About this tool
The Total Alkalinity Increaser Calculator is a free, in-browser tool that tells you how much baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) to add to raise a pool's total alkalinity (TA) to your target. Total alkalinity buffers pH — too low and pH bounces around, too high and pH drifts up and scale forms — so keeping it in the ideal 80–120 ppm range makes the whole water chemistry stable. Everything is computed locally in your browser and nothing you enter is uploaded.
The method uses the standard industry rate that 1.5 lb of baking soda per 10,000 gallons raises TA by about 10 ppm. So the dose in pounds is gallons × delta_ppm × 0.0000015, which the tool also shows in ounces, kilograms, and grams. This practical figure already embeds a typical product purity, so it matches what real pool-supply dosing charts recommend rather than the pure stoichiometric minimum. The change required is simply delta = target TA − current TA.
As a worked example, raising a 10,000-gallon pool from 70 ppm to 100 ppm (delta 30) needs about 4.5 lb of baking soda (roughly 72 oz, or about 2.04 kg). Because large single additions can cloud the water, the tool also reports how many separate doses to use if the amount exceeds about 1.5 lb per 10,000 gallons at a time. Add with the pump running, wait about 6 hours, and re-test before adding more.