keeping things mostly under control until SLAM

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nutria

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LifeTime Supporter
Feb 20, 2015
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Austin, TX
Hi,
I have been lurking for a while and trying to learn as much as I can, but I could use some help from experienced people. The situation is this: we just bought a house with a pool (or rather 2 pools: a lap pool and a square pool). The issue is that we have not moved in yet and I cannot go there every day (or can drop by only briefly), so I cannot go through a SLAM. Right now the water is blue but I started to see cloudiness and a green tint. I did a check of the PH, FC and CYA (with one of the recommended test kits) and got:
FC:0
CYA:90
PH:7.6
My question is how do I keep things from going really bad until I can start a proper maintenance (in about 2 weeks)? Also, I have not looked at the filters (DE) but I assume they are completely dirty (I don't yet know how to clean them). What I've been doing up to now if taking a couple of gallons of bleach with me every time I go by the house and dumping in both pools as well as trying to take as many leaves and random stuff out of the water and skimmers as possible.

Any help much appreciated!
 
:wave: Welcome to TFP!!!

The the pools tied together or did you only test one of them?

That is a pretty high CYA, so a 50% water replacement might be the first thing you will need to do.
Keep doing what you are doing, but you may want to raise the FC up to SLAM level every time you are there.

Start using PoolMath to calculate how much you need to add. For example, with a CYA of 90ppm, your FC target is 35ppm. For a 20k pool with a FC of 0ppm, it would take almost 9 121oz bottles of 8.25% bleach to reach that. Remember if the FC is not 0, then it would take less bleach. My thinking is that you need to keep the FC above 7ppm at all time so you need to raise it a good bit higher if you are not going to be there for a few days.
 
Thanks! The pools are "loosely" tied together by a spillover from the square to the lap pool, but they each run independent systems (pump, filters, etc). It looks like the original owners had a puck feeder thing on the square pool and relied on that to chlorinate both of them. I did test them independently however and got the same results. I realize that the CYA is high, but right now I am trying to just keep things at bay until I can move into the house and start properly taking care of things. This is damage control rather than a solution. I am assuming I will need to backwash and clean filters extensively and that will loose a fair amount of water ... which should help in lowering CYA hopefully. I have never had a pool so please tell me if I am not making any sense.

Another thing, the pool(s) are plaster and were built in the 80ies. There is a polaris 240 cleaning thing and the filters are pentair DE (they look positively ancient).


jblizzle said:
:wave: Welcome to TFP!!!

The the pools tied together or did you only test one of them?

That is a pretty high CYA, so a 50% water replacement might be the first thing you will need to do.
Keep doing what you are doing, but you may want to raise the FC up to SLAM level every time you are there.

Start using PoolMath to calculate how much you need to add. For example, with a CYA of 90ppm, your FC target is 35ppm. For a 20k pool with a FC of 0ppm, it would take almost 9 121oz bottles of 8.25% bleach to reach that. Remember if the FC is not 0, then it would take less bleach. My thinking is that you need to keep the FC above 7ppm at all time so you need to raise it a good bit higher if you are not going to be there for a few days.
Click to expand...
 
I have complete access, the house is ours, but we have not moved in yet. It is fairly far from our current home so essentially what I have is my lunch hour from work to go over and do what I can. In a couple of weeks I will be there full time and then I can get really on top of things. My hope is to not let things evolve into a swamp, since I imagine it is exponentially harder to get it back under control.

Smykowski said:
What kind of access do you have, and how often can you get over there?
Click to expand...
 
I would just do the SLAM process as best you can. You probably won't make any progress, but you'll keep it from getting worse.

Is it feasable to do any kind of drain and refill now? SLAMing at a CYA of 90 will be difficult.

If you can drop the CYA, start the SLAM based on the FC/CYA ratio for your new CYA level. If you can't do it yet, bring the FC up to 25 or 30 whenever you make it over there. Again, you won't really make any progress, but you'll probably keep it from turning into a full blown swamp before you can it attack it right.
 
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