Hi there... I've been reading along and learning how to care for the pool that came with the house we bought in November. The pool hadn't been opened in two years and was completely overgrown with algae. We used our sellers' pool guy and over the course of a couple weeks he cleared out all the algae and got the pool looking beautiful. Since then, though, we've struggled to maintain chlorine. I got the TF-100 and tested a few days ago, and sure enough our FC level was nonexistent, as was our TA. The water was perfect, though - absolutely crystal clear with a CYA of 40. I plugged our results into the Pool School calculator and last night we dumped in the suggested amounts of baking soda, soda ash, and bleach.
(A note on the bleach - I sent my husband to get the bleach and he got very overwhelmed and then came home with something that was less than 6%. We put it in, anyway, just to get things started.)
This morning, I went out to check and the water is now slightly cloudy and it looks like we have black algae on the bottom? The pool needed to be vacuumed, but this doesn't look like the typical dirt that blows in and settles at the bottom.
I just tested again:
pH: 7.2
FC: 1.5
CC: .5
CH: 125
TA: 140
CYA: 55
Clearly I'm in need of a lot more bleach. But I'm still confused about why my water would go from crystal clear to cloudy and why algae would try to bloom AFTER we've started moving in the right direction? Am I doing something wrong?
Thanks!
(A note on the bleach - I sent my husband to get the bleach and he got very overwhelmed and then came home with something that was less than 6%. We put it in, anyway, just to get things started.)
This morning, I went out to check and the water is now slightly cloudy and it looks like we have black algae on the bottom? The pool needed to be vacuumed, but this doesn't look like the typical dirt that blows in and settles at the bottom.
I just tested again:
pH: 7.2
FC: 1.5
CC: .5
CH: 125
TA: 140
CYA: 55
Clearly I'm in need of a lot more bleach. But I'm still confused about why my water would go from crystal clear to cloudy and why algae would try to bloom AFTER we've started moving in the right direction? Am I doing something wrong?
Thanks!