Is My Pool Water Balanced?
Balanced water is clear, comfortable, and easy on your equipment. Enter the readings from your test kit and this checker tells you, in plain English, whether your water is balanced — and if not, exactly which levels are off and what order to fix them in.
What “balanced” means
Balanced water keeps five things in their ideal ranges. They're connected, so the order you fix them in matters — alkalinity steadies pH, and pH affects how well chlorine works, so you always work from the foundation up.
- Total Alkalinity: 100–150 ppm — fix first; it buffers pH.
- pH: 7.2–7.6 — comfort and chlorine effectiveness.
- Free Chlorine: 2–4 ppm — your active sanitizer.
- Cyanuric Acid (CYA): 30–50 ppm (60–80 for saltwater) — protects chlorine from sunlight.
- Calcium Hardness: 200–400 ppm — protects surfaces from etching and scale.
Once you know what to adjust, size the exact dose with the Chemistry Calculator, the Chlorine Calculator, or the Stabilizer (CYA) Calculator. New to these terms? The Pool School glossary explains each one.