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Hey PachinkoPlayer, I remember your story from last year--it helped inspire the Seasonal/Temporary Pool Guide. Hope the only reason you're refilling is the high temperature... --paulr

CC going up like that indicates that the chlorine is chewing on something. My pool's only a little bigger than yours and I use 12% also, so without checking pool calc the numbers look like the right ballpark. If you have a cover, leave it off during the day, that will help burn off the CC. --paulr

FC = free (good) chlorine, CC = combined (bad) chlorine, TC = total chlorine = FC + CC. That's it. In a clean pool, CC is near zero so TC is close to FC. You can get just the FAS-DPD chlorine test to augment your 6-way kit, if you like. You shouldn't need to shock on a schedule, it's an...

If you are using the OTO (yellow drop) chlorine test at the same time as the pH test, read pH first. Staring at the yellow before looking at the red/orange can change your perception due to color fatigue. (I had the same pH test go from 7.5 to about 7.9 after looking at the OTO.) --paulr

With CYA 0, during the day you're losing nearly all FC to sunlight before it can do any good. You want 20-30ppm asap. After you clear the pool and hold FC overnight, you can bring it back up to normal SWG levels. No clue about the foam but it's probably worthwhile trying to skim it off. --paulr

I've also heard that a fountain can cool the water, but I have no personal experience with that. Running the pump at night might help a little. Running a fountain will also likely cause your pH to increase. But that isn't really a bad thing, because then you'll need to add acid, which will...

For a salt pool in Georgia, I'd think CYA 60 is a little on the low side, but only a little. If the cell can maintain FC with a reasonable on-time, no reason to mess with success. --paulr

Hear, hear. If you want to lower TA, you need to add acid and then wait for pH to come back up without adding any pH-increasing chemical. Otherwise you end up going in circles. But--do you really need to lower TA any further? 110 is on the high side but not outrageous. If you stop messing...

atcnick, your numbers are mostly reasonable, as Mag pointed out. The pH is a bit high, that's about it. I'll get to chlorine in a bit. Regarding safety chemistry-wise, with all due respect to Richard320 it is primarily chlorine and pH that matter. Other things being out of whack can cause...

Vinegar is for dissolving bones, silly. For blood, you want bleach. --paulr

It tells you that CC > 0.5 therefore you are not done shocking. You want CC <= 0.5, a clean overnight FC test, and water looking good. --paulr

Make sure all the internal hoses are on tightly. That's usually the problem when mine loses oomph, a hose popped off or split. --paulr

Regarding the chemicals... google "msds your-product-name-here" and you'll probably find the Material Safety Data Sheet, which is supposed to describe everything "hazardous" in a given product. For example "msds 20 mule team borax" got me this PDF. But as for the stuff I buy... dry acid is...

That's what we recommend in the Seasonal Pool Guide. Looks like 4 lb should do the job; just don't add it all at once... --paulr

Algae is no reason to dump and refill. What you did will surely kill off anything that did get in the water. --paulr

For both CH and CYA, there are really only two ways to lower them: remove water and replace it with water that has less of whatever you want to get rid of; or, a reverse osmosis treatment. --paulr

I don't actually use the cover cover. --paulr

Yes, my understanding is that FC loss is, to a first approximation, proportional to the starting FC. I would guess that 1/3 jug daily would be about right. You will find out for sure when you start doing it. Just for comparison, lately I've been using about the equivalent of 1/3 jug every...

So you have a kit that uses the DPD chlorine test; drops that turn the sample pink/red, which you compare to color blocks and match up. Be aware that this test will bleach out (read as zero) when FC is very high, somewhere in the teens as I recall. TC: Adding more drops than you're supposed to...

If it's 6% bleach, one big jug is worth about FC 6.5 in your pool, so you're raising FC to around 10+ and seeing it back at 4 two days later. If we call that a 40% chlorine loss per day, you're losing 4-ish the first day and 2-ish the second day. If you were there every day and replacing 2ppm...

We have about reached the limit of my understanding of SWGs (didn't take long, did it...) I didn't see a CH number, but based on the other numbers it seems unlikely you'd be getting calcium scaling inside the cell. Tweaking up the CYA should help. The FC will have to be higher in proportion...

Green hair generally comes from copper in the water, not chlorine. --paulr

The chlorine kills the algae, but the dead algae gets taken out by the filter. It can take a sand filter some days to catch up with all the dead stuff; the trick there is not to backwash too often, because a sand filter actually becomes a little more effective when it's a little dirty. Wait...

For the CYA test, the black dot should completely disappear. Here's a link from Taylor that might help: CYA test w/ pics You can run the pump any time it's convenient. For the Intex SWG, especially with a lower CYA, you're better off running it at night to give the chlorine more chance to...

Um, did the SWG appear to be on at the time? If it wasn't on, it wouldn't be producing... :oops: should've made that clear originally, hope you figured that out on your own... but if it looked like it was on, then it seems probable there's an issue with the unit. --paulr

In a 20K gallon pool, each 8oz of trichlor is worth about FC 2.7 and CYA 1.7, so 8 pucks is around 14ppm CYA. That might cause some cloudiness in the CYA test but probably not enough to register as a true 20ppm. If you already had some CYA in there, obviously it would add up. The CYA added by...

In that case, don't fiddle anything until you're done with the drain and refill; it's literally money down the drain. At that point it becomes worthwhile to rebalance. And just use bleach as your chlorine source until the new SWG is up and running. --paulr

He means, do a CYA test without adding any reagent, and see if there's any obvious cloudiness. That would interfere with the test, make it read higher. Test results in the >=100 range are kind of unreliable anyway. Could be much higher. After you get your own test kit you can try diluting...

Channeling means the sand has clumped to the point where there are (in effect) highways through it for the water, and the sand is doing no real work. You would need to open up the filter and get your hands right into it, swooshing around and breaking up any clumps you find. --paulr

If those are 8-oz pucks, in your pool each one is worth 2ppm CYA, according to the Pool Calculator. In general, save the trichlor for vacations or other times when you're not around to attend to the pool, and use straight CYA now. You can add bleach immediately when you're also adding CYA...