Right in the middle of SLAMing we got slammed with a huge downpour that added a good two inches of water to the pool. Do I need to start all over or just maintain my 16 FC level?
Massive downpour during SLAMing..now what?
- Thread starter gablueliner
- Start date
Just keep testing and adding the appropriate amount of liquid chlorine relative to your CYA.
The rain wont hurt you. Like northrn says, just keep your FC going and you will be good.
Not a big deal. Your average pool depth is probably something like 5 or 6 feet. Let's go conservative and call it 50" for mathematical convenience. 2" is only 4% of the pool volume. That's less than the margin of error on the tests. You probably won't even notice the dilution.
Thanks for the advice. PH came up so I added some more acid. FC came down one point. CYA was at 40 prior to rain but I did not reckeck it. TA was unchanged. Will check FC level just after dark and adjust if necessary.
From what I have read on here, if your FC is over 10 or at slam levels your PH will not be accurate. I am only testing FC. I started my slam yesterday. Good luck.
Keep up the slam. Drain a little water off if you want. Dont bother testing your CYA again unless you get three or four big rains like that, you will just waste your reagents.
What Azgirl says is true. with FC above 10, the pH test is skewed. No need to test pH or do anything with it until the slam is over.
Rain has no I'll effects on a SLAM... except that you're going to get wet! But you won't melt!
As others have said, keep up the SLAM! It seems you sent the rain this way. Here are a couple of photos of the area around my pool yesterday afternoon. The black fence in the photos is the pool fencing.
Behind pool. This is normally dry grass.
The is along side the pool. This area is normally a dry reiverbed which was installed for just such rain events. It has a 24" culvert in it to drain the water to the street where it drains to the lake.
I got a lot of runoff from the pool deck into the pool during this rain. Between the rain and runoff I had to drain water off the pool twice as it was just below the coping.
Your pH is unreliable during a SLAM, as others have said. For future reference, it is very common for pH to rise when you get a rainfall. Typically nothing to do with the chemistry of the rain water, but more about the massive amounts of aeration that rain drops cause on your pool surface. This drives up the pH by increasing the rate of carbon dioxide outgassing from your pool water. Higher TA will give higher rates of outgassing with aeration, so more pH rise.
Thanks!
As I have said in other posts, we are the low lot in our neighborhood. Heavy rain events send us water, but the is the most I have seen. While I may object to some things the previous owner (builder of the house) did, he did the best job he could in grading and preparing for water. The neighbors told me that before building the lot had a 6 - 8 foot deep ditch running through it. When they built they put the 24" culvert pipe in this ditch and covered it with gravel and dirt. As a matter of fact it is this gravel around the pipe that "I think" gets the backwash from the pool. My backwash pipe goes underground in this direction, but I have never seen any water.
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