Recent content by Deb04

You don’t need to drain the pool bc of “old water”. There are other reasons it may be necessary to drain some water, even a lot of water, but the age of it isn’t one of them. When you have a proper test kit, post your results and we’ll help you determine if and how much of your water needs to be...

Think of all the pool chemicals you’ll save!

You can tell your pool company what to put, or not put, in your pool. I tell them not to put any chemicals in and I put them in myself the day before they come.

Our initial cell lasted 13 yrs. The second cell is on yr 6 and doing fine. Ok, my cell operates only 6 mos a year, so justified to cut those numbers in 1/2 for a pool that's open all year.

If you have Ocean State Job Lots near you, their 12.5% chlorine is $5.99/gallon.

Try to drain before the rain and then you get free water refill.

Because your CYA is so high. Your CYA is binding up so much of your FC that it can't do the job of killing algae. That's why it would be so helpful to replace 40% of your water to get your CYA down to 60.

When you raise your CYA, calc what your target FC is and raise it with liquid chlorine. Then adjust your SWG to keep it there. SWG do a great job of keeping FC in range, but not so much raising FC more than a little bit.

In the first post you said that CYA is > 80. If it is > 80, your SLAM target is higher than 31. If it’s >80, but 90 or less, target is 35. If it’s >90, you need to do a diluted CYA test.

My pH is always in the 7.4-7.6 range. Today I had to add MA for the first time in over a year bc there were several children doing cannonballs in the pool yesterday. I was thinking earlier about how I go through a gallon of MA about every 1-2 years and I buy the 1/2 strength stuff. My TA is 50.

You can bring your pH down to 7.6 with muriatic acid. Your TA will drop a little too. Don’t let your TA go below 50. If it does, raise with baking soda.

Let the free chlorine come down on its own. It’s safe to swim at this level since it’s less than slam level, which is 16. This is, of course, assuming that your water is crystal clear. Keep FC at about 7 at that CYA level.

You need to add liquid chlorine to bring FC up to SLAM level, which is 12, not 3. Check and redose every 2 hours when possible, as you did. You just need to get FC to 12. In a couple of days, recheck CYA to see if it’s 30.

Agreed. You've got an algae problem, as you know, and you need to SLAM the pool. If the water is white and cloudy, the algae is very significant and it will take days. No promise that it won't be a week or more. The algae has been happily multiplying. Time to stop it in its tracks.

OP has a cartridge filter, so no backwashing. Just didn't want to confuse OP.