Ok, I might be a little off base in continuing this thread here, since I am not longer confuzzled about replacing water
(if someone can share the rules about starting a new thread, that would be awesome...one of my posts was moved back to this thread, so I'm still here ;-) ).
But.....since y'all have been involved with me here since the start, I wanted to provide a pictoral update! The change is soooo dramatic - not just from green to blue, but the
shades of blue that have come up since the refill. Every day it looks more amazing. Yesterday it was still pretty cloudy in the deep end, but today I can see the drain, clear as a bell. It even reflects the clouds better!
Saturday, while draining. Yuck.
Sunday, while refilling. Still lots of green in the deep end.
Monday. Improving, but the deep end is cloudy.
Tuesday. WOW!
Obviously, this isn't all just the result of a SLAM. If I had not drained first, I'm sure I'd still be somewhere in the shades of lighter green today. But the SLAM is helping even the mostly-fresh water transform its color day by day. You can really see the difference in the deep end where the color is more intense in every case.
Gorgeous color aside, here are this morning's numbers:
FC = 13.5
CYA = 15
That CYA level is 24 hours after about 2.5# of dry CYA. I've added the other 2.5# this morning (I wanted to take it slow and make sure I didn't add too much, considering what I've gone through to get it down!). I'll check it later today and be sure it's on track to get to 30 but not more than that.
Tomorrow, I should have a better idea of how the FC is holding with the CYA in the appropriate range. For now, it seems pretty willing to drop to 7 over the course of the day, but a gallon brings it up to 13-14. So somewhere in there I'll find the sweet spot.
And pretty soon I'll just be hoping for more hot days to bring the temp up!