Source water refers to where the mains water that supplies your swimming pool comes from. The water companies collect water from a variety of sources. Some of it is collected from ground waters such as wells and boreholes etc., and some of it is collected from surface waters such as lakes, rivers, streams etc. The ground waters have a higher content of calcium carbonate and are known as 'hard' water. The surface waters don't have such a high calcium carbonate content because they haven't permeated through the ground where it comes into contact with various minerals, including calcium carbonate. Hard water leads to scaling as it deposits its calcium onto the surfaces it comes into contact with.
Soft water does the opposite and will corrode the surfaces it comes into contact with. This is why water balance testing is carried out weekly and the aim for pool operators is to have the water ever so slightly scale-forming. In practice, it will be very difficult to get the water completely balanced and as long as your pH levels are OK (which means your alkalinity levels are probably also OK) then you are unlikely to have major problems with water balance.
Different parts of the UK have different source waters. Due to the network of pipes water can also transported from one area of the UK to another. This means that source water is not always constant and an area that has been supplied with hard water could find that at certain times (due to low stocks of water for example) it gets supplied with soft water from somewhere else.
In : Pool Water Chemistry
Tags:
"hard water" "soft water" "source water" "calcium carbonate"
