Backyard Chemistry

Last night, I did it. Got into the hot tub, I mean. All day, CoolGuy had been working on the pool. He rented a power washer and scrubbed it down. Then he used a sprayer and gave it an acid wash, then he washed it all again and drained and scrubbed with the wire broom and rinsed and swept. Whew...I need to tell you why, huh? Chemistry!

We've lived in several different eco-systems in our trekking about the country, and each of them has revealed some knowledge that locals are privy to, and new people have to learn, usually the hard way. Some of the bits were relatively painless, some harder. (Painless: put all your crackers and cookies into sealed plastic containers (ala Tupperware) in So. Cal. because the subtle humidity won't affect you, but it will make your soda crackers limp. Harder: every single thing you own will be covered with mildew and mold if you leave it in an environment (ie: garage attic) without air conditioning when you live in Maryland. Clothing, paper, plastic, etc. EVERYTHING gets moldy there. (I'll never live in Florida.)

So, what have we learned in Nevada, boys and girls? We learned swimming pool chemistry. One day last December, I was out looking at the pool for some reason and realized that it looked odd. The water had something in it---like clear gelatin, but shaped like little tiles the size of your thumbnail. You could reach into the water and feel them, but if you got a handful, it wasn't substantive enough to actually pick them up. They disintegrated when you took them from the water. Weird...

CoolGuy did some investigation and we learned that when you have a swimming pool in Las Vegas you need to empty the water out of it entirely about every three years in order to keep the mineral content in the water at a particular ratio. Or else, when the temperature drops to just the right low (maybe 40 degrees, I forget--it was quite cold) the minerals will precipitate from a solution into a solid form. Voila: we had performed a chemistry demonstration in our backyard.

All the time we've had this house and pool, we had just been adding water whenever we needed to compensate for evaporation. Of course, it was the desert's mineral-filled water. We have a water softener hooked up for household use, and I take my refillable bottles to the filtered machines every week because the tap water tastes yucky. So... as we added liquid, we were also adding dissolved minerals and, after six years, we'd finally achieved the correct solution, and the temperature got low enough for the transformation.

We just let the weird pool water sit there and we only used the hot tub, refilling and filtering it independently from the pool. And that was fine while it stayed cold. But a few days of balmier weather at the end of January quickly led to a yucky green hue, so CoolGuy emptied the pool. He let the residue dry a little, and there were two wheelbarrows full of powder to be shoveled out. When it was dry, it resembled the stuff inside of a piece of drywall. That's not too surprising, since there is a gypsum mine and drywall plant just up the road and over the hill in the desert to the east. However, it also could just be calcium.



This is a view of the empty pool with the powder stuff. There are also plenty of leaves and other wind blown debris in it too. So, he cleaned it all up and the pool has been sitting empty for a couple of months. We cut back all the dried grass and trimmed up the plants around the pool, and then this week, the weather has been excellent, and CoolGuy had the time to devote to the rest of the chore of pool renovation.

Here's a close-up of a grass seed-head that had drooped into the pool during this time. Notice how it is all covered in crystals? Every leaf and blade of grass and the pool cleaner hose and anything in the pool was also covered entirely with crystals. It was surreal.

But, you can see all the build-up of the minerals on the side of the pool, huh? So, after researching what to, CoolGuy got the powerwasher and the muriatic acid and went to work. Lots of it came right off with the power washer, he had to work harder at other spots--like where some leaves were resting (stains), but it looked fabulous and clean and smooth when he was finished, hours later.

Then, it was time for the refill. (Oooh--that water bill is going to be scary.) It took several hours, but the spa can be refilled independently of the pool, so CoolGuy did that, and turned on the heater. He was definitely ready for some soaking. I'd spent so much time outside watching and getting excited over the renovation that I decided I'd try the spa too. It was easy as the bathtub: sit down on the edge, remove RoboCop boot, swing legs over into the water, and gently sit myself down on the top step. Awwwww...relax, soak, enjoy. Nice!

And now we know: empty pool every three years to avoid Science Experiments at Home.