Hello all,
First off, huge thanks for this forum and all the helpful advice I have gathered already from it, it is truly appreciated. Anyways, I recently purchased my house this past winter that has an approx. 30 x 15 x 5 oval pool (15,000 gallons), Pentair Star DE filter, and from the looks of everything the previous owners maintained everything decently...so anyways here is long-ish summary on what is going on, sorry for the wall of text!
I rebuilt the deck surrounding the pool early this summer, which greatly delayed me in actually opening the pool. By the time I got around to pulling the winter cover off, it was covered in pretty nasty algae and debris from being cooked out in the hot sun all spring and most of June while I redid the deck. I sumped as much water as I could off the cover and *almost* got it off without spilling anything into the pool itself....however at the last second the cover dipped into the pool and I had a huge slick of algae and debris fall into it, which turned my water a pretty cool neon green.
Filled the pool, got the DE filter up and running and added 5 gallons of Superclor and a bottle of algaecide, this quickly turned the water from a green mess to blue, but it has been VERY cloudy and hazy ever since (two weeks). Even though my pressure was good, I figured after almost 24/7 filter operation for a week with that much algae it wouldn't hurt to backwash and clean out the DE filter grid. When I reinstalled the filter and recharged it, I noticed a bunch of DE going back into the pool after about the first 1 pound of DE. It probably occurred the first time I just wasn't paying attention. So I removed the grid again and noticed a few small tears....went to the pool store and replaced every fin, so now I practically have a new grid that is ready to go. Mentioned to the pool store about my super cloudy pool water and they thought the discharged DE that escaped into the pool could be contributing to it and that I it would be a good idea to floc it and vacuum to waste so I don't gum up my new grid. They advised me to not even install the new grid until the floc / vacuum was accomplished.
So I went ahead and used enough floc for my 15000 gallons, let the pump run for a few hours and then shut everything off for a day. No change in water quality or any visible "settling" of debris on the bottom, so I gave it another day, and still no visible change at all to the water or any noticeable settling or clumping of material.
So its been 48 hours and now I am confused at what my next action should be. Do I go ahead and vacuum as well as I can, SLAM the pool, and backwash / clean my filter until everything clears up, or should I try another round of floc first? Now that I have read up on your site I am pretty convinced the vast majority of my cloudiness was caused by the sheer amount of dead algae I had in my pool and not due to a few cups of DE escaping back into it, and I should have focused on chemistry and chlorine levels before resorting to floc.
I apologize in advance, I have no set chemistry numbers (I do have a Taylor 2006-K ordered), I will get those posted ASAP.
Thanks for any insight any of you may have,
-Alex
First off, huge thanks for this forum and all the helpful advice I have gathered already from it, it is truly appreciated. Anyways, I recently purchased my house this past winter that has an approx. 30 x 15 x 5 oval pool (15,000 gallons), Pentair Star DE filter, and from the looks of everything the previous owners maintained everything decently...so anyways here is long-ish summary on what is going on, sorry for the wall of text!
I rebuilt the deck surrounding the pool early this summer, which greatly delayed me in actually opening the pool. By the time I got around to pulling the winter cover off, it was covered in pretty nasty algae and debris from being cooked out in the hot sun all spring and most of June while I redid the deck. I sumped as much water as I could off the cover and *almost* got it off without spilling anything into the pool itself....however at the last second the cover dipped into the pool and I had a huge slick of algae and debris fall into it, which turned my water a pretty cool neon green.
Filled the pool, got the DE filter up and running and added 5 gallons of Superclor and a bottle of algaecide, this quickly turned the water from a green mess to blue, but it has been VERY cloudy and hazy ever since (two weeks). Even though my pressure was good, I figured after almost 24/7 filter operation for a week with that much algae it wouldn't hurt to backwash and clean out the DE filter grid. When I reinstalled the filter and recharged it, I noticed a bunch of DE going back into the pool after about the first 1 pound of DE. It probably occurred the first time I just wasn't paying attention. So I removed the grid again and noticed a few small tears....went to the pool store and replaced every fin, so now I practically have a new grid that is ready to go. Mentioned to the pool store about my super cloudy pool water and they thought the discharged DE that escaped into the pool could be contributing to it and that I it would be a good idea to floc it and vacuum to waste so I don't gum up my new grid. They advised me to not even install the new grid until the floc / vacuum was accomplished.
So I went ahead and used enough floc for my 15000 gallons, let the pump run for a few hours and then shut everything off for a day. No change in water quality or any visible "settling" of debris on the bottom, so I gave it another day, and still no visible change at all to the water or any noticeable settling or clumping of material.
So its been 48 hours and now I am confused at what my next action should be. Do I go ahead and vacuum as well as I can, SLAM the pool, and backwash / clean my filter until everything clears up, or should I try another round of floc first? Now that I have read up on your site I am pretty convinced the vast majority of my cloudiness was caused by the sheer amount of dead algae I had in my pool and not due to a few cups of DE escaping back into it, and I should have focused on chemistry and chlorine levels before resorting to floc.
I apologize in advance, I have no set chemistry numbers (I do have a Taylor 2006-K ordered), I will get those posted ASAP.
Thanks for any insight any of you may have,
-Alex