Greetings all!
I have been reading the forum inside and out for, unfortunately, the last 8 days. I say 'unfortunately' because we put up the pool 10 days ago. With our own information and some suggestions from a know it all pool place lady. The suggestions were, ahem... incorrect. so anyway......here I am, and I am two seconds from calling a pool guy, because, quite frankly, we have alot of hands in our pool (four adults who are attempting to share but who each think they have the solution to the problem.. I am included in this....and a couple of smaller and inpatient humans who just want to swim, for crying out loud!!). The 4th of July and it's obligatory pool party is also just around the corner so I'm pretty desperate.
SO our story is this: We got the pool, used, cheap. (This was my bad decision ... please refrain from
). It was pretty dirty and it sat in the yard getting rained on for another couple of weeks so it got dirtier still. It had one patched hole in it that was ... pretty big (about 2 inches). So we gave it a rinse off and set it up and started filling it with well water, which was fine to the naked eye for a little bit but about an 1/8th of the way full the well began to spit out orange water, which did not seem like a good idea to me. So we stopped that flow and rigged up the hose to the washer faucet and it took a couple of days but it filled up, and it was sort of a cloudy aqua brownish color, like this, maybe?
we switched on the saltwater system and tossed in the saltwater starter stuff (which is essentially cya) and waited for the miracle of clear water to occur over night and as you can guess that did not happen. We took a sample to the pool store where the assault with intent to bankrupt began. It was at that point I was also beginning to look at this website. Still, I have three other peeps in the mix who had other ideas. I can't remember what we did. a jug of something because the alkalinity was low, I think. Hardness they also said was low and sold us about six tons of calcium, but I was reading this website when the others were busy tossing chemicals and i screamed, "NO! Halt! enough with the calcium already!!!" She wanted us to hit 300ppm for hardness and I was reading that is just not necessary with these intex pools. So no more calcium. We were using testing strips which i was also rapidly discovering are not accurate. The Taylor 2006 is nowhere to be found in the immediate area, so I had to settle for the Walmart 22 dollar kit and returning for free samples to be done at the pool store and fighting off the calcium crazed pool lady. Filter has run essentially continually and we have been rinsing it out at least twice a day, starting on day 5, when we decided to take a look at the cartridge and realized the thick orange stuff it had accumulated was probably not allowing anything else to be filtered anymore. The numbers have not been too far off all along, and now seem to be ok with the exception of alkalinity which is a little high according to your standards and the pool calculator and the cya is too low; although I was a bit thrown off with how to read that, as it can take a week to read accurately. Suffice to say after 6 days it was still at 30, which was fine by the pool lady but not so good according to you guys, so we threw some more in, but not enough because we only bought one bottle of it and we only had half the muriatic acid we needed and the long and short of it now is CLOUDY AQUA COLORED WATER with the following numbers: (from the pool lady free analysis this am)
Temp 75.0(f)
FC 7.0 (after adding 128 oz of bleach the night before)
TC 7.0
CC 0.0
pH 7.5
Hardness 90
Alkalinity 100
Cyanuric acid 30ppm
copper 0.0
Iron not run (why the heck not? I asked, with all that red stuff floating around??)
Total dissolved solids - also not run.
This is what pool lady told us: copper, alkalinity, pH ok.
hardness Low (there she goes again with the calcium) add 25 pounds in 2 doses.
FC is above the recommended range and we should not use the pool because our bathing suits will dissolve.(she did not really say that, but she implied it).
she scratched out the stabilizer level is low for some reason.
she gave us a free bag of DEAS A cartridge filter aid In which we are to hose down and clean the filter if pressure is high... add 5# of DE to the skimmer with the filter running
Run filter for 48 hours stragiht
hose down filter again as necessary.
WE HAVE DONE NOTHING YET. I take that back. We poured in 2 128oz bottles of bleach this evening, I think. I say I think because i am not there tonight but I heard that was the plan.
So...... what I 'think' we should be doing is this:
to lower our TA we need to first lower the pH to 7.2 using 20 oz muriatic acid and then aerating to bring ph back up or use baking soda (but how much, and when?)
add 83 oz of stabilizer to bring cya up.
and if we wanted to lower the hardness, we would replace 44% of the water...but is it ok @ 90ppm?
thanks for any help!! I have been instructed to 'call the pool guy' but I really think we can do this ourselves!! We havent' screwed it up beyond repair, have we?
Colleen
I have been reading the forum inside and out for, unfortunately, the last 8 days. I say 'unfortunately' because we put up the pool 10 days ago. With our own information and some suggestions from a know it all pool place lady. The suggestions were, ahem... incorrect. so anyway......here I am, and I am two seconds from calling a pool guy, because, quite frankly, we have alot of hands in our pool (four adults who are attempting to share but who each think they have the solution to the problem.. I am included in this....and a couple of smaller and inpatient humans who just want to swim, for crying out loud!!). The 4th of July and it's obligatory pool party is also just around the corner so I'm pretty desperate.
SO our story is this: We got the pool, used, cheap. (This was my bad decision ... please refrain from
). It was pretty dirty and it sat in the yard getting rained on for another couple of weeks so it got dirtier still. It had one patched hole in it that was ... pretty big (about 2 inches). So we gave it a rinse off and set it up and started filling it with well water, which was fine to the naked eye for a little bit but about an 1/8th of the way full the well began to spit out orange water, which did not seem like a good idea to me. So we stopped that flow and rigged up the hose to the washer faucet and it took a couple of days but it filled up, and it was sort of a cloudy aqua brownish color, like this, maybe?we switched on the saltwater system and tossed in the saltwater starter stuff (which is essentially cya) and waited for the miracle of clear water to occur over night and as you can guess that did not happen. We took a sample to the pool store where the assault with intent to bankrupt began. It was at that point I was also beginning to look at this website. Still, I have three other peeps in the mix who had other ideas. I can't remember what we did. a jug of something because the alkalinity was low, I think. Hardness they also said was low and sold us about six tons of calcium, but I was reading this website when the others were busy tossing chemicals and i screamed, "NO! Halt! enough with the calcium already!!!" She wanted us to hit 300ppm for hardness and I was reading that is just not necessary with these intex pools. So no more calcium. We were using testing strips which i was also rapidly discovering are not accurate. The Taylor 2006 is nowhere to be found in the immediate area, so I had to settle for the Walmart 22 dollar kit and returning for free samples to be done at the pool store and fighting off the calcium crazed pool lady. Filter has run essentially continually and we have been rinsing it out at least twice a day, starting on day 5, when we decided to take a look at the cartridge and realized the thick orange stuff it had accumulated was probably not allowing anything else to be filtered anymore. The numbers have not been too far off all along, and now seem to be ok with the exception of alkalinity which is a little high according to your standards and the pool calculator and the cya is too low; although I was a bit thrown off with how to read that, as it can take a week to read accurately. Suffice to say after 6 days it was still at 30, which was fine by the pool lady but not so good according to you guys, so we threw some more in, but not enough because we only bought one bottle of it and we only had half the muriatic acid we needed and the long and short of it now is CLOUDY AQUA COLORED WATER with the following numbers: (from the pool lady free analysis this am)
Temp 75.0(f)
FC 7.0 (after adding 128 oz of bleach the night before)
TC 7.0
CC 0.0
pH 7.5
Hardness 90
Alkalinity 100
Cyanuric acid 30ppm
copper 0.0
Iron not run (why the heck not? I asked, with all that red stuff floating around??)
Total dissolved solids - also not run.
This is what pool lady told us: copper, alkalinity, pH ok.
hardness Low (there she goes again with the calcium) add 25 pounds in 2 doses.
FC is above the recommended range and we should not use the pool because our bathing suits will dissolve.(she did not really say that, but she implied it).
she scratched out the stabilizer level is low for some reason.
she gave us a free bag of DEAS A cartridge filter aid In which we are to hose down and clean the filter if pressure is high... add 5# of DE to the skimmer with the filter running
Run filter for 48 hours stragiht
hose down filter again as necessary.
WE HAVE DONE NOTHING YET. I take that back. We poured in 2 128oz bottles of bleach this evening, I think. I say I think because i am not there tonight but I heard that was the plan.
So...... what I 'think' we should be doing is this:
to lower our TA we need to first lower the pH to 7.2 using 20 oz muriatic acid and then aerating to bring ph back up or use baking soda (but how much, and when?)
add 83 oz of stabilizer to bring cya up.
and if we wanted to lower the hardness, we would replace 44% of the water...but is it ok @ 90ppm?
thanks for any help!! I have been instructed to 'call the pool guy' but I really think we can do this ourselves!! We havent' screwed it up beyond repair, have we?
Colleen
