Yeah, the way things are going I may not have to SLAM for very long to finish up the process.
I am definitely loving the TFP process. I am a very science minded person so having a formula and procedure to follow to maintain the water is fantastic.
Since we can't really discuss much of the science before my test kit shows up I will share some of the back story on how we got to today with the pool. We have never taken care of a pool before so after buying the house in November it's been a huge learning curve figuring it all out.
At first, Leslie's helped a lot with explaining how our equipment works, such as how to clean the filter and what some of our attachments are for, but I was never fully comfortable with their water chemistry advice. The only place we've really been "pool stored" is the chlorine. Leslie's told us the chlorine granules were the highest quality chlorine they had and that liquid chlorine was not as good for the pool. They explained that the liquid chlorine adds salt to the pool and the granules don't add anything bad. I havent had time to research that yet so I took their advice.
The previous owners used a pool service to maintain the pool. When we took over ownership of the house we also took over maintenance of the pool. They had the pool at shock levels of chlorine for the sale so I don't think we added anything to the water for a couple months. After that we added the granular chlorine (which I now know has CYA in it). We only had "guess strips" and the pool store for water testing so we were really just guessing how much chlorine to add (which probably wasn't enough). The water is just now getting to the point where it might be warm enough to swim in on occasion so I actually think it's fortunate we had the algae problem now because that's what led me to TFP.
In my research about solving the algae problem most of the sites I found were either from this site, pointed to this site, or said the same thing as this site. Between that and the logical science based approach I feel much more comfortable following the formulas outlined here than the guess and check mystery potion method of the pool stores.
Thanks everyone, this site is awesome!