Testing questions

[dieseltim2]

Ok, so I have been reading on the forum for several months now, and have been following the program in my own pool for the last month now.

My first question is what is the down side of keeping my FC in the 5-16 range all the time, if my CYA is at 40? Does it hurt anything to keep it up near or slightly over slam levels over night if it is dropping so much in the day?

I do seem to use about 121oz of 8.25 % ea. day with temps in the upper 90's. The pool is in full sun from about 9am till 7pm. Water temperature is hitting 92-95 by evening.

Todays loss was only 3ppm because of cooler night temps and cloudy daytime.

I know someone is going to ask for an OCLT, but the last week we seem to get some amount of rain most every evening. So, that would throw off the test if I had time to do it at 4:30 am b4 work. So no I haven't done that yet. To do to do........

Second question is if I'm doing a FC test every day and I'm shooting for 8-16 range, can I use 5ml in the test and still have an accurate test result? It should be one drop for each ppm.

 

[Richard320]

The downside of running higher FC than you need is that you lose more to the sun. FC loss is not a fixed parts per million per day. It's a percentage. So if you lose 4 ppm when you start at 8, you'll lose 8 ppm when you start at 16. That's just wasted bleach -- money just burned up by the sun.

You should just target enough to keep you above minimum for your CYA until the next time you test and add.

Also, if you've been getting enough rain to overflow or need a pumpout, you're losing CYA. Low CYA will accelerate the losses to the sun.

 

[dieseltim2]

I did see a drop in CYA about 2 weeks ago, down to a little above 30 but I put some of my leftover pucks into a floater while we were gone for a long weekend to do a two for one. Kept up the FC and brought back up the CYA at the same time. I even thought about adding a few more to raise it to 50 to see how that effected daytime losses.

Most of the rain we have gotten in the last week or so was just enough to keep it topped off, just enough that I think it would screw up an over night loss count.