advice for vacation

[aim4squirrels]

Hey all,

We will be taking an 11 day vacation and I will not be able to maintain the pool or have someone stop by to adjust levels on chlorine or PH.

I would like some advice on my intended plan:

The pump is currently set for 13 hours per day operation, all the daylight hours.

I plan to close the skimmers and remove the cleaner and operate solely on the main drains due to evaporation fears. I currently do not have an auto fill device, nor do I want to experiment with relying on one before we go.

We have a spa that has a fountain feature, and the spa itself has a waterfall feature that spills over into the pool. I understand this will raise PH due to aeration, but without the fountain running in the spa, the spa won't receive any sanitation, so I've set the fountain as low as it can go to minimize aeration. My TA is currently 80, and if you factor out CYA effect on TA, it's more like 62. I'm not sure which number I should consider my true TA as I've been working it down lower to better buffer the PH change due to those water features. What's the lowest safest PH to push the pool down to so it won't be ridiculously high when I return?

As far as chlorine demand goes, my current CYA level is 55, and I don't want to go too much higher, so I figured could put 2 lbs. of 73% cal-hypo in to go to shock levels, and a floater with 2 3" pucks of trichlor in the pool with the flow gates on the floater all but closed off. As of right now, I'm seeing about 1.5 points of FC burnt off a day. Oh yeah , CH level is at 250ppm, so I'm not horribly worried about the cal-hypo raising that up.

What say you all to my plan?

 

[Isaac-1]

I would use bleach instead of cal-hypo to get to shock level, add the trichlor floater and hope for the best, expect to need to change out some water to get your CYA level back down when you get back since your already on the high side.

 

[aim4squirrels]

Thanks for the response! Forgot to mention that I have borates in the pool at approx 50 ppm.

 

[Durk]

I use floaters a lot, whenever I travel. I never expect to get more than a week out of one. If you choke it that far down, and only have two pucks in there, you will get a max of 7.3 ppm FC as per PoolCalculator. That's well under 1 ppm per day. I'd load it up with the max(I get 5 or 6 in mine if I break one) and leave it half open. This is just a guess. Almost shut down, I suspect you might come back and find you still have most of your pucks in there and algae in the pool. 11 days is a long time.

I have two floaters. I know that wide open and chock full one floater will take care of my 28k pool for a week and the tabs will be just about gone. I start the summer at about 35 CYA. So I have any old idiot come over and just throw in the second floater at the end of the first week. That way I'm good for two weeks.

Even though you will gain CYA, I strongly suggest you do a dry run and use the floater for a week while you are home and test every day. That will give you a much better idea how things will go when you are away and where you should set the ports and how full it should be. Then try it again if you had too little FC or the tabs got used up too fast. That beats heck out of listening to my or anyone else's guess.