white cloudy stuff coming out of jets

May 30, 2011
2
I have an inground (about 18,000 or so gallons) salt water generated pool. right now my water is cloudy in the deep end and like a blue green color. We added shock, salt and stuff to adjust the Ph Level. upon vacuuming it started to blow white cloudy stuff out of the jets. This happens to us every year. What causes this to happen? This year though we also have foamy stuff and like an oily sheen on the water's surface.
 
Hmmmm OK lets see if I can get you all this info...well, first of all, I have a sand filter and we just replaced the sand last summer. I know that much :)

Pool is inground, vinyl liner, around 18,000 gallons I believe. there is a deep end. I just went outside and looked at all my equipment.
heater: Jandy Lite 2
the salt thing is a Pentair Intellichlor .
Pump is also Pentair - superflo high performance pump.

as of yesterday, all my dippy stick readings were good:
Total Hardness - 200
Free chlorine 2 / 4
pH: 7.5
Total alkalinity - 180
Cyanuric Acid - 0

I think thats all the information I have..is there anything else I can give you? It's weird. It happens when vacuuming...everything will be working fine and then all of a sudden white cloudy stuff starts shooting out of the jets. We were told by the pool company that when this happens, to stop vacuuming, backwash and rinse a few times then resume vacuuming, but they could never tell us WHY it happens or WHAT it actually is. Whenever it starts doing this we have to quick run and shut off the pump to keep the amount of this white cloudy stuff to a minimum because once it starts, it clouds up all the water and then we have to wait for it to settle. Teh first time we noticed it was about 3 years ago when we had a lot of stuff floating in the water and they had us use this stuff called Floc (???) we were told it was the floc coming back out through the filter...that it was getting caught in the sand...but like I mentioned, we have since replaced the sand and haven't used it since.

I'm sorry if this response is all over the place...I don't really know much about the pool even though I have been maintaining it since 2006. I never really feel like I know what I'm doing.

Thank you for any help you could give me!!!
 
I'm going to ask a question rather than contribute an answer. Is it possible with a TA of 180 there is some scaling going on, and when the pump starts it is blowing that scaling out the returns? I saw this happen as my scaling went down after getting everything in balance, and I assumed this white, cloudy stuff from the returns was the scaling coming loose and being blown into the pool. I even saw it coming right out of the sand filter, which is only a few weeks old and full of new sand (I think I read somewhere it's possible to scale the sand in a sand filter).
 
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