Chlorine and CYA help!

[dshetayh]

Hi everyone! I need your help. I have an 18000 gallon plaster pool DE filter, and just opened pool 2 days ago-pool was a cloudy light green. I added a ton of bleach and it turned crystal blue with only some staining on the bottom of the pool in small areas.

I tested my water.

pH: 7.4
Alkalinity: 110
Calcium: 225
Fc: 0
Cc: 0
Cya: 0 (at least I think. I added water to the tube and I can see the black dot clear as day).

I just added a gallon of instant pool conditioner. Do I wait 24hrs to test again then add bleach? Or should I add bleach tonight after 6 hours of adding the conditioner?

I may need to add more conditioner since 1 gallon equals only 32ppm o a 10,000 gallon pool.

Thoughts?

My pool won't hold chlorine and this has been an issue since last year. It's very frustrating!

 

[Husky25]

What is instant pool conditioner?

Something is consuming the chlorine, whether it be algae, ammonia, or the pool conditioner. Through my readings of TFP dot com, I learned that in the absence of chlorine, bacteria can convert CYA into ammonia. I became preemptively worried about ammonia conversion over the Winter (Luckily that didn't happen).

Anyhow, the only solution is liquid chlorine. From everything I've read, it takes quite a bit to get out in front of it, but it is absolutely possible.

Also pet stores sell ammonia test kits for aquariums.

 

[Texas Splash]

Liquid conditioner is just another name for stabilizer in liquid form and it will work fine to raise your CYA. Liquid will dissipate and mix quite fast. You posted your thread about 3 hours ago, so I would check CYA now just out of curiosity. It may not have reached its max potential for that dosage yet, but you should have enough to start adding some bleach.

Now in PA you don't need a really high CYA right now, so I would only shoot for the minimum 30 ppm of CYA which it appears you did. What Husky25 is alluding to is the possibility of an abnormal condition that sometimes occurs when opening a pool in the winter. So what I would ask you to do now that you already added conditioner is to do this:
- Add enough regular bleach based on the poolmath calculator to increase your FC to 10. Then test it again in 10 minutes. If it held at 5 or above, then increase FC to 12 and perform a SLAM. If your FC dropped to almost nothing (4 or below) and your CC shot-up, then keep adding bleach and re-testing FC every 10 minutes until it holds.

At this point you can see it's very important to stay consistent with the bleach to maintain FC until the pool can hold it on its own. Good luck!