I'm taking care of, or trying to take care of my pool myself once again. I did a fair job for a while but got a pool service finally. Meanwhile, I was educating myself about all the terms, parts, etc of the equipment and still knew very little about the chemistry. I live in a high wind area, especially spring and fall and I get a lot of debris and dirt/sand/foliage. My pool person told me I needed phosphate remover, which was quite expensive. He said that would solve any algae growth ( I ocassionally get mustard algae at the height of summer and if I do, I only use the algaecide I read about on this site) and he said it would stabilize the water, so I let him go ahead with it. He was doing multiple treatments at first and eventually was doing it once per week and it was expensive! I didn't really like the idea because phosphate remover wasn't one of the things I remembered reading about here so I finally stopped the service. I cleaned the filters and they were coated with a slimy substance. I soaked them in a diluted TSP solution then muriatic acid to get all the slime off. They looked good after and the pressure seems ok, the usual post filter cleaning reading so I don't think that's what's causing my current problem. Which is,
I cannot get the chlorine level up to even semi normal range. My previous practice was shock once per week and tabs in a floater all summer. And things were ok, I did get calcium scale on my pool tiles but we have hard water here, so? I checked the chlorine/ph weekly in the spring/summer and used acid occasionally. Now I have no chlorine, as in .5 no matter how much bleach i pour in as soon as the sun goes down; Ph is 7.5; FC is 3, CC is 2; CH 800; TA is 300 and CYA is 50. I don't know how these values work together yet, but I have the TF100 test kit and I'm studying. But meanwhile the pool math calculator is telling me to replace my pool water, like 68% of it! and we're in a drought on water restrictions with fines. Is there no other way to decrease the calcium? Is that why the chlorine is disappearing? I quit using tabs and shock (DiChlor I think it was) after I read that those increase calcium and I'm using bleach as instructed. Any advice you can give me will be greatly appreciated. I'm picturing calcium deposits on all the innards and pipes and don't want to damage the equipment or the pool surface.
I cannot get the chlorine level up to even semi normal range. My previous practice was shock once per week and tabs in a floater all summer. And things were ok, I did get calcium scale on my pool tiles but we have hard water here, so? I checked the chlorine/ph weekly in the spring/summer and used acid occasionally. Now I have no chlorine, as in .5 no matter how much bleach i pour in as soon as the sun goes down; Ph is 7.5; FC is 3, CC is 2; CH 800; TA is 300 and CYA is 50. I don't know how these values work together yet, but I have the TF100 test kit and I'm studying. But meanwhile the pool math calculator is telling me to replace my pool water, like 68% of it! and we're in a drought on water restrictions with fines. Is there no other way to decrease the calcium? Is that why the chlorine is disappearing? I quit using tabs and shock (DiChlor I think it was) after I read that those increase calcium and I'm using bleach as instructed. Any advice you can give me will be greatly appreciated. I'm picturing calcium deposits on all the innards and pipes and don't want to damage the equipment or the pool surface.