New Member - Southwest Ohio

[SoloTSi97]

My family and I recently moved into a house with a ~1.5 year old 18x36 inground pool. It's not very deep, so roughly 20k gallons.

We opened the pool ourselves (with help from this site, YouTube, etc.) and started the season taking water samples to the local Leslie's Pool Supplies store. Before long, but after several (expensive) trips to Leslie's, I found myself wondering if we'd get similar results by just throwing the dollar bills directly into the water!

That was when I broke down and bought a quality water testing kit and a copy of some pool calculator software. I started having very good results, and spending a lot less money, learning about the chemistry and testing the water myself!

Fast forward today ... we've had a LOT of heavy rain over the past week. Now that most of that rain has passed, I took a look at the pool today and discovered that it's cloudy. So, it looks like I have some work to do!

It seems like every time I google for answers to pool questions, I end up on this site. So, I figured I was overdue for creating an account and just diving in here.

Thanks to those who offer their knowledge and expertise on this site so that newbies like me have somewhere to go to learn!

 

[Donldson]

Welcome to TFP, from a little drive up I-75!

Glad to see you have taken control of your pool! The SLAM process will be the key to getting the cloudiness out of your pool. If you don't mind me asking, which test kit did you get?

Pool School - SLAM - Shock Level And Maintain

 

[pooldv]

Welcome to TFP!

Only hang out here if you want to spend less and have a cleaner pool!

Please add your pool info to your signature as shown here, Pool School - Getting Started

 

[SoloTSi97]

If you don't mind me asking, which test kit did you get?

It's a LaMotte ColorQ Pro 7, according to Amazon. I bought it based on the good reviews and the digital readout. The engineer in me is not satisfied with the precision of comparing colors!

Please add your pool info to your signature as shown here, Pool School - Getting Started

Will do! Thanks for the replies.

 

[SoloTSi97]

I added the pool info. I guess my signature doesn't magically show up on older posts, though.

 

[pooldv]

No, but you can probably edit the post and check the show signature box. Looks good.

Except that mineral system. More here
Alternative sanitizers and pools--The Truth!!
Pool School - Metals in the Water and Metal Stains

 

[SoloTSi97]

No, but you can probably edit the post and check the show signature box. Looks good.

Except that mineral system. More here
Alternative sanitizers and pools--The Truth!!
Pool School - Metals in the Water and Metal Stains

Thanks for the link. I have already, in my vast two months of pool ownership, run into differing opinions on the mineral system. That had already started raising red flags there. Not knowing any better, we did put a fresh cartridge in it when we opened the pool and have been keeping the FC level at the (lower than usual) 1.0ppm level recommended on their docs.

I'll do some further research on it, but another thing I've noticed is a distinct lack of mention of those systems on this site and others like it. So, if the people with the knowledge don't use them... ;-)

 

[BoDarville]

Welcome to TFP!