5 Ways To Prevent Copper Stains In Your Pool

1. Maintain A Proper Ph Balance

Ph is really important to water balance. It measures how acidic your water is on a spectrum and being too high or low can have negative effects. 

When the Ph of pool water becomes unbalanced it becomes more prone to absorbing and depositing minerals and metals like copper. This leaves you with blue patches and streaks all over your pool.

Maintaining a proper balance of Ph will help protect your equipment and your surface, so we recommend weekly testing. 

2. Use A Sequesterant

Truly these are one of the most overlooked chemicals because when they’re used correctly you won’t notice anything different.

Sequestrant helps to keep copper, iron, and other metals or minerals in the water. Preventing it from being able to “stick” to your pool surface. It’s something that should be done on a routine depending on which sequestrant you go for and the age of your pool.

Most pools should be sequestered once or twice a year depending on the use and location of the pool. If you are in a place like Orlando where it rains often during the summer we recommend sequestering the water once before the swim season and once after. Usually May & October.

We really like the Magenta stuff as it covers pretty much all the bases a sequestrant should and works for all types of pools.

3. Use a Chelated Copper Algaecide

Pools turn green, it happens to almost all of them at some point. And when you look for how to get rid of a green pool you meet a host of chemicals called ALGEACIDES.

There’s so many its hard to keep track of even for us but one of the most popular elements of the “extra strength” or “super strong” ones, is copper. 

Copper is actually a really great thing to have in an algaecide. It’s very effective and kills even some of the worst algae.

We often don’t recommend them though because not all of them use quality chelated copper.

Chelated copper is essential in a copper algaecide. It gives you the benefit of the copper to eliminate the algae but you don’t want that copper to react with something else in the water, like chlorine.

Chelation is what prevents that from happening.

High quality chelated copper algaecides are available in most places. They’re a little more expensive but definitely worth the investment.

4. Change The Plumbing of Your Chlorinator

The location of your chlorinator or salt system in relation to your pool heater is one of the more surprising reasons you can get copper staining.

These items should always come after the heater to save it from being hit with freshly chlorinated water constantly.

If you have an in-line chlorinator Its also a good idea to plumb in a Hartford loop.

This is a preventative measure meant to prevent the chlorinated water from trickling back into the heater. 

When super chlorinated water back feeds to your heater, that chlorine will be oxidizing and slowly dissolving the copper heat exchanger. 

Once the system turns back on the now copper filled water will flow into the pool. Over time this will lead to blue streaks as well as significant damage to your pool heater.

5. Stop Over Chlorinating Your Pool

Chlorine levels do sometimes need to be elevated beyond the 3-5 recommended levels. It’s called shocking a pool

This should be infrequent and only in cases where algae is present. Constant over chlorination can accelerate the effects of copper in the water from all the above-mentioned issues.

If your chlorine level won’t come down check and adjust your stabilizer level as you may be chlorine locked, and need to partially drain the pool.

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F.A.Q.