pool consuming 6 ppm/day free chlorine

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Keep the faith and continue the shock process. It WILL work.

At least you are getting a FC reading. Another thread had added more bleach than that and finally today got a FC measurement at all.
 
the water looks and smells fine (not even much chlorine smell)

should I get an ammonia test kit to rule out the CYA-eating bacteria?

I'm doing a 5 mL DPD chlorine test. The precision limits of counting 20 drops in that volume makes me doubt any OCLT result. Was the true value 1.0 or 1.5 ppm loss? Hard to say when I am "finished" shocking
 
Ammonia would react much more quickly and produce CC. With ammonia, you wouldn't be able to hold FC for as long as you do. You might have some other slower-to-oxidize organics in the pool, but holding shock level or water replacement are the only options for that. I'm just not sure the problem is in the water or in something like the filter or other area. You might do a bucket test with fill water to see if it behaves similarly in terms of not being able to hold an FC level. Also, you said you backwashed, but did you ever look inside the filter to see if there is biofilm (clumpy sand with channeling)? It's just very odd to have this high demand for no apparent reason.
 
I have not opened the filter to inspect it yet. I'm hoping the circulation of high chlorine water will kill anything in there.

How do I do the bucket test? Just scoop 5 gallons of pool water and leave it on the step, perform same tests as the bulk water?

I tested my chlorine level at sunrise; my level actually went UP to 25 ppm. I have no idea what to make of this :?
 
So I'm now confused. Are you not getting chlorine loss overnight? I thought you were? If you aren't getting losses overnight, is your pump not running at night? You could redo the test running the pump at night and if you have bigger losses then the problem (chlorine loss) is somewhere in the circulation system including the filter. No need to do a bucket test if you do this overnight test with vs. without circulation. That would be better than a bucket test anyway (just didn't think of that at first).
 
If you had no overnight chlorine loss and the pump was running, there's no need to test again with the pump off. Your loss appears to be just during the day and usually that would indicate that your CYA is too low. However, you are measuring 60-70 ppm for the CYA. So I'm at a loss to explain this assuming measurements are correct. Since your overnight loss did decline now to near zero, how's your daytime loss now? Probably still high, but is it as high as before? At 60-70 ppm CYA, even in Arizona sun you should be losing less than half the FC amount per day so with a minimum of 5 ppm FC you would start at 10 ppm FC and lose 5 ppm, but in practice it should be more like going from 8 or 9 ppm FC to 5 ppm for a 3-4 ppm FC loss at most. To get lower than that in full Arizona sun, an 80 ppm CYA might be needed, but it just seems like your loss is higher than normal for some unexplained reason.
 
Thanks for the help on this. I completed the shock process in 4 days, and now my chlorine consumption has stabilized at about 3-3.5 ppm/day. Still higher than I would like, but "normal" as far as I can tell.

Might be time to research a Liquidator/Pump so I don't have to manually add bleach every single day..
 
Nice work!!!

What is your CYA now? The sun is quite intense here, so raising the stabilizer level might help reduce the loss. Although what you are seeing is not too unexpected in my opinion.
 

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