SLAM status log

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W

welbo

0
Apr 14, 2016
81
College Station, TX
I'm starting a SLAM today. Water continues to be cloudy and chlorine usage has started creeping up. The last couple of days, to prepare:
Ordered an extra XL from tftestkits.net (and a speedstir for fun)
Good vacuuming of the pool floor
Good long backwash of the sand filter. Start up psi is 8psi.
Wife brought home a bunch of 10% with 16176 date stamps.
e55bf733569a13644e2a3313a48561d1.jpg


Hooked up the 'Lady Bug vacuum' and let it run. Set pump on full time.

Topped of the pool water level

Tested at 0830 this morning:
FC 3.5 (dropped from 8ppm at 0830 yesterday with no swimming but a lot of sun)
CC 0
pH 7.6
TA 60 (YEAH! Finally got it down)
CYA 39 (That's what I'm calling it. It was just below the 40 mark)
CH - don't care
Borates- about 11 ppm calculated, not tested

To start:
At 1030 I added
26 fl oz MA to get between 7.1-7.2 pH
272 fl oz 10% for a target 15 ppm FC

I'm initially going to test every 30 mins and maintain. I'll keep you updated! And I'll get an almost 'before' pic at the next test too.
 
Sounds like you're off & running in the right direction. Suggestion - the FC/CYA ratio was developed as such that we round-up the CYA (i.e. to 40) so that your FC on the chart would equate to 16. No need to break it down incrementally. Stick with the SLAM page and let us know if you have any questions or problems. Have a nice day. It's going to be a scorcher. :sun:
 
Didn't quite make my 30 minute goal. Work in the home office is keeping me busy.

At 1145:
FC 14
Added 22 fl oz 10% to raise back to my target 15. Just read the post above so I will adjust to 16 on the next test. Oops, gotta go do that!

We plan on swimming today too. I'll be brushing the walls while I'm in there. I need a new brush too. The bristles all fell out of the old one. I liked that 18" with the spoiler on tftestkits.net but it's backordered. Do they all deteriorate after about a year, or did I just get a bad one?

The ladybug is doing laps around my ladder. :mad:
 
Forgot to put in the 1430 test.
FC 13.5. Added 54 fl oz.

Went swimming with 5 bather load from 1700-1930.
Test at 1945 FC 11.0
Added 160 fl oz 10%!

Sun is almost down so I'll top it off as soon as it goes down and get a final reading. Then check again before sun comes back up for the OCLT. Although at this point there's not much use. The water looks worse than before I started so this is going to take a while. I might be better served just servicing the Chlorine until I give up for the night and save the OCLT for tomorrow.

For the 5 or so hours I'll be asleep, do you like to overshoot the target or just live with sub-shock levels. My daughter just turned 1 so I'm not interested in getting up through the night to feed the pool bottles. I've had all I need of that.

I still have a floater and some tri-chlor left over from last year. I could load that up? :wink:

The water is like bath water. I expect if I hadn't started this when I did it would have been green by now. 3 weeks ago I was trying to figure out how to heat this water. Now I'm wondering if I should figure out a way to refrigerate it!
 
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Last night's add was done at 1945 and then I didn't do anything else until this morning. This morning I expected to find the chlorine very low since about 12 hours had passed since it was tended to. I took a sample at 0730 and it took 36 drops for a 10mL sample to change over! So I went back to my spreadsheet to try and figure out what is going on and saw the addition recorded from last night as 277 fl oz. That seemed a bit off so going back to pool math and checking again, it showed the addition to be 177 fl oz. Well in truth, I added 1 gal (128 fl oz) then the rest of another gallon that was about 1/4 full (~32 fl oz), so the spreadsheet was wrong. But that means I in fact shorted the needed addition by a little and somehow ended up with more than target FC this morning?
Problem solved. When I used pool math last night, I used it on a computer I hadn't used it on before. So the web form had all of the default numbers in it. I forgot to change the bleach concentration and it was set to the default 6% bleach. After changing it to 10% bleach, it showed the needed addition last night was only 109 fl oz, so I put about 50 extra oz's in.

So... my FC last night should have been up around 18 at 1945, before the sun completely set. At 0745 this morning, after sun has come up, it is at 18. That's not the best OCLT method, but it seems to indicate that the pool is not consuming a lot of chlorine.
The water is getting worse. I can hardly see the bottom now. The pump pressure has not risen any. My confidence is a little shaken. Let's see what the rest of today brings. I won't be able to tend to it every few hours today. Wife can help some though.
 

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Some AGPs come with pitiful pumps. Also, have you every deep cleaned your filter? After seeing significant pump performance after doing that myself this spring, I am adding it to my start up procedure every year.
 
I had a round pool previously and purchased a 2500 gpm pump and sand filter setup for it. When we got the bigger 16x32' it came with the same pump and filter we already had so I just left the new one in the box and used the old one. The pump got to where it would sometimes trip the gfci so I took the old one out and put the new one in its place. I put in the new sand filter too. When I put the old one in originally I used sand from a pile of fill dirt. It blew out yellow clay from the outlet after every backwash for the first few months. This time I thought I could avoid that by using good sand purchased from the box store. It still blew sand into the pool for a while after backwashes.

So, this being a new pump and sand filter, it could be part of the problem. It has a lot of flow, more than the old one. The filter start up pressure is pretty close to where the old one ran. Maybe the sand didn't settle properly? Or it actually blew too much out? I guess I should take the top off and at least look in the filter.
 
The water appears to be improving as of this morning even though I didn't do a very good job on the SLAM yesterday. I'll do better today.

Pump pressure is definitely coming up. Start up was 8 psi. 25% is 10 psi, right? That's what I'll aim for for backwash. Coincidentally (or not) the end of the green band and the start of the yellow band is 10psi. I'm at just a little over 9 right now. Flow is still good. I'm just glad to see it going up. It tells me it is working.

I think there'll be a swim and a good brushing in today. The seams along the bottom need another going over for sure.

I had my eyes open underwater last time we swam while at shock level. It was very comfortable but they were a bit dried out after the swim for a while. Guess I'll use goggles this time.
 
After a 3 day SLAM my water is no better. Still very cloudy. We went for a swim yesterday. I swam all along the bottom with some goggles and found a thin layer of silt that had settled. It looks like DE to me. There is also still a lot of sand. So I'm pretty sure I just wasted a lot of chlorine and time doing a slam when all I needed was to fix my filter. Well at least I'll know what's involved if I ever have to do it again. That experience will keep me motivated not to get into the position of needing it ever again hopefully.

So now I'm going to take the filter apart and try to figure out what went wrong with it. Maybe the sand is too coarse. I have other I can put in that's a lot finer. Maybe a mix of the two would be best?
 
I thought it was bad to swim at slam levels. Is it okay after all?
Click to expand...
It is okay to swim up to the SLAM level. The stabilizer still helps to protect you and the pool from the harsh effects of chlorine.

As for the filter, it sounds like a good idea to inspect it to ensure the laterals are intact and nothing has been compromised to allow sand to escape. Sand, as long as it was #20 silica pool sand, should never go bad, although sometimes from season to season a good thorough deep cleaning is required as seen on the Deep Cleaning a Sand Filter page. Sand itself however shouldn't contribute to cloudy water if it's algae-related, although a deep cleaning can help in overall filtration efficiency.

When in doubt, perform an overnight (OCLT) test. Good luck!
 
As I mentioned a post or two up, the filter and sand are new so cleaning would not accomplish much except to rearrange the sand in case it did not settle properly when I set up the filter this year. I think replacing at least some of the sand is the best bet at this point. It is clear that it is not filtering properly.
On the plus side, once I get it filtering properly, it will promptly start filtering out the DE on the floor and suspended, which should make it even more effective.
 
Wow. The filter only had about 1/4 of the sand left in it. No wonder the flow was so much better through this one.
Laterals look OK. Only thing I can figure is during the backwash and rinses I did during startup a lot got pumped out. Anyway, I bet fixing this solves all my problems.
 

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