New Pool & Water - how long to run the filter?

[katkami]

Hi all,

I'm adding my town water to my new pool. Electrical & plumbing are in. I ordered the TF pool test kit, but it's not in yet, so I won't have a good water test for a little bit...

BUT if the pool fills up tonight we're wondering "what do we do now"? We've got a sand filter, ozonator, skimmer & heat pump. The water is a little gross at the moment - lots of floaty bugs - do we plan to run the pump for a few days? Do we need to "Shock" the pool right away?

I searched for a while on a pool startup routine but no lucky, so I won't be insulted if you just point me to a link.

 

[JasonLion]

With town water and a vinyl liner it is very simple to startup. Add chlorine every evening right from the start and balance the various numbers and you are set. Until 24 hours after you add CYA I would aim for a FC level of 2 each evening. Once the CYA is in for 24 hours you should start aiming for the FC level that goes with the CYA level you are expecting based on how much CYA you added. Once you have a real CYA test result you should switch to using that to determine your FC target.

 

[duraleigh]

Kat,

If your pool fills this evening, I would turn on the pump and put in one small jug of Clorox. It'll get burned off bythe Sun tomorrow AM but it's good insurance.

Plan on running your pump to "turn" you pool 2-3 times daily (so 30kgal in 24 hours) which for most folks works out to somewhere around 8-12 hours daily.

You'll need CYA (stabilizer) in your pool right away. add enough to get to around 40-50ppm......that'll help protect the chlorine from the sunlight.

You may not need to shock at all if you put a jug of bleach in there each evening.

(Your kit shipped yesterday out of NC so look for it around Friday.....Thanks!)

 

[katkami]

Dave thanks for your quick response and the info on the test kit - didn't mean to make it sound like it was late - I only ordered it yesterday so that's speedy delivery! I didn't expect to see it until next week sometime.

And thanks for your tips, I didn't know if I needed to run the pump constant for a few days or get it right on the twice a day schedule right away. I'll pick up some bleach on the way home, currently all I've got is the starter kit of chemicals that came with the pool and I've been reading up on BBB here and there - it's been hard to start thinking about water chemistry when we've got all the construction & stuff going on!