Is my vinyl liner damaged permanently from stains?

[vgr]

Hey guys. I'm a rookie pool owner, forcefully inherited beautiful 10-12 years old pool thru the purchase of foreclosed property. The only problem I've got a "cat-in-the hat". According to records, pool hasn't been opened for 5 years. So I was pretty much introduced to the biggest pain in the butt of my life. Pool business. I will try to be short:
-Opened the pool in May and discovered nasty black water with somewhat trees growing thru the cover.
-Pump was shot, DE filter were missing grids and I had no pool knowledge whosoever.
-Had a lot of research done about the pools, used this and similar sites and forums, youtube, friends and any other sources of info, bought bunch of cleaning tools, installed, new pump, purchased new DE filter on Amazon, few hundred dollars worth of chemicals and finally, a month later along with a "back-breaking" labor I saw the bottom. Of the pool. What a relief I had.
-I balanced the water per specifications, added lots of liquid chlorine and one morning the water from the window of my bedroom was amazingly clear. Sparkling.

When I went to the pool all ready to swim, there was lot of disappointment waiting for me: the entire bottom of the pool covered with brownish/greenish stains. What to do? Research, youtube and pool stores.

Organic or not? I've used vitamin C to test and nothing showed. Then I found two methods of removing stains: oxylic or oxalick (correct me if I spelled wrong) and ascorbic. In both separate cases I've applied same applicable routine: balanced the water, evaporated chlorine down to nothing, added acid chemicals in the pool in suggested proportions, added sequester agent, back wash etc. Nothing helps. When cloudy water disappeared, stains were there.

Dear pool enthusiasts. Are my pool stains permanent? A'm I due to spend few thousand dollars next summer for new liner? Thank you for any feed back or advise. Sorry for long post. Photos attached.

 

[linen]

Welcome to tfp, vgr

If the vitamin C test does nothing than the ascorbic and/or oxylic acid treatments will do nothing to the stains.

Next thing to try is a trichlor puck placed on the stain for a little while to see if that reduces it. If it does, you stains are organic and you will need to do the SLAM process.

Are the areas of the stain rough?

 

[vgr]

Nope. Stains are nor rough at all. Here the thing. At one time friend of mine said to place a chlorine tab into the sock and lightly rub the stain. So I did and the entire area of the stain/liner got kinda lighter. I was afraid that I've damaged the liner, but now I think maybe my stains are organic. Also, right after ascorbic treatment my dirty and spotty fiberglass stairs looked brand new within 5 min. I will look into SLAM process, thanks. By the way what is trichlor puck?

 

[linen]

It is a solid form of chlorine that can be made into a puck that can be put into a automatic puck chlorinator or in a floating chlorinator. In general, it is not a good way to chlorinate a pool since is also adds cya, and lowers ph and TA.

Sounds the stains on you stairs were metal, so you may have both organic and metal stains on your pool. Take care of the organic first by doing the [s:24ygeb78]shock[/s:24ygeb78] SLAM process (with lots of brushing), then you can see if you still have stains form metal and take care of that later.

 

[Casey]

Running an elevated chlorine level will almost always get rid of organic staining.

 

[Isaac-1]

Yes, high levels of chlorine will bleach out your liner, but if you do it in a controlled manner for a limited amount of time like the SLAM process the results should be removal of the organic stains with minimal bleaching of the liner. Most of the time liner bleaching is caused by dry chlorine products being left in direct contact with the liner for extended amounts of time, sometimes it is by persistent high chlorine levels in the water, but I suspect most often it is caused by massive single dose "shock" levels introduced by following pool store or pool service methods. We teach a controlled approach around here with dose , test and repeat as needed, not a blind massive nuking approach.

 

[vgr]

Thanks for reply guys. Night before I post my message on board I went to local pool store. For whatever reason my chlorine level was not able to hold for at least a week, even after shocking with hypo (if I spell it right again?) and my water got little milky/cloudy. All my chemicals looked good, maybe a little less PH than needed, at 7.0. So the pool guy guru gave me a recipe: 3 bags on none-chlorine shock to level CH and 10 gal of liquid at night. My pool is clear as crystal right now and chlorine is up in sky, they don't even have the color on color chart of the test strips to match it (I know you guys hate test strips, but that's all I got now). The weather in NJ is 100-110 within heat index for next 4 days and my green stains are still there. I've studied the SLAM process and basically, correct me if I'm wrong, it is a slow nuking the pool with chlorine. More or less I did same type of "nuking" from May till now, that's how I'd resurrected my pool. The question is, maybe replacing liner is more "efficient" or "acceptably convenient" way to approach this issue. Out of 2 month of pool opening my kid were restricted to swim many nice days due to nuking or maintenance matters. Can SLAM process be combined with safe swimming activities? How long does it take to SLAM the pool like mine?

 

[Richard320]

...<snip> ...I've studied the SLAM process and basically, correct me if I'm wrong, it is a slow nuking the pool with chlorine. More or less I did same type of "nuking" from May till now, that's how I'd resurrected my pool. The question is, maybe replacing liner is more "efficient" or "acceptably convenient" way to approach this issue. Out of 2 month of pool opening my kid were restricted to swim many nice days due to nuking or maintenance matters. Can SLAM process be combined with safe swimming activities? How long does it take to SLAM the pool like mine?

Well.. yes and no... "Nuking" the pool tends to be wasteful. Chlorine loss to sun is a percentage. Say you lose half every day - not an unreasonable number. If you "nuked" it to 30, You'd lose 15 ppm to the sun. If however, you brought to, say 20, and then topped it off a few hours later to 20 again, and kept it up, you would have lost a lot less to sunlight while still keeping the FC level high enough to beat back the algae. Another problem with the megadose is that you don't get the repetitive brushing over several days that will scrape off the scab the algae can form (the slimy part) to let the bleach get in and kill things. So it's just killed maybe 95%, and it comes back.

You can swim all the way to shock level. So If you took it up to shock level after dark, it would be shock level or below the next morning, and swimming can happen. When they're done in the pool, raise it back up again. But that will slow down the process.

How long does it take? That's like asking how deep is a hole. Or how much does a woman weigh. There is no right answer. Some people here have gotten a proper test kit, studied the articles, and got obsessive. I recall a guy last year who had four days to do it, and he set his alarm and got up during the night to brush and add bleach. He made it. Others have had some tough strain of algae, or residual algae hiding inside ladders or lights that kep them from passing the overnight test for three weeks, before they finally found it and eliminated it.

Since you'll likely drain the pool partially over the winter, you could endure the ugliness and replace it early next year. But on the other hand, if you're determined to replace it anyway, a fresh fill and proper dosing (get the right test kit!!!) will have you troublefree in about two days, depending on how fast the pool fills.

 

[juzzie]

If you decide to "endure the ugliness" over winter, is there a risk of permanent staining from algae or anything like that?

Sent from my GT-N7105T using Tapatalk 2