Hey, I just had a new vinyl liner installed for a 25,000 gallon pool. I have well water and when I put the chlorine in it turned an orange orange color. On the advice of AI I added three bottles of Jack’s pink stuff which was supposed to save my new liner and then three bottles of pro team metal magic which was supposed to pull the metal out of the water so it can be filtered. Seems like I’m somewhere in the middle because while the water is a tea Brown now there is nothing on the floor that can be vacuumed and when I filled my skimmer with polyfill it stays White which tells me nothing’s being filtered out. Any advice you have would be appreciated. I saw your ferretabs and was wondering if that would work for me. According to Leslie’s Pool test I have 4.4 PPM of iron. My chlorine is 1 PPM because I’m afraid to add it back and turn everything orange again.
What type of filter do you have? If you have a sand filter and haven’t used any other products, FerriTabs work beautifully.
However, because you’ve already added Jack’s Pink Stuff and ProTeam Metal Magic, the iron is likely tightly bound up by those chemical complexes. When metals are fully sequestered or crystallized by these particular treatments, FerriTabs usually can’t grab hold of the particles to drop them out or filter them properly.
We typically avoid using the Pink Stuff or Metal Magic for this very reason. Our go-to method for iron-heavy well water (paired with a sand filter) is using Ascorbic Acid/Stain Free to lift any immediate discoloration or staining from the surfaces, immediately followed by FerriTabs to physically capture the iron and drop it out through the filter.
How Jack’s Pink Stuff and Metal Magic Work
Both of these products are designed to handle metal problems (like the iron from well water turning the pool tea-brown), but they approach the issue slightly differently:
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Jack’s Magic The Pink Stuff (Sequestering Agent): This acts like a chemical “magnet” at a molecular level. It attaches itself to dissolved metal ions (iron, copper, etc.) and binds them into a tight chemical complex. This “sequestration” keeps the metals locked up so they cannot oxidize, react with chlorine, or precipitate out to stain the new vinyl liner. However, traditional sequestered metals stay dissolved in the water and are typically too small to be caught by standard pool filters.
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ProTeam Metal Magic (Crystallizing/Filtering Sequestrant): While it also binds to metals, its formula is designed to “crystallize” the bound metal particles. It aggregates the metal complexes into slightly larger physical sizes, specifically so a standard pool filter can eventually trap and remove them from the water entirely when backwashed or cleaned.
The Problem With Combining Them with FerriTabs
Because the customer added six total bottles of these aggressive chemical complexes, the $4.4\text{ PPM}$ of iron is completely bound up and locked into a liquid state.
FerriTabs are a flocculent/floccing agent meant to physically bind to free, oxidizing iron particles to drop them out through a sand filter. Because the iron is trapped inside the “Pink Stuff” and “Metal Magic” chemical cages, the FerriTabs cannot “see” or grab onto the metal. This is exactly why the customer’s polyfill is staying perfectly white—the iron is chemically masked in the water right now rather than being physically filtered out.