I’ve noticed that many of the links on this blog are dead. I’ll be going through the archives and trying to update them this next month or so.
The one that surprised me most - sort of - was that Bio Guard removed all of their Material Safety Data Sheets from their website. They didn’t just move them so that my links would be dead. They completely removed them and put a note, “To request MSDS for BioGuard products, please contact our BioGuard Customer Care by phone at 1.800.932.5943”.
Just a few months ago their entire library was available at their website. Now, they want to control who they release that information to. Why?
Perhaps it’s because they prefer that the public thinks their “essential minerals” in their Mineral Springs program are a “proprietary blend of minerals” instead of common salt and borax. Yes, the same Borax that Ronald Reagan used to shill for on Death Valley Days. I guess if you’re selling common salt and a laundry additive for something like $40.00 a 30 lbs. bag, you need to control who you release that information to.
You can achieve much the same results of a bag of Mineral Springs Beginnings with about $5.00 worth of salt (a forty lbs. bag at the Big Box store), a 4 lbs. box of sodium tetraborate decahydrate (20 Mule Team Borax) that sells for $2.99, and a little over a quart of muriatic acid to neutralize the borax.
If you use the median percentages for a bag of Renew it’s 2.4 lbs salt, about 7 ozs. of 20 Mule Team Borax, and 4 ozs. of liquid muriatic acid. That’s between $1.50 and $2.00, depending on where you shop. How much are you paying for Renew?
Here’s excerpts from an e-mail from a lady whose had quite enough of the whole Mineral Springs program:
“I stumbled across your blog as I was hunting for cheaper prices for Mineral Springs-Renewal that we have to put in our pool every week. I started reading all the articles and although I thought I was a fairly-informed consumer.
I can see I was totally wrong when it comes to these systems. So my question is--what now? Our pool was put in by [Big Pool Company], (Atlanta, Georgia area) in August 2007. We have had no troubles except now--trying to keep the PH low and the cyanuric acid up and the price of the Renewal--it is totally stupid--up to 26-30 dollars per week--no, I did not sign up for this! We take a pool water sample to our local [Big Pool Company] store in Loganville, GA and they test it for free--we never leave there without needing 90-150 dollars of chemicals.....
Our pool is still under warranty and after reading your articles and all the links--I want our of this system--any suggestions???? Any advise would be appreciated.”
$26 to $30 a week for $2.00 worth of salt and laundry powder... Think I’m making it up? Look again at the MSDS for Renew and do the calculations yourself. The “Inorganic salt” is salt. The Boron Salt is a product very similar to 20 Mule Team Borax. The Inorganic Acid is a granular acid to balance the pH from the high pH Boron salt (I substituted an equivalent amount of liquid muriatic acid in my calculations), and the Aluminum salt is just in there as a desiccant, to keep things dry. When you add it all up and replace with off-the -shelf bulk items, it comes out to about $2.00 for 4 lbs.
I’ve talked about all this before. Click on the Label Getting Screwed Buying Salt. It’s all there. And the BioGuard links have been Renewed, for a lot less than $30 a week.
