Pool was fine all summer. I stay on top of the chemistry.
late August it started looking green. I SLAM’d, keeping chlorine at 14-16 per chart. I kept it there for 3 weeks. I brushed, but there’s really not much algae ‘sticking’ to the walls, a little in a crease on the floor, but mostly it’s just the powdery/floating stuff. I backwashed the pool twice during this time but pressure never bumped up more than 35%. I can’t think of where a hidden source of algae would be because it’s an AGP.
After 3 weeks, there is still algae forming in the pool and while the water got much clearer, it is not to its usual standards. In addition, I’m having trouble with my pump/motor so we called the pool company out to help with the second problem. Today while I was at work the pool guy told my wife our motor was starting to fail (there is no capacitor in this model) but there shouldn’t be a problem with our filter or sand needing deep cleaning because they’re relatively new. He’s going to get a new motor.
However he also ‘diagnosed’ very high phosphates, and said that may be part of why we’re not successfully SLAM’ing. He added some PhosFight. I don’t blame my wife because she doesn’t know these things, but the Pool School book says phosphates are irrelevant. That said, my wife found that very high phosphates can come from bird droppings, and this is the second summer in a row we’ve needed to SLAM, and both cases occurred about 2-3 weeks after coming back from a 2 week summer vacation during which time the murder of crows on our 2 acre property appeared to use our pool as a bird bath. We vacuum and so forth but it’s entirely possible that we aren’t successfully getting out all the stuff we need to.
Now we’re toward the end of the season I’m also running out of bleach and no local stores have any. So I’m probably going to have to close the pool a couple weeks no matter what and try to sort this out in the spring.
Any ideas what’s going on?
late August it started looking green. I SLAM’d, keeping chlorine at 14-16 per chart. I kept it there for 3 weeks. I brushed, but there’s really not much algae ‘sticking’ to the walls, a little in a crease on the floor, but mostly it’s just the powdery/floating stuff. I backwashed the pool twice during this time but pressure never bumped up more than 35%. I can’t think of where a hidden source of algae would be because it’s an AGP.
After 3 weeks, there is still algae forming in the pool and while the water got much clearer, it is not to its usual standards. In addition, I’m having trouble with my pump/motor so we called the pool company out to help with the second problem. Today while I was at work the pool guy told my wife our motor was starting to fail (there is no capacitor in this model) but there shouldn’t be a problem with our filter or sand needing deep cleaning because they’re relatively new. He’s going to get a new motor.
However he also ‘diagnosed’ very high phosphates, and said that may be part of why we’re not successfully SLAM’ing. He added some PhosFight. I don’t blame my wife because she doesn’t know these things, but the Pool School book says phosphates are irrelevant. That said, my wife found that very high phosphates can come from bird droppings, and this is the second summer in a row we’ve needed to SLAM, and both cases occurred about 2-3 weeks after coming back from a 2 week summer vacation during which time the murder of crows on our 2 acre property appeared to use our pool as a bird bath. We vacuum and so forth but it’s entirely possible that we aren’t successfully getting out all the stuff we need to.
Now we’re toward the end of the season I’m also running out of bleach and no local stores have any. So I’m probably going to have to close the pool a couple weeks no matter what and try to sort this out in the spring.
Any ideas what’s going on?
