Swimming Pool Phosphate Remover Cost Comparison

[SMS]

The other day I was in a pool supply store, trying to buy a quart of Orenda PR10000. This sells for $37 online and I had bought it at the store previously for $60 in a prepackaged quart bottle.

Now the store sells only the much less concentrated Hasa product in bottles, but has a PR10000 in bulk that they use for their pool maintenance side of the business (PR10000 is the most effective phosphate remover per ounce). So I wanted to buy a quart of the bulk PR10000, and they didn't know how much to charge me so they started to calculate the price based on the effectiveness of the PR10000 versus the price and effectiveness of the Hasa, and came up with $108 a quart!

Anyway, I decided to do a spreadsheet of phosphate removers to see which was the most cost effective. This is using the dosages specified by the manufacturer.

Surprisingly, the Kemtek was the cheapest in the 32 ounce bottle, while the PR10000 was the cheapest once you move to the 1 gallon bottle. Phosfree (regular) was the most expensive by far, nearly seven times as expensive than the Kemtek, with Phosfree commercial and Hasa nearly 3x the cost of Kemtek.

| Kemtek|Orenda|Orenda| Hasa | Phos | Phos | |Phosph.| PR | PR | Phos | Free | Free | |Remover|10000 |10000 | Out | Reg. |Comcl.| --------------------------------------------- Ounces | 32.00 | 32.00|128.00| 32.00|101.50|101.50| --------------------------------------------- Price |$13.00 |$37.00|$109.00|$18.00|$40.00|$55.00| --------------------------------------------- Per Ounce | $0.41 | $1.16| $0.85| $0.56| $0.39| $0.54| --------------------------------------------- Cost (1) | $6.50 | $7.40| $5.45| $18.00|$42.17|$18.33|

1. Cost to Bring PPB down by 1000 in a 20000 Gallon Pool

[JimT]

What is the maintance dose on each product for your 20k pool?

The Phosfree price for 3 liter is kinda high. You should be able to get that for around $25 to $30. I think I paid $32 last time I bought it.

[SMS]

The maintenance doses will all be proportional to the costs I calculated for the dosages to bring the phosphates down a lot.

My pool is 40K gallons, I just used 20K as a comparison because few people have 40K pools (my pool is very deep because the people that put it in had a diving board).

I used the dosage chart on the bottle to calculate how many ounces it would take to reduce phosphates by 1000 ppb in a 20K gallon pool, to find the effective cost of each one.

The prices of each product vary, I used the Leslie's sale price (today) for the Phosfree, and the OSH (Orchard Supply Hardware) price of the Kemtek. The other prices are what I found on-line, actually the Hasa price at the store I went to was much higher than the on-line price.

I remember when I first was buying the phosphate remover after a winter of a lot of leaves in the pool. One quart of PR10000 brought the phosphates to zero, while it would have taken six 3L bottles of the Phosfree to achieve the same result.

All of these products have lanthanum chloride or lanthanum carbonate as the active ingredient.

Chlorine is another chemical with wildly different prices. I pay $2.50 a gallon for 12.5% chlorine at one pool store (8 one gallon deposit bottles for $20), while Leslie's sells 10% chlorine for $4.79 a gallon, about 2.4x the price when adjusted for the different strengths.

[SMS]

I'm pretty sure that almost every retail pool supply store has no interest in selling something like Orenda PR10000, even though they will use it themselves. Why sell a highly concentrated chemical when you can sell much higher quantities of less concentrated versions and net much higher profits.

They had five 55 gallon containers of it, and based on the retail price for the 275 gallon price ($13,480.31) or $49.02 per gallon, they probably paid around $35 per gallon.

[JimT]

I figured as much. I'm using the phosfree trying to get it to zero. But I use the test at the store. I throw in about a pint a week.

[SMS]

The other issue is cyanuric acid. There are no commercially available neutralizers and if you use 3" chlorine tabs the cyanuric acid builds up so much that you end up with chlorine lock-up and you have to drain and refill. Some pool stores really push the tabs instead of liquid chlorine. They are convenient, but now I only use them when I'm on vacation.

[JimT]

I don't use mine as much .

[willshak]

I have a Nature 2 sanitizer installed after the filter for my inground pool. Been using it for the last 6 or more years. I use fewer tabs per season now than before I had it. The cartridge is advertised as being good for 6 months, but since I am in the NE US, our Summers are barely 3 months, so I use it for 2 seasons before replacing.

[SMS]

I had one of those once, but I never saw a difference in chlorine use.

[trader4]

Does that mean if you kept the chlorine at lower levels than normal you wound up with noticeable water problems? Not that I disagree with you, just curious. I'm skeptical about the science behind it. The sales info is also misleading, as it implies that normal chlorine levels cause eye and skin irritation and odors. In fact, burning eyes and chlorine odor come from chloramines which are combined chlorine that comes from a pool that needs to be shocked.