180 ppm Cyanuric Acid Level - with Rudy Stankowitz

🔥 Episode Breakdown

This episode cuts through one of the biggest misconceptions in pool chemistry—and then zooms out to what’s really happening across the industry right now.

🧪 180 ppm CYA – What Actually Happened

No—nobody said to run pools at 180 ppm.

That number came from ratio-based chemistry, not a recommendation.

•  CYA doesn’t sanitize 
• HOCl does
•  Higher CYA can work if chlorine is increased proportionally

Problem?

👉 Most people won’t maintain the ratio correctly 

That’s why the industry stayed conservative.

🧠 Chlorine Misunderstood (Again)

• Available Chlorine ≠ % chlorine in the bucket
• Active strength ≠ oxidizing power
• Free chlorine ≠ active sanitizer

👉 HOCl is all that matters
Controlled by pH and CYA equilibrium—not guesswork.

⚠️ March Reality Check

•  Drownings labeled “accidents” 
•  Safety barriers missing 
•  Suction injuries still happening despite the Virginia Graeme Baker Pool and Spa Safety Act

Nothing shocking—just constant failure.

⚖️ Lawsuits & Industry Pressure

• Hayward Holdings facing reported legal pressure 
•  Market slowdown hitting Fluidra and Pentair
•  Shift to repairs and service

👉 Pressure rolls downhill—to you.

🧯 BioLab – Still Not Over

The situation in Conyers, Georgia isn’t resolved.

It just stopped making headlines.

🏆 Mentor of the Year

Someone helped you in this industry.

Nominate them:
 👉 Talking Pools Podcast Mentor Award

🎯 Final Thought

Nothing changed…

Except expectations, liability, and attention.

And if you’re still operating like it’s 2019—

You’re already behind.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:53

Welcome to Friday. I'm Rooney Stankowitz. This is the Talking Pools Podcast, the Flock It Friday episode, weekend eve. We are upon it. Can't wait to get out there. At least Saturday, get a pole in the water. Sunday, we got Easter Sunday. Happy Easter to those of you that celebrate. I do. My grandkiddies will be searching for eggs in my yard at some point during the day. And how cool is that? On a different note, on a very different note, I suggested something or put something out there, a hypothetical. What if, what if the cyanoric acid level in swimming pools, are you ready for this? Are you sitting down? Was permitted to be, okay, here it comes, 180 parts per million. 180. What do you think about that?

SPEAKER_00 1:50

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SPEAKER_02 2:16

Here are all of the folks who responded on my Facebook page. That's Rudy the Pool Man. It should be at CPO class, I believe, is the handle. Again, the at symbol, then CPO class. And I asked a simple question. How many people have gone through Jack's Magic Certified Stain Specialist program? And a lot of people stepped up. So I figure I have some swag here. Why not do a Rando contest? Just draw a name at random and send this stuff off. Ship it in the mail. Get it to them. So here we are. Everybody who said yes, here's your name on this wheel. Are you ready? Crus your fingers. We're going to announce this on Friday's podcast episode, but I'll show you this Friday night. And that's when you'll see this. But here we go. Again, for a box of Jack's Magic Swag. And Katie Settle is our winner. Congratulations, Katie. On a different note, a different winner, a different contest, we ran on the Talking Pools podcast Facebook page a contest. The greenest, the most swamp vomit pool you have ever seen. Then by votes for visitors, whoever's picture got the most votes by our closing time. We ran this for, I think, an entire weekend, but whoever got the most votes in that time period won. And our winner there, who wins a pair of slick shades. If you're not familiar with slick shades, they are wooden sunglasses, and the brand is S L Y K K. I think there's two Ks in there. So yeah, slick shades going out to Ron Pence in Idaho. Congrats, Ron. You are the winner.

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SPEAKER_02 4:42

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SPEAKER_04 5:23

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SPEAKER_01 6:04

In an industry built not just on skill but on those willing to teach it, there's a call to recognize the people behind the professionals. The Talking Pools Podcast is now accepting nominations for its 2026 Mentor of the Year Award, honoring those who don't just have the answers, but teach others how to find them. If someone helped shape your path in this industry, now is the time to return the favor. Visit cpoclass.com, click on the Talking Pools Podcast Mentor Award tab, and submit your mentor's name up until May 15th, 2026, because behind every great pool professional, there's someone who showed them how to think.

SPEAKER_02 6:44

All right, listen up. If you're serious about getting smarter, stronger, and actually winning in life, you need to be around the right people. And that's exactly why I built this. On my website, you're going to get the tools, the strategies, and the mindset shifts most people will never tell you about. And if you're ready to take it to the next level, the CPO program is where the real transformation happens. That's where the committed people go. So here's what I want you to do go to the website right now, www.cpo class.com. Look around. And if you're serious about leveling up, I want you to register for a CPO class. Stop watching from the sidelines. Step into the arena. I'll see you inside. Kolcinsky? Kolsinski or Kolczynski? Jason. Anyway, Jason said he wants to hear a podcast episode about the CDC considering bumping that cyaneuric acid level up to 180 parts per million. And it wasn't that long ago. If you want to get a great conversation started anywhere in this industry, all you have to do is say cyaneuric acid, and it will take off. And it can sometimes get heated. I'm going to give you a number that makes people lose their minds. And again, that number that we're talking about here, 180 parts per million. Now, I'm going to get folks that say chlorine lock. But then I have my friend Mike Marshall, who anytime you say cyanuric acid three times pops up like Betelgeuse, saying that his cyanuric acid levels run much higher than that, and he doesn't have any problems maintaining his swimming pools. So either way, again, I think we should peel back the curtain. You should be able to see the wizard and understand what goes on behind the scenes. And that's why today, Jason, yeah, you got it, buddy. We're talking about a cyanuric acid level of 180 parts per million. Now, before you roll your eyes and say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I heard about that. Somebody wanted to let pools run wild. No, that's not what happened. Not even close. Now, this didn't come from a guy in the field guessing. This came out of discussions tied to the Council for the Malaloquatic Health Code, which you can be a member of if you like. The CMAC. You could be one of the people that helps make the rules that govern the industry. Anyway, the people in that room, they weren't guessing, they weren't modeling, they were arguing, and they were trying to answer a question that the industry still struggles with. What actually controls sanitation in a chlorinated pool? Because here's the uncomfortable truth cyanuric acid doesn't sanitize a damn thing. Free chlorine doesn't sanitize everything. Hypochlorous acid is what does the work. That's HOCL. And HOCL that's controlled by equilibrium chemistry, not opinions, not habits, not what your supplier told you. So now we go back to that number: 180 parts per million. Yeah. It was discussed. Yeah. It showed up. And yes, it was real. But not in the way people repeat it. The proposal wasn't, hey, let's raise the CYA to 180 because that would be insane. That would be lazy. That would be ignoring everything we know about chlorine kinetics. The proposal was this stop managing CYA as a standalone number. Start managing the ratio between cyanuric acid and free chlorine. That's where everything changed. And there's even a change there. So once you shift to a ratio, you are no longer asking, What's my CYA? You're asking, how much active sanitizer do I really have here? Now, this wasn't random. This idea is rooted in published work. Researchers like Dr. Roy Voer spent years examining the relationship between CYA and disinfection. But peer-reviewed studies, many you'll find on ResearchGate, show that as CYA increases, a fraction of active HOCL decreases. But if you proportionately increase the free chlorine, you can maintain similar disinfection performance. That's the foundation. That's the entire argument. Now, let's do the math. If you take a ratio like 30 parts of CYA to one part free chlorine, and you maintain a six part per million free chlorine, you land at 180 parts per million of cyanuric acid. That's where the number came from. Not a recommendation, not a target, a consequence. And that's what was being debated. Now let's talk about the room. Because this wasn't a calm academic discussion. This was tension. This was friction. This was people who understood chemistry, arguing with people responsible for public health, arguing with people responsible for operations. You had voices like Richard Falk, Roy War, pushing toward ratio-based control, science-driven modeling, moving away from arbitrary limits, and then you had others, including health department perspectives and industry stakeholders, raising a very different concern. Yeah, but what happens in the real world? Because theory is clean, pools are not. Let's talk pool pros first. If you can control, you control the ratio correctly, you maintain consistent HOCL levels, you reduce UV degradation of chlorine, you stabilize the system, you potentially reduce chemical consumption. From a purely chemical standpoint, it works. Now, reality, higher CYA means slower oxidation kinetics, increased margin for operator error, greater dependence on accurate testing. And here's the big one: most pools are not managed precisely enough to hold a ratio. And public health officials know that. They're not designing codes for you. Not for me, not for the guy who understands equilibrium chemistry. They're designing it for the worst operated public pool in the jurisdiction. And that changes everything because now the question becomes: what happens when someone doesn't maintain the ratio? At a 30 part per million CYA level, you have room for error. At 180 parts per million, you do not. And that's why pushback happened. Hard pushback. There were concerns about crypto inactivation rates, E. coli kill times, real-world compliance. Because the CDC and the MAHC aren't just thinking about clean water, they're thinking about outbreaks. And outbreaks don't care about your math. So now we get to the heart of the debate. 20 to 1 versus 7.5%. Most of you have heard keep your chlorine level at 7.5% of your CYA. We all heard that for a long time. It's the industry rule of thumb. But what was being discussed at the CMAC was tighter control. A 20 to 1 ratio, sometimes even more conservative. So let's translate that. 20 to 1 equals 5%. So 7.5% was a lot more aggressive chlorine relative to your CYA. So depending on who you ask, 7.5% is safer, 20 to 1 is more efficient. Both are trying to approximate HOCL control, but neither one fixes the real problem. People don't hold ratios consistently. And that's why we never went to 180 parts per million. Not because it doesn't work chemically, because it does, but it's because it requires precision, it requires discipline, it requires understanding. It even requires a different means of measure. You do not have a tool that you carry that can measure a cyanuric acid level up to 180 parts per million. Okay. The solution was simple: 50% pool water, 50% bottled water. We're going to run a dilution test 50-50. Now run the test. If you get a reading, whatever your reading is, double it. So now I can read all the way up to 180 parts per million, actually up to 200 parts per million. So if we were at 90 in this new sample, that would mean we were at 180 parts per million. That's the solution. That's the easy way to do it. But the kickback was hey, how do we know we can trust the people in the field to run a proper dilution test? And I know you listening to me, us talking right now, I know you got this. But you also know who's out there. Captain Flyby Night, shit and split, dump and run, splash and dash, that fucker. We know we can't trust that person to do it correctly. So I suggested, hey, you know that little squeeze bottle, the little squeeze bottle that comes with the tailor kit, that little dropper. You fill it, it's kind of opaque. You fill it with water up to one line, then with CYA solution, test solution, which is actually melamine, up to the next line. Andrea actually spoke about Andrea actually spoke about that a little bit earlier in the week, but you fill it up to the next line, you shake it for 30 seconds, and then you run your test, right? So all we would have to do is get Taylor to put an additional line on that bottle. One in between the first line and the bottom of the bottle. Now we would fill up to the new line with pooled water, then up to the original line with bottled water, and then add our melamine solution, and you would have a perfect dilution test. But they said no. No, just no. The model aquatic health code is written for systems that assume failure. So the final outcome, the industry stayed conservative. CYA limits remained far lower. Ratio discussions continued, but never replaced fixed limits in a meaningful way. And that brings us back to the number. 180 parts per million. It wasn't reckless, it wasn't random. It wasn't even wrong. It was just too dependent on people doing everything right. And if you've been in the industry for longer than five minutes, you already know why that didn't happen. They tried to make people understand chemistry. And that was the real problem.

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SPEAKER_02 19:55

Blu-ray all day. I saw a conversation the other day. You've seen these two, I'm sure. Somebody asks a simple question about chlorine strength, and suddenly everyone becomes an expert. And I sat there reading through it, watching the same bad information get repeated over and over again. And I didn't say anything. Not because I didn't know the answer, I did, but because before I comment on anything online, I always ask myself one question. Do I feel like fighting today? Do I feel like having an argument today? And that day, I didn't. But we're gonna fix it here. Because what they were talking about is one of the most misunderstood concepts in pool chemistry available chlorine content versus active strength. Two different numbers on your bucket. And if you don't understand this, then you don't understand chlorine. Let's start with the mistake. Most people think available chlorine, 90% available chlorine means 90% chlorine in the bucket. No, that's not what it means, not even close. ACC is a comparative measurement of oxidizing power, not the amount of chlorine present. It comes from an old industrial standard. Chlorine gas equals 100%. That's your reference. Everything else is compared to that. So when you see trichlorate 90% available chlorine content, all that means is trichlor is 90% as strong. It has 90% the oxidizing strength of chlorine gas. That's it. Not that the bucket is 90% chlorine. That misunderstanding alone has wrecked more dosing calculations than algae ever has. Now, the part that almost nobody in this thread understood active strength. That tells you how much of the chemical is in the bucket. Not how strong the stuff in the bucket is, but how much product is in there. So 90% available chlorine content, but you see next in the percent active strength, it's greater than 99%. That means greater than 99% of what's in that bucket is trichlor. OCL is not constant. And no matter what form of fluorine you put in the water, what you get is HOCL, hypochlorous acid, and hypochlorite ion, the percentage of which you have more of. Again, pH dependent. It depends upon your pH reading. So it's 7.5 50 50. Less than 7.5, the amount of HOCL increases and hypochloride ion decreases. Higher than 7.5, the HOCL decreases and the hypochlorite ion increases, which is interesting. Because we've spoken about this before. Hypochlorate ion does not have the same attraction as cyanuric acid that hypochlorous acid does. So what happens at that point is when the pH is high, the hypochlorate ion starts to peel away from the cyaneuric acid and get eaten up. So you'll actually lose more chlorine due to solar UV degradation than you would due to your chlorine being more active in a lot of scenarios. And it's the same root issue. People think in terms of numbers on paper, instead of chemical reality and water, chlorine is not active chlorine. Total chlorine is not active chlorine. Hypochlorous acid is what matters. All right. So March is over. The fuck was that? Seriously. I've been watching these headlines rolling all month, and I feel like I'm living in some alternate universe where water just got invented last friggin' Tuesday. You've got story after story, kids in pools near drownings, actual drownings, and every headline sounds the same. Tragic accident, freak accident, unimaginable. Unimaginable. It's a hole filled with water. What part of that is confusing? They call a suction injury a freak accident. Freak accident. That's literally why the Virginia Graham Baker Pool and Spa Safety Act exists. It's not rare. Let's talk about real absurdity. We're renting out houses with pools to families with kids. And sometimes no barriers. None. No fence. No alarm. Nothing. And then when something happens, we act shocked. That's like putting a tiger in your backyard, opening the gate, and then going, Wow, nobody could have predicted this. Everybody could have predicted it. You just didn't want to deal with it. When a kid drowns in a pool, it pisses me off. And that's just under normal circumstances. When a kid drowns in the pool because there was a code violation, that just pisses me off harder. And now here comes the fun part: the lawsuits. Oh, the lawsuits. Now we're treating pools like they're defective blenders. Like they just malfunctioned one day. This pool injured someone. No, the pool didn't do anything. The pool sat there being a pool. That's what pools do. Like it has been doing every day since it was built. But now everybody wants someone to blame. The homeowner, the platform, the manufacturer, the installer, the service guy. Yeah, you. Because you touched it at some point, which means, congratulations, you are now part of the story. Nobody's asking about chlorine levels. Nobody's asking about LSI. Nobody's asking about CYA. They're asking one question. Who's responsible? And if your name is anywhere near that pool, you're in the conversation. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, while all this chaos is happening, the manufacturers over here are trying to keep it together. Hayward Holdings, investor lawsuit,$20 million because apparently everything's fine wasn't actually fine. They rode the COVID boom like everyone else. Now, now they've got inventory sitting around like leftovers nobody wants. And companies like Fluidra and Panther, they're not crashing, but they're definitely not partying anymore. This is the hangover. No more explosive growth. Now it's, hey, how do we make money when nobody's building pools? Answer you, repairs, parts, service, which means pressure rolls downhill. And guess where it lands? Right on your route. Now, before anybody gets twisted, this isn't me making accusations. This information on Biolab and Hayward is what's been reported publicly by sources like PR Newswire, the EPA, and multiple news outlets. Ongoing investigations are still playing out, and I'm walking you through what's out there, not rewriting it. Conyers, Georgia, remember the fire? The smoke? The evacuations? Yeah. That didn't magically resolve itself. It just stopped trending. Cleanup, still happening. Testing, still being questioned. People still asking, what the hell were we actually exposed to? It's not over. It just got quieter. And quiet is where the real problems live. So what actually happened in March? Nothing obvious. That's what happened. No single explosion, no single scandal, just a steady stream of accidents that weren't accidents. Lawsuits that kept expanding, manufacturers tightening up, chemical companies under a microscope, and all of it points to one thing. The industry is changing. Water didn't change. Physics didn't change. Pools didn't change. Expectations did. Liability did. Attention did. And if you're still operating like it's 2019, you're about to find out the hard way. It's not. It's not 2019 anymore. And that's a damn shame. Wait a minute. Go to mentoraward.com. Go to mentoraward.com. Somebody helped you in this industry. I don't care what they helped you with, but somebody helped you. And whoever that person is who didn't intend on getting anything out of it and they were doing nothing but a good deed, I want to know who they are because I think they should be celebrated. And that's where we're having our 2026 Talking Pools Podcast Mentor of the Year Award. Right now, I just need to know who they are. We'll do the rest of the work after that. There's no voting, no pretty prettiest picture, no best looking shirt. It's not going to go that way. What we're going to do is we're going to dig and we're going to dig deep and see who's actually contributed the most out of the bunch that we get in. Somebody helped you. www.mentoraward.com. Go there, tell us who it is. All I need you to do. Okay. Until next time, be good. Be safe.