Maintain 5-Pounds Premium Granular Flocculant Pool Clarifier

My problem was hard white foam which appeared after a heavy rain washed a tremendous amount of debris into my pool from the huge pine tree which towers over it. This followed a long period of bad air caused by firestorms in California last year. I laboriously filtered the water and adjusted all the chemicals, so that the water (which was green immediately after the rain) became perfectly clear and odor-free, but the foam was visible whenever I heated the spa. I would remove it with a net about 1-foot square and pile it next to the spa. I could easily remove 50 square feet (50 netfuls) of this hard white foam each time I used the spa. It would form huge piles on the ground that bounced each time I added another netful of foam, much like pudding. The next day I would see green residue on the ground where the foam had been. I was not worried that the foam could be dangerous to my health, but I didn't like it very much. From what I could determine on the internet, the foam was caused by organic matter that had gotten into the water and was too small to be removed by my cartridge filter. I could have kept removing the foam manually repeatedly, but the volume of water in the spa is very small compared to the volume of the pool, and it would have taken forever to remove all of the foam in this way. I had read that Maintain flocculant should not be used with a cartridge filter, but my cartridges were about 9 months old, and I didn't mind sacrificing them. First I took out the cartridges and washed them. There was a lot of green debris on the ground afterwards but nothing out of the ordinary compared to previous washes of other cartridges. Then I replaced the cartridges and set up the pool vacuum. After getting the air out of the system, I turned off the pump. I made sure that the pH was above 7.8 and added 1/2 bottle of this Maintain flocculant, spreading it over the top of the pool. The next day I noticed that there was a lot of white powder on the bottom of the pool, but the water was still cloudy and there was also a lot of powder adhering to the walls of the pool. So I brushed the walls, which caused a dramatic increase in water cloudiness, and waited another full day before vacuuming. On the second day, the water was clear enough so that I could see the bottom well enough to vacuum and there was relatively little flocculent adhering to the walls. I turned on the pump and quickly removed the cap from the opening at the bottom of the cartridge filter. This of course caused a huge amount of water to spill onto the ground around my pool equipment. Then I rushed over and started vacuuming the pool. When the vacuuming was complete, I quickly turned off the pump and replaced the cap. Then I refilled the pool with tap water. The pH dropped to about 7.4. I filtered the water in the pool to remove the cloudiness. The next time I turned on the spa, the foam problem was greatly reduced but not eliminated. I could still remove about 10 netfuls of foam each time I heated the spa. So I washed the cartridge filters again, but this time they seemed quite clean, and there was very little white material on them, suggesting that they had not been affected by the flocculent which had been able to escape easily through the bottom of the filter. Since I still wasn't satisfied, I added the other half of the bottle of Maintain flocculant and repeated the above procedure. This time, I achieved a further reduction of foam, to about 5 netfuls each time I used the spa, but the difference was not as dramatic as the first time. In retrospect, I should have used the entire the bottle of flocculant the first time. Finally, after filtering the pool thoroughly with the old filter cartridges in place, I replaced them with new ones. In conclusion, I was able to prove that it's OK to use flocculant with a filter cartridge, as long as you're willing to replace your cartridges, and it seems to me that replacing the cartridges might have been unnecessary, since they did not appear to be very much affected when I cleaned them after the floc treatment. I also demonstrated that flocculant can greatly reduce, but not eliminate, the hard foam problem that I've been experiencing.

I had a problem where dirt washed into my pool from a construction project. This settled out the fine silt and allowed me to vacuum to waste with minimal difficulty. It is the first flocculant I have used that required the pump to remain off for 24 hours. Liquid floc requires the pump to circulate the water. This product works great.

This stuff is actually amazing! We had a really rough winter out her in the pacific northwest, then the pool heater broke so I couldn't start the pump for weeks. The pool was disgusting! I used this and within one day all of the gross stuff fell to the bottom of the pool. The only issue I had was trying to vacuum all of it up. There was so much that it clogged the line so buyer beware it works great, but almost too good.

Love this product. It worked great at getting the pollen out of my pool water. I previously bought a different product and it didn't do what it stated. Well worth the money.

Liquid never worked. This is the only granules I've found. Just toss out on the top of the water by the handfuls and wait a day or so. Everything sinks! Awesome product!

Did not work to get the algae out of the water. I would not recommend.

This product works for green algae, but it is expensive. Our local garden supply has aluminum sulfate granules for only $2.50 per pound.

This product cleared my incredibly cloudy pool. My DE filter was needing to be backwashed every 30 minutes and I thought I was never going to get it clean. Did some googling and learned about floc. This one was the fasted delivery. Here's what I did for my ~30k pool. 1. Set pump to recirculate **important** if you leave the pump running 2. Dumped entire 5lb container into 5 gallon bucket w/ pool water. 3. Mixed it up for a bit 4. Dumped it into one of the skimmers. 5. Let run for an hour, then turned off the pump 6. Left overnight ~ 12 hours. 7. Vacuumed all the crud that sunk to the bottom to waste. There was a LOT of it! I can't believe how well it worked!