If you look at what I said above, I have shocked and used pucks before I left. I've had people come during the week to add. I'm going to be going on a two week vacation in the spring and just was wondering what others did? I am sorry for asking. It seems like more times then not people get offended when you ask a simple question on here. I thought one of the things the forum does, is to help others. So all you experts never had problems when you were beginning? I try to help others as much as I can. I am sorry for asking.
We can and will help, we're just trying to figure out where the gaps are. It's not always easy to discern what people are asking and what their needs are. If I may read-back to you, this is what I think you are asking -
What can or should I do better to keep my pool from going green when I leave on extended vacations?
If that's the question, then the answer is you need to keep your FC at the proper level while away. I see a bunch of problems with your current setup -
1. Manual chlorination with bleach.
2. Low CYA
3. Small Intex type pool volume
4. Sunny climate
Manual bleach chlorination means that you're always adding enough bleach to try to outrun your losses long enough before adding again while trying to maintain the proper FC/CYA ratio. So your pool is seeing swings in FC. No one is perfect and the environment is always changing around your pool so some days your efforts might be good enough and other days they might not. Some type of automation or regular dosing would improve your setup greatly.
I think a CYA of 30ppm is too low. You should target 40ppm minimum or even try 50ppm. This will help reduce your daily losses and probably allow you a little more wiggle room if your additions are off. You will need to maintain a higher daily FC level so that your FC/CYA ratio is correct.
You have a small volume Intex pool. There's little shielding the water from fast temperature excursions and intense UV. This is going to make your pool a little harder to control chemistry-wise than a larger AG pool or in ground. So more frequent additions may be helpful. Also, the equipment (pumps and filters) on Intex pools tends to be undersized for the task (one intake, one return). Therefore you could have circulation dead spots that allow the algae to take hold better.
With all that said, you may be someone who should, on occasions when you can not be there, be using trichlor picks and a floater. That would be the cheapest way to create a continuos dosing system. The burden on you would be managing CYA and dumping water as necessary to keep the CYA in check. Other options would include a chemical dosing pump or converting to a salt water chlorine generator, but all of those have high upfront costs relative to your pool.
Adding borates to your water or using Polyquat-60 can act as a supplemental algaecide and give you some insurance for those times when you FC might dip. But those too are costly alternatives and are not substitutes for maintaining proper sanitizer levels.
Does that help at all?
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk,16k gal SWG pool (All Pentair), QuadDE100 Filter, Taylor K-2006
