Hello and Thanks!

[TheOddLinguist]

Hi. My name's Christopher. My wife and I bought a house last year and – as a result – became first-time pool owners.

We started out with a major CYA situation, but with the help of the posts on this forum, we're finally at (what I'm going to call) a manageable situation. So, first of all, thanks so much for all your help!

Now that we've got that settled, I'm not sure what to focus on next. So, if you wouldn't mind helping again, I'd appreciate some more experienced eyes.

FC  3.0
CC  0.0
pH  7.6
CYA 70 (possibly 80; it's a little hard to tell)
CH  50
TA  70

I'll get the FC up today/tonight. (To 6.0 or so, I'm thinking?)

Using the PoolMath calculator, it seems my biggest issues are CH and TA. I'm a little afraid to tackle both at the same time (but please, correct me if that's the wrong way to think about it), but I'm not sure which is more important.

Our pool has a vinyl liner, and I've read some posts that CH may not be as important in that case. But most of the recommended values seem to be so much higher than where I am, I'm concerned that I should raise it a bit anyway.

So, sorry to turn this introduction into a call for help, but again, thanks for all you've done for me thus far. I only hope I'll be able to help in some fashion in the future.

 

[Richard320]

Welcome, Christopher!

There's nothing wrong with those numbers aside from the low FC, which you already know about.

70 TA is just fine. Don't mess with it unless it gets down below 60 through repeated pH adjustments.

You are correct that you don't need CH in your vinyl pool. There is no plaster surface to etch.

Low CH can cause the water to foam, especially right where the return stream hits the water. If it annoys you, raise CH. You can use Cal-hypo to chlorinate to bring it up slowly. If I knew the pool size (hint hint) I could even tell you how much Cal-hypo you can use before CH becomes a problem. This time of year, pool chemicals are on sale all over the place.

 

[TheOddLinguist]

Oh, sorry about that. I'll update my signature shortly.

Actually, one of our yet-to-be-resolved problems is that we still don't know (for certain) how big the pool is.

It's 16' x 34', and the water in the shallow end is 3' deep, but we don't know the deep end. So, I'll measure that as soon as I can. We have a diving board, so we've had someone estimate around 25,000 gallons, but I'll try to find out for sure.

Thanks for your help!

 

[TheOddLinguist]

On a tangentially-related note, I updated my signature, but it hasn't shown up yet. So, I'm posting to either a) make the signature start appearing or b) ask if there's some other step I missed.

UPDATE: That worked. OK. Thanks again!

 

[Richard320]

On a tangentially-related note, I updated my signature, but it hasn't shown up yet. So, I'm posting to either a) make the signature start appearing or b) ask if there's some other step I missed.

UPDATE: That worked. OK. Thanks again!

It shows up. Thank you.