Water Chemistry and Treatment Protocols FAQ

Both SettingsWater Chemistry and SettingsTreatment Protocols ship working. Water Chemistry arrives with industry-standard targets for every reading, and with no protocol at all a tapped symptom simply puts every product you have tagged for it on the plan. Treat both screens as tuning, not as setup you have to finish before your crews can work.

What does have to be set up is elsewhere, and this article starts there because it is the reason most first Dose Plans come back empty.

What actually has to be set up

Only the first two can stop a Dose Plan from sizing chemicals.

The fastest way through step 2 is the Dosing Rules section at the bottom of SettingsWater Chemistry. It lists What the Dose Plan can dose, and Attach recommended dosing rules attaches our defaults to every product on your shelf whose name we recognise — liquid chlorine, cal-hypo, dichlor, trichlor, muriatic acid, soda ash, sodium bicarbonate, calcium chloride, cyanuric acid, pool salt and phosphate remover. Products that already carry a rule are never overwritten. See Dosing Rules and Application Rates for the full walkthrough.

Water Chemistry

What are the default targets?

These are what every account starts with. Each row on the screen takes a Min, an Ideal and a Max, and every one of them is yours to change.

Three readings are recorded on a visit but have no range to set. Total Chlorine exists to work out combined chloramine against free chlorine. Water Temp feeds the saturation index and the seasonal chlorine calculation. TDS is recorded for reference.

Phosphates are reported in ppb, not ppm, and there is no benefit to any amount of it — phosphate is algae food and it drives chlorine demand — which is why the min and ideal are both 0.

Why is the recommended chlorine higher than the Free Chlorine range I set?

Because cyanuric acid protects chlorine from the sun but also binds it: the more stabilizer in the water, the higher the residual has to be to sanitize at the same rate. A flat 1–3 ppm band ignores that, which is how a salt pool held at the recommended CYA 70 ends up dosed chlorine on every visit and then flagged High for it.

So the working chlorine target is scaled to the stabilizer reading taken on the day:

The Free Chlorine (FC) row is a floor and a ceiling on that calculation, not the target itself. Chlorine is never targeted below 1 ppm however little stabilizer is present, and never above 10 ppm, because past that the water is a shock rather than a residual.

Do salt pools use different targets?

Yes, and you do not have to do anything to get it. A pool with a salt cell uses the Total Alkalinity (TA) — Salt Cell Pools row instead of the liquid-and-tablet row, because a cell pushes pH up continuously and a high alkalinity gives it more to push against. It also uses the Cyanuric Acid (CYA) — Salt Pools row, and holds a lower chlorine residual for its stabilizer level than a tablet pool does.

A pool counts as having a cell when any of these is true on its Pool Profile: the sanitizer system is Salt, a salt cell model is recorded, or one of its features mentions salt. That is deliberately wider than the sanitizer system alone, because an ORP-controlled pool on liquid feed is Automated with no cell, and some chlorine-system pools have one fitted.

ORP targets only apply to pools whose sanitizer system is Automated.

What about spas and commercial pools?

Both adjust themselves from the Pool Kind on the Pool Profile. A spa runs hotter and is bathed in far more heavily per gallon, so it holds a higher chlorine residual (3–5 ppm) and much less stabilizer (up to 30 ppm). Commercial water is held to the CDC Model Aquatic Health Code rather than to comfort, at 2–4 ppm chlorine. Sites that never filled in Pool Kind are unaffected.

Can I set different targets for one customer's pool?

Not from Settings — target ranges are company-wide, and the screen says so. What varies per pool is read off the Pool Profile automatically: Sanitizer System picks the alkalinity and stabilizer rows, Surface Type picks plaster versus vinyl and fiberglass calcium, and Pool Kind applies the spa and commercial adjustments above.

What do the Custom and Default badges mean?

Every row carries one. Default means the row is still OpsVara's recommended range. Custom means your company has recorded its own numbers for it, and your numbers take priority over the automatic adjustments described above.

Reset to Defaults, at the bottom left, clears your custom ranges in one go after a confirmation. There is no per-row reset, so if you want to keep some of your changes, note them before you reset.

What is "Account for the season when calculating doses" doing?

It sizes chlorine to still be in range when the tech next visits, rather than to the band at the moment of the test. Chlorine demand roughly doubles for every 18°F of warming, so the same weekly pool needs a great deal more chlorine in July than in October, and a dose that ignores that is under the minimum within a day or two in summer.

With it on, chlorine is sized from the water temperature recorded at the pool, the gap to the next visit, and the site's sun and bather load. Five numbers tune it:

Turn the setting off to dose to the target band exactly as read, with no allowance for the interval.

Why won't my change save?

Every row needs all three numbers, in order. Two messages appear under the row:

• All three values are required. — one of Min, Ideal or Max is empty.
• Must be Min ≤ Ideal ≤ Max, all numbers. — the three numbers are out of order, or one is not a number.

Save Water Chemistry Settings stays disabled until the whole screen is valid and something has actually changed.

Who can edit this?

Company admins and office managers. The tab only exists on pool accounts. Field techs never see it, but their app reads the same targets you set here, so the Low / OK / High badges a tech sees in the field are the ones the office chose.

You can also reach the same screen as the Water Chemistry step of SettingsSetup Wizard.

Treatment Protocols

Do I need one?

No. With no protocol, tapping a symptom on a visit puts every product you have tagged for that symptom on the plan. Add a protocol when you want to do one of four things: choose between tagged products, name a product that is not tagged, keep two products apart, or put something on every visit.

Does a protocol change my chemistry doses?

No, and this is the most common misunderstanding. Chlorine, pH, alkalinity, calcium, stabilizer, salt and phosphates are always dosed from the water test against the ranges above. A pool protocol shapes only the symptom lines — which algaecide the plan reaches for when a crew taps Green algae, and what must never go in alongside it.

What is the difference between Pick One and Use Together?

Pick One puts a single product on the plan: the first in your order that is available, preferring one that also covers another symptom the tech tapped, so one jug covers two problems. Use Together puts every listed product on the plan. Products listed under Backups are kept for the applicator's reference and are never recommended automatically.

Full detail, including combinations and Never Together pairs, is in Configure Treatment Protocols.

A symptom is missing from the rules list

The list only shows symptoms scoped to the work type you have selected. Scope it to this work type under SettingsSymptoms and it appears.

Verify it worked

Run one real visit and read the Dose Plan. That single check covers everything on this page.

1. Amounts appear against the readings that were out of range. If they do, volume and dosing rules are both in place.
2. On a salt pool at a stabilizer level of 60–80 ppm, the chlorine target reads higher than the Free Chlorine row you set, and alkalinity is judged against the 60–80 ppm salt-cell band.
3. If you tapped a symptom, the plan line says where the product came from — a Treatment Protocol rule, always included by your protocol, or a tagged product.
4. Open SettingsWater Chemistry again. Any row you changed reads Custom; the rest read Default.

Troubleshooting

Every message below appears on the Dose Plan itself, so a tech can act on it without calling the office.