity. The higher the number, the less the hydrogen ion activity.

Rudy (33:00.29)
Does that make sense to you?

Andrea The Pool Girl (33:02.368)
Yes.

Rudy (33:03.37)
Or some people call it the measurement of how acid or base something is, that's simplified. Some folks call it the measurement of the water's demand for acid. Not the acid demand, but the demand for acid, meaning if you have a low pH, we need more acid. Or right, sorry, reverse. If we have a low pH, we already have a lot of acid, we don't need anymore. If we have a high pH, that means we don't have enough acid, so we need more.

And then it gets tricky also because to your point, the reagent we use, R0004, the chemical name there.

Andrea The Pool Girl (33:43.336)
Phenol Red.

Rudy (33:45.206)
That can only measure a pH between 6.8 and...

Andrea The Pool Girl (33:50.279)
and 8.2.

Rudy (33:52.458)
Yeah, so anything that looks like 8.2. Now here's where we can apply what Wayne said. Anything that looks like 8.2 tells us that the pH is 8.2 or higher because that's just the darkest color that thing can get with phenol red. That's just it. So 8.2, 9.2, 10.2 all look the same color.

Andrea The Pool Girl (34:09.175)
by your...

Rudy (34:20.674)
The same thing on the opposite end. If you get a yellow reading, you can call it 6.8, but the only thing we know for sure is that it's what?

Andrea The Pool Girl (34:31.575)
Isn't it 6.8 on the test block?

Rudy (34:34.018)
6.8 or lower.

Andrea The Pool Girl (34:36.291)
lower.

Rudy (34:38.53)
because 5.8, 4.8, 3.8 are all gonna look the same as 6.8. That's just the capabilities of phenol red. That's all that it can measure. That's why sometimes.

Andrea The Pool Girl (34:41.728)
Mm.

Andrea The Pool Girl (34:46.365)
see.

Ahem.

Rudy (34:53.022)
you'll see when interference is caused by a high level of chlorine, you get a completely different color.

Andrea The Pool Girl (35:00.235)
Yeah, that purple.

Rudy (35:02.018)
deep, dark, brilliant purple, right? So what happens there, when the chlorine level is 15 parts per million or higher, the phenyl red complexes with the chlorine and you get chloro-phenyl red. Chloro-phenyl red's still used in science to measure pH, but it can only measure a pH between 4.8 and 6.6. Anything greater than 6.6 is gonna be that dark purple color. That includes...

Andrea The Pool Girl (35:28.747)
Let's see.

Rudy (35:29.854)
Everything in your acceptable range 7 2 to 7 8 so your pH could be 7 2 and have that deep dark purple So it's important to

Andrea The Pool Girl (35:38.319)
and then people don't know that and then they add acid and then you end up with zero alkalinity.

Rudy (35:44.886)
you create a problem where there wasn't one. So that is something else to be concerned with. So now normally when we adjust the pH, we also adjust the total alkalinity. There's no way around it. It's hard with a few exceptions to adjust your pH without adjusting the total alkalinity, either up or down. So we use muriatic acid that will lower both no matter how you add it. I don't care what myths,

are out there about acid columns or sometimes they call it an acid slug where do you know the myth? How does it go?

Andrea The Pool Girl (36:20.895)
Yes.

Oh, some I don't even know because I don't pay attention to it about something. If you pour it straight down, it only lowers the pH. And if you spread it all around, it lowers both or the other way around or something silly.

Rudy (36:36.054)
The other way around, what they say is that if you pour it slowly all into one spot, it will lower the total alkalinity without affecting the pH. And if you broadcast it, it lowers the pH without affecting the total alkalinity much. But the problem with that is, well, muriatic acid, the formula for that is HCl, it's hydrochloric acid. And every time you add muriatic acid to the water, the HCl dissociates. And what you get is chloride.

Andrea The Pool Girl (36:48.959)
That doesn't make- that never made any sense to me.

Rudy (37:06.126)
and hydrogen. So you're adding hydrogen to the water every single time you add it, no matter how you add it. And we said before, pH was the measurement of hydrogen ion activity. It's impossible to add more hydrogen ions without affecting the hydrogen ion activity. So it's always going to drop the pH. It's always gonna lower the total alkalinity because remember we spoke about total alkalinity being a buffer.

hydrogen ion and it turns its into something else that's not acidic and in the process it uses some of itself up. So the fact that it uses some of itself up while it's buffering also causes the total

Rudy (37:53.378)
So you have both things going on, and that's why it lowers both. You could use sodium bisulfate, that's also known as dry acid, that will lower both, but that shouldn't be used in what kind of pool?

Andrea The Pool Girl (38:01.335)
triacid.

Andrea The Pool Girl (38:08.695)
Uhhh... salt pools.

Rudy (38:10.562)
Because...

Andrea The Pool Girl (38:12.279)
the sulfates.

Rudy (38:13.994)
and the sulfates fuck up what?

Andrea The Pool Girl (38:16.987)
Your face. Ha ha ha. The salt cell.

Rudy (38:19.45)
You know this answer, come on now. The ruthenium coating on the plates. Right, so that shortens the life of the cell. The same thing with sulfuric acid, and a lot of us used a lot of that during the pandemic because we couldn't get maryotic acid. So, but we shouldn't be using that in a saltwater pool either, right?

Andrea The Pool Girl (38:23.691)
the ruthenium in the plates.

Andrea The Pool Girl (38:36.883)
Not me. Actually, I did.

Andrea The Pool Girl (38:43.595)
Well, you had to.

Rudy (38:46.722)
Here's one for- we didn't have a choice at that point in time, but we shouldn't.

Andrea The Pool Girl (38:49.899)
Well, there was a point in time when I couldn't get either of those types of acid to do my commercial pools. And I was about to be shut down by the health inspector because I couldn't lower the pH.

Rudy (39:03.886)
So, what do you do?

Andrea The Pool Girl (39:05.463)
It was very, very scary. Prayed for the best.

Rudy (39:09.678)
So why shouldn't you use a product that contains sulfates in a saltwater pool?

Andrea The Pool Girl (39:15.411)
because it messes everything up?

Rudy (39:20.598)
Repeat after me when I'm done. Because sulfates like to coat things, that's why they use them as an anti-corrosion product in your municipalities, right? They will also coat the plates in the cell, which make it harder to produce chlorine. Your own version, they coat, they coat. Sulfate etches, no, sulfates.

Andrea The Pool Girl (39:39.019)
They coat the plates or is like they etch. They don't etch things. I thought we said it etched things.

Rudy (39:49.438)
Oh, I'm thinking phosphates. I'm sorry. I skipped subject. Yeah, so Blah blah blah. Oh, yeah, so it fucks up the ruthenium. Okay. Anyway, I'll fix it later. So, okay now here's this scenario Correct so check out this scenario You show up to a pool the pH is good total alkalinity super low

Andrea The Pool Girl (39:56.595)
Yeah, we said that.

It etches it. It's etching.

Rudy (40:15.49)
What's likely going on?

Andrea The Pool Girl (40:18.475)
I'm sorry, you said what?

Rudy (40:20.118)
You have a pool, pH is good, total alkalinity, super low. Why? Give me a reason that could occur.

Andrea The Pool Girl (40:30.203)
Because somebody keeps adding acid but they have their leave their fountains on They leave the deck jets on air rating

Rudy (40:35.35)
Yes! And the fountains are doing what?

aerating and when you aerate it creates turbulence and the turbulence causes the aqueous carbon dioxide in solution to out gas which drives the pH upward but does not increase the total alkalinity so they add acid to control the pH which continually brings the total alkalinity down but what does the pH do keeps going back up so they keep adding more acid keeps going back up which continually drives the total alkalinity down

Andrea The Pool Girl (41:04.919)
That happens a lot in salt pools too, not just with pools with water features.

Rudy (41:11.958)
And why would the PH be fucked up in Assault Pool?

Andrea The Pool Girl (41:15.231)
because of the salt cell itself. Well, you know, the process of electrolysis. Electrolithophe. I don't know the details of that.

Rudy (41:23.796)
Okay, what goes on there?

Rudy (41:34.002)
Well, when you add salt to a salt pool, salt, the formula for salt is NaCl. When that hits the water, it dissociates and what you get is Na, which is sodium, and Cl, which again is chloride. In the salt cell, in electrolysis, the chloride becomes chlorine gas, which dissolves in the water, becomes hypochlorous acid, goes on to kill things, all that good stuff. We're not worried about that part right now. The sodium...

Andrea The Pool Girl (41:58.163)
It's not generating sodium, sodium hypochlorite, like some people like to think either. That's another myth.

Rudy (42:03.722)
it converts the... well, sodium hypochlorite is chlorine in water. Okay, so...

Andrea The Pool Girl (42:07.103)
Yes, when you put gas into a liquid, I get it. Right. But it's, it's not making the chlorine that you put into a jug.

Rudy (42:15.194)
No, not really, no. It's making chlorine gas in the water, which dissolves and becomes hypochlorous acid very quickly, which is the killing form of chlorine, which is what does the sanitizing and disinfecting. And then as that sanitizes and disinfects, it degrades itself back to chloride, is what happens. Now, the sodium there, let's put that in a parking lot for just a second.

and realize that anything that passes through that salt cell is subject to electrolysis, that's why you'll get magnesium hydroxide because of people using products that contain magnesium that will become magnesium hydroxide during electrolysis, because water is also subject to electrolysis and some of the water that passes through will split in that process and what you get is hydrogen and hydroxide.

will bubble off inside the cell as hydrogen gas because hydrogen gas doesn't dissolve very well in water. So that's bubbling off in the cell, that's creating turbulence which is doing what?

Andrea The Pool Girl (43:22.871)
causing the pH to rise.

Rudy (43:25.502)
Now the hydroxide can complex with the sodium from the sodium chloride, and here we get sodium hydroxide, which is also known as what?

Andrea The Pool Girl (43:38.516)
Um...

I don't know.

Rudy (43:42.414)
caustic soda, or sometimes we call it lye, it's the most base material that we know of on the planet. So that also jacks the pH up. So hold on just a second.

Andrea The Pool Girl (43:44.396)
Uh.

Andrea The Pool Girl (43:53.983)
Wait, so the salt cell makes lye?

Rudy (44:00.15)
So yes, so the salt cell makes lie.

Andrea The Pool Girl (44:04.587)
So I had somebody try to explain it to me one time that, and they weren't explaining it to me, let me rephrase that, they were explaining it to somebody else and I happened to be standing there, but I didn't know enough at the time to know why he was wrong. But he said that the pH is always high on salt pools because the salt cell makes liquid chlorine and liquid chlorine has a pH of 13 or whatever.

Rudy (44:32.482)
Liquid chlorine has a high pH, but it mostly has a high pH because of the additional sodium hydroxide that they add to the formula to give it a longer shelf life.

Rudy (44:45.55)
But it's not making liquid chlorine, it's making chlorine gas.

Andrea The Pool Girl (44:49.972)
Right, well I know that now.

Rudy (44:53.858)
So now when we talk about what we add to increase the pH, we already discussed the scenario where the pH was less than 4.5, and then the only thing we could add chemically of the two out of sodium bicarb or sodium carbonate would be sodium carbonate.

Rudy (45:24.226)
So we'd have to add sodium carbonate, at least until it got higher than 4.5. Then we could add baking soda all day long, and that'll bring it back up, and that's fine.


And yes, we can use soda ash and we can use bicarb. And like we discussed, we can use aeration. Bye.

Andrea The Pool Girl (47:05.271)
and you can use liquid chlorine too.

Rudy (47:08.726)
That's silly. You can. You can. I wouldn't add it if I happen to need chlorine as well, but I suppose you could.

Andrea The Pool Girl (47:09.879)
Yeah.

I'm joking. I'm trying to-

Rudy (47:22.57)
And liquid chlorine does have a high pH, and so does Cal-Hypo. But what happens with Cal-Hypo?

Andrea The Pool Girl (47:24.983)
it does.

I was just gonna say it.

Andrea The Pool Girl (47:33.239)
It makes a cloud when the pH is high.

Rudy (47:36.418)
We're talking about pH here, okay. But what happens with the pH with Calhypo? A dose of Calhypo does what?

Andrea The Pool Girl (47:43.991)
It raises the pH, does it not?

Rudy (47:47.042)
But does it stay high?

Andrea The Pool Girl (47:48.887)
I don't know, I've not used it enough. Probably not, because they don't put lie in the Cal Hypo. Wow.

Rudy (47:53.542)
No, exactly, and it wouldn't stay high with the liquid chlorine either if they didn't put in that excess lye because the process in which chlorine uses itself up is an acidic one, so adding the dose results in a temporary increase in pH. As chlorine uses itself up, the pH then comes back down, so theoretically the change is net zero. No increase.

But, and you get a lot of people who scoff at that, it takes a minute. It takes a while before it actually does come back down. And that's if you're adding your dose.

Andrea The Pool Girl (48:37.047)
And that's, and that's not if something in the meantime didn't cause it to rise something else legitimately.

Rudy (48:42.974)
And only if you're adding the dose sporadically. If I'm continually pumping in liquid chlorine, it's gonna continually keep it higher, right?

Andrea The Pool Girl (48:54.839)
I sure, yeah.

Rudy (48:56.47)
But now we have to contend with the fact that they add the excess lye to the product to give it a longer shelf life and that in liquid chlorine when you do add it brings up the pH and keeps it high. However, you do not see the same thing with Cal Hypo. It brings the pH up for a little while. And I mean, it could be a day or more, but it does come back down.

Andrea The Pool Girl (49:20.759)
like Bush coming back down from this cloud.

Andrea The Pool Girl (49:26.871)
I don't know, it just made me think of that song.

Rudy (49:29.738)
I have no idea what you're speaking about here. Something to do with a bush.

Andrea The Pool Girl (49:32.855)
You, that's the name of the band. You've never heard of Bush. The name of the song that I was referencing was called come down. I don't want to come back down from this cloud. No.

Rudy (49:37.494)
I'm not the band, no.

Rudy (49:47.05)
No, sorry. Is this like a 90s thing? That's probably why.

Andrea The Pool Girl (49:48.279)
Oh.

Yes.

Um, you missed out.

Rudy (49:55.51)
really pay much attention there.

Andrea The Pool Girl (49:56.951)
Hehehehe

Rudy (50:00.342)
in either case, so we have that to look at.

Andrea The Pool Girl (50:02.903)
You should take out my singing for me though.

Rudy (50:06.146)
So that's a scenario where we could add bicarb when the pH is low and have it absolutely do nothing.

Then I gave you another one where we could actually use bicarb to lower the pH. So just knowing the chemicals that we use and what the full function of it can help us a lot out there in the field.

Andrea The Pool Girl (50:29.175)
can.

Rudy (50:30.642)
Now, other things to know about pH, because you talked about this pH ceiling thing.

Andrea The Pool Girl (50:36.023)
I brought it up briefly. No, I cannot. I'm sorry, I don't know how it works. I can't explain it. I don't quite, I don't fully, I don't understand it myself.

Rudy (50:37.995)
Explain.

Rudy (50:41.779)
Explain the fucking feeling.

explain... explain the theory.

I don't think it works, but that's not the point.

Andrea The Pool Girl (50:52.343)
the pH is just gonna like get as high as it's gonna get and that's it.

Rudy (50:56.834)
There's something out there known as Henry's Law that basically applies to ocean water. That's not meant to be used in water where there's other reactions going on, such as chlorine reactions. So it doesn't really apply, but the theory is that if you just let the pH seek its own thing, it'll eventually stop somewhere, and then you can just balance everything else based to the LSI. But water chemistry is not all about the LSI, is it?

Andrea The Pool Girl (51:27.799)
For some people it is.

Rudy (51:29.634)
But it shouldn't be because the LSI is only about protection of the vessel. That's the only thing that it deals with. Nothing else. I'll give you an example.

Andrea The Pool Girl (51:37.207)
Now, this is an example of what we talked about earlier where people are arguing about the same thing, you know, people are arguing about something and it should just be not argued about.

Rudy (51:42.494)
It is. It's short-sightedness.

Rudy (51:53.046)
but it's because it deals with short-sightedness. So if you understand the saturation index, the whole purpose of that is to determine whether or not the water is corrosive or scale forming because of the way it affects the plaster. Water has to have a certain amount of calcium and carbonate saturated in it. That's what that's all about. That doesn't.

Andrea The Pool Girl (52:12.919)
And then you can adjust the other values based on what you can and can't change. Like for example, temperature.

Rudy (52:19.662)
Correct, but did you know at a higher pH, you'll burn off more chlorine than you would at a low pH?

Andrea The Pool Girl (52:27.991)
burn off.

Rudy (52:29.75)
Gas off due to UV degradation. Or yeah, burn off due to UV degradation.

Andrea The Pool Girl (52:34.967)
So if your pH is higher, your chlorine doesn't last as long.

Rudy (52:39.562)
Because when your pH is higher, you have less hypochlorous acid. Hypochlorous acid is the killing form of chlorine. We know that chlorine's effectiveness is pH dependent. The lower the pH, the more hypochlorous acid. The higher the pH, the less hypochlorous acid, but the more hypochlorite ions.

Andrea The Pool Girl (52:57.623)
Mm.

Rudy (52:58.594)
Hypochlorite ion is not protected by cyanuric acid. So on a sunny day, if you have more hypochlorite ion than you have hypochlorous acid, the sun will burn off all of that hypochlorite ion. So we wanna keep the pH on the lower side. Does that make sense? Okay.

Andrea The Pool Girl (53:17.527)
Yeah, I mean, I like a pH on the lower side anyway.

Rudy (53:23.038)
You know I do a lot with algae. I grow my own algae.

Andrea The Pool Girl (53:27.927)
You kind of remind me of Egon in Ghostbusters 2 when he had the slime and that and he was yelling at and he was yelling at the slime and playing music for it.

Rudy (53:36.306)
I am an algaculturist. That's what they call it.

Rudy (53:44.048)
I am an alga-culturist. I grow algae.

Andrea The Pool Girl (53:46.007)
You date the algae Rudy?

Rudy (53:49.478)
I do, and I grow only the species of algae that I have confirmed from samples drawn from swimming pools. So there's no guessing, there's no if, ends, and buts, that's all I grow is what grows in pools, the same genus. So with that...

Andrea The Pool Girl (53:59.575)
Kinda grody.

Andrea The Pool Girl (54:07.575)
What if, hold on, hold on, what if you accidentally dropped one of your jars and spilled it into the pool? Oh my god, you'd have bionic? You'd have bionic? Like the blob. Ew.

Rudy (54:15.714)
then I would have an algae balloon, bionic stuff. I was actually just feeding them yesterday, too. I have my algae food here, which is just basically water filled with nutrients. But.

Andrea The Pool Girl (54:27.575)
That's weird.

Andrea The Pool Girl (54:33.271)
Is it sugar water?

Rudy (54:35.734)
The point is, no it's not sugar water, the point is that all of the algae species that are known to grow in swimming pools, or I'll say the majority of them, because there could be some that I haven't run into just yet, but every one that I'm familiar with grows better in water with a higher pH. In fact, I took some samples and lowered the pH to 7.0 in the sample, and within a matter of days,

Andrea The Pool Girl (54:40.663)
phosphates.

Rudy (55:03.542)
cyanobacteria, which we also know as black algae, died just from maintaining a lower pH.

Andrea The Pool Girl (55:07.415)
Awwww. You killed Steve, bro?

Rudy (55:12.606)
I killed some microcystis. But what happened was by controlling the pH, you can control whether or not the pool is conducive to algae growth. And if you go with a higher pH, you're going to be more prone to having algae problems in a swimming pool. Doesn't mean you're definitely gonna have more. It just means that now you have an environment where the water is more conducive to colonization.

Rudy (55:40.558)
So the pH plays a role in a lot of different things. And then again, finally, what does pH stand for?

Andrea The Pool Girl (55:49.079)
Uh, p-p-potenshydrogen. Hydro-

Rudy (55:54.946)
Potent's hydrogen, that's the German version, right? You did? Or power of hydrogen?

Andrea The Pool Girl (55:57.271)
Did I say it right?

hydrogen sounded like a really funny word for me to me for some reason and then I got confused because I was like is it that or is it power of hydrogen I got confused

Rudy (56:03.926)
Power of hydrogen?

Rudy (56:10.994)
Actually, the scale was created by this guy named Søren Sorensen, which at the Carlsberg Foundation in Sweden, he was doing some experiments with muriatic acid. This is where he discovered it. And he put electrodes into this muriatic acid. And what he found was, what he found was is that the hydrogen ions were bubbling off at the positive electrode.

Andrea The Pool Girl (56:21.879)
Mm-hmm.

Andrea The Pool Girl (56:30.871)
electrodes.

Rudy (56:39.714)
So he labeled his electrodes. He labeled the positive electrode with a P for positive, and he labeled the negative electrode with a Q because it was the next letter in the alphabet for the negative. Then when he noted that the hydrogen ions were bubbling off at the positive electrode, he wrote a small H next to that.

Andrea The Pool Girl (57:01.367)
Ah.

Rudy (57:02.702)
key H.

Andrea The Pool Girl (57:04.791)
Well then how can we write it with a lowercase p and a capital H if he did it the opposite way?

Rudy (57:11.906)
because hydrogen is written with a capital H because it's an element.

Rudy (57:23.426)
And all elements start with a capital letter, don't they?

Andrea The Pool Girl (57:25.911)
Do they? I don't know.

Rudy (57:30.85)
I don't know of one that doesn't. I mean, I'm sure there's a more specific reason for the reason why, but I believe it's just because it's the name of something.

Andrea The Pool Girl (57:40.631)
Oh, okay. Well then why is the P lowercase?

Rudy (57:42.022)
Your name starts with a capital.

Rudy (57:47.662)
because the P was just the labeling of the electrode.

He labeled it with a small letter P. He labeled the other with a small Q.

Andrea The Pool Girl (57:52.791)
Oh.

Andrea The Pool Girl (57:57.239)
Why not with an N? For negative.

Rudy (58:00.958)
He just, I don't know, he's not around for us to ask anymore.

Andrea The Pool Girl (58:05.143)
All right, can I take a quick break? I gotta pee.

Rudy (58:07.186)
No, we're going to end. But we're going to end. So.

Andrea The Pool Girl (58:11.255)
like right this second.

Rudy (58:13.89)
Yes, but we just finished talking about what we were talking about. So that's all I had on that for this week. With that said, we do have two open contests out there still. We had the winner for our tattoo contest, right? John Kellum. We still need his address, though, don't we?

Andrea The Pool Girl (58:29.751)
Mm-hmm. Yes, in this great empty pool. Did he not email you back? I emailed him from my personal email address.

Rudy (58:40.086)
and you didn't have a response yet. So John, we need to get your address so we can have the vendors send you out all the neat stuff that you want. Then we had the hook and eye contest.

Andrea The Pool Girl (58:41.943)
Uh oh.

He probably has no fucking clue.

That's not a hook and eye. It's a ring hook.

Rudy (58:51.314)
It was a whatever. It was a hook and eye, in which case Paulette Hester won that contest. Then finally, now what do we have out there? The cover art contest for 500 bucks, right? That ends the end of November where a winner will be chosen from the art for that one. And we all.

Andrea The Pool Girl (58:54.615)
I'm sorry.

She cheated.

Andrea The Pool Girl (59:04.983)
Cover art? Uh huh.

And Kevin was asking questions, which makes me nervous.

Rudy (59:13.406)
We also have the why you should be Rudy's wingman or wing woman at the at the Aqua leadership retreat in Ft. Lauderdale coming up the beginning of December to come to the reception with me as my guest. So why should you be my wingman? What we're looking for is a video or why you should be my wingwoman. Just tell us why.

Andrea The Pool Girl (59:21.207)
Am I not invited?

Andrea The Pool Girl (59:27.959)
Fort.

Andrea The Pool Girl (59:33.943)
Aww.

Rudy (59:41.538)
tag us in it so we can find it so we can see it. We'll choose the winner. Best answer, that's what we're going by. It's not a random thing.

Andrea The Pool Girl (59:47.703)
Do you know what a wingman is?

Rudy (59:50.482)
I know what a wingman is and a wing woman. Yeah, it's all good. That's what we're looking for. So why should you be my wingman or wing woman?

Andrea The Pool Girl (59:51.831)
Okay.

Andrea The Pool Girl (59:57.207)
Alright.

Does your algae know about this?

Rudy (01:00:05.186)
Do the video, get it out there, see if you can win. And go ahead and finish this up here, Andrea. You're in a weird mood today.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:00:10.583)
I am and I've had a rough couple of days I told you and I'm very tired. Anyway that's it so thanks for listening you guys are always fun and like us, follow, do the thing. Just go do the thing. Follow, share, like. I saw something interesting on Spotify now for the Spotify listeners there's a Q&A section and it asks what was your favorite thing about this episode and you can write in a reply so you know you can do that too.

Seems cool. Write something nice, you know, and that's it. Talking pools at gmail.com and I'm yeah, that's it. Stay awesome. Hydrated.

Rudy (01:00:40.334)
Cool. There you go, something new.

Rudy (01:00:48.59)
Until next time, be good, be safe.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:00:53.815)
solve your problems.

I gotta go.