Hey folks! I'm in my second year trying to wrangle my above ground pool and in two weeks I haven't been able to get it clean. It's been a big of a saga trying so far, and I don't have a proper log, but I'll try to relate things as best I can. Sorry for not having more accurate info, but hopefully it's enough to get some advice. I've really appreciated the info you guys have on here, BTW! You seem to be maybe the best resource on the internet for pool management.
So I opened the pool last year somewhere around April, it is a 4500 galon pool and came with a ( supposedly ) 1000gph pump, we used cholrine tablets in a floater and dichlore ( clorox 6 in 1 pool shock xtra blue ) shock about weekly. Things went roughly fine for a little bit, but after we finally figured out how to get the vacuum hose and vacuum that we had attached, the pump didn't actually have enough suction to vacuum anything up hardly at all. I think we had a dud pump, but we didn't know exactly what was going on.
Things got super busy and we couldn't manage anything with the pool, other than I kept the chlorine level basically OK as little bits of debris accumulated in the pool since our pump wasn't really working. At the end of the pool season I stopped keeping up on the chlorine levels and it accumulated algae and more debris all the way up until about a couple weeks ago when I started trying to clear it back out again.
This year, the plan was to get a better pump, with a sand filter, and use an SWG instead of doing chlorine tablets and dichlor shock.
The new pump is
way better than the old, but I'm still struggling to get the pool non-cloudy now.
So it started off incredibly green and cloudy. You could hardly see maybe 6 inches through the water. I got the pump running and the vacuum hooked, up, but it's been quite difficult to vacuum thoroughly when you can't actually see what you're vacuuming, but I did what I could.
The vacuum and filter pulled lots of thick green algae out, and we started putting the dichlor shock in to kill the algae. I started off relatively conservative and did a half bag ( which is about a double dose for the size of the pool ), I did that for the first couple nights or so, with a little bit of vacuuming.
A couple days in, I put enough salt in the pool to get it to about 3000 ppm and I started running the SWG (
Intex Krystal Clear 4500 gal model ) on turbo mode to help produce some extra chlorine.
It got a little better but was still green, and the free chlorine would be at 0 every morning, so I started adding more dichlor at a time, doing 1 bag per night. After about a week I had put about 5 bags of dichlor into the pool, and it had gotten it not green anymore ( partly because that Clorox stuff has annoying blue powder in it
), but still had a 0 free chlorine as the total chlorine continued to rise, and it was still just about as opaque and cloudy as before, even though it wasn't green.
Now is a good time to note I'm using
these test strips. I have seen on the forum that test strips are generally inaccurate by all accounts, I had just been hoping to avoid having to buy a $100+ test kit when I had seen a lot of people getting away with test strips at least for above ground pools it seemed.
Anyway, at this point I was trying to figure out what to do because I couldn't keep any free chlorine in the pool. I assumed that there was still algae and other contaminants using up the chlorine. I was aslo still having a hard time vacuuming. Combined with not being able to see, I was finding that a leaf canister was absolutely essential, but I didn't have one. I kept trying to vacuum, but the minimal inline leaf catcher right before the pump inlet kept getting clogged, so I couldn't keep vacuuming. So I had to wait for a leaf canister to come in the mail before I could really vacuum.
At this point I found TFP's SLAM protocol. I figured I probably had to get the free chlorine up long enough to break down the chloramines and hopefully clear the water. I made sure the PH was balanced, though my total alkalinity was a little low. I poured a half gallon of 10% sodium hypochlorite bleach, in the morning it finally manged to have 0.5 ppm of cholorine according to the test strips and I think the total chlorine was somewhere between 10 and 15 ppm. For the next four days or so I ended up putting about 3 gallons of bleach into the pool, and I managed to get the free chlorine up to about 3 or 4 ppm. But what was confusing me is that as soon as I added more bleach, the test strips seemed to indicate an immediate increase in total chlorine, getting it up to 20 ppm and beyond I think because it started bleeding brown at the edges of the test square when it only went up to a bright teal color. But the free chlorine would never get above 5 no matter how much bleach I added.
At this point I realized that there was still some algea on the bottom of the pool, ( that I couldn't see ), that I was able to pick up with the vacuum, and I figured that was also probably using up the chlorine. I did my best to vacuum it out, but still didn't have a leaf canister so could only do so much.
Then I started adding calcium hypochlorite. Over 3 days I ended up putting 6 bags of calcium hypochlorite in there, which seems like a ridiculous amount for the size of the pool, and maybe wasn't a good idea, but I wasn't exactly sure what to do to raise the FC enough to hopefully break down the chloramines.
Finally, I got a leaf canister and I've been able to vacuum up almost all of the maor leaves and debris, and I don't get any green at all over the whole surface of the pool when vacuuming anymore.
At this point the pool is clearing up a very little bit each day. I have completely stopped adding any chlorine for about 5 days and the free chlorine has dropped from what looked like 5 ppm to about 1-3, while the total chlorine is still steady at the top of the scale at 20 ppm, though with a little less brown around the edges, now it's mostly just teal.
I'm suspicious that my test strips were getting bleached out so that even if the free chlorine is going up I can't tell, and they have probably been seriously confusing me.
The pool
is getting clearer very slowly, I can barely see about 1/2 way down through the water ( which is about 4 feet deep ). I have been backwashing the filter at least 2 times every day, and usually much more as I run the vacuum and backwashed it every time I vacuumed and when the suction was reduced during vacuuming. When backwashing in the morning I still see some brown-ish water come through the pipe which seems a good sign that the filter is doing its job anyway.
Finally, some last relevant points:
I have added 4 doses of water clarifier over the last 9 days or so to attempt to help the cloudiness.
It has been raining a _lot_ throughout this whole process. There have only been about 4-5 sunny days in the last 15 or so, and we've had some very heavy rain as well as hail. Many of the days that weren't rainy were at least cloudy.
The pool doesn't have any CYA in it, or at least it's probably less than 10 ppm. I saw the instructions for adding CYA mentioned that it can take a while to dissolve and that you want to avoid backwashing your filter for a week or so after adding it, so I wasn't sure if I should add it when I'm trying to get the pool setup as quickly as possible and I needed to run the filter around the clock to clear it. So I was kind of hoping that the sun wouldn't bite me too badly with the largely cloudy / rainy weather. I do wonder if the lack of sun is also contributing to the fact that the chloramines won't go away.
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Sorry for the rambling explanation, I hope that's enough info to get at least some hints or guidance.
www.troublefreepool.com
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