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I checked my FC this morning expecting it to be around 5. It was 12.5!!! What the heck???? My FC has been a little higher than I want over the last few weeks (7.0-7.5) so I've been slowly dropping the cell output from around 25% to 18%. Four days ago FC was 6.0 so I dropped the cell output from...

Since the CYA test is one of the more difficult tests for most people to interpret (including myself), I figured I'd order the R-7065 CYA 50ppm standard from tftestkits.net and give it a try. I actually found it to be pretty much what I would consider 50ppm based on how I've been testing CYA so...

I became a new pool owner in January and these are the things that surprise me the most as a new pool owner.... 1- How little time it takes to maintain the pool 2- How little chlorine my pool uses 3- How cool my water is during the heat of summer I probably spend ten minutes a week maintaining...

I prefer to use liquid stabilizer and I just ordered a gallon from Amazon. The price? $42.99. No biggie because I only use a couple gallons a year. But, I looked at my last order from six months ago. The price then? $25.99. Yikes! This inflation is no joke!!!! Glad it's transitory :cool:

Thankfully, our pool came with an auto fill. Unfortunately, our tap water has CH of 90 and we get a lot of evaporation here in the Phoenix area. I had an RV water softener that I wasn't using so I modified my existing auto fill plumbing by adding a tee and connecting my RV water softener...

I installed an IntellipH three months ago and have followed other threads by @Turbo1Ton and @Dirk showcasing their fixes for burned connectors. My connector looks fine but I don't want to be scrambling to fix it if it fails later. Plus, I think the fix is easier if the connector isn't burned...

My pool is about as low maintenance as you can get with IFCS, SWCG, auto fill and a Pentair IntelliPH. The only thing I do is test the water and clean the skimmer basket. Even that aint much because there are very few trees around our pool so on a typical day the basket just gets half a dozen...

So I had my water all nice and balanced when we had a short stint of "cooler" weather and I decided to cover my pool for three days. I knew that would raise my FC but I didn't realize how much (I'm a rookie after all). In order to bring FC back down I disabled my IC40 from the EasyTouch panel...

I've been using a solar cover for my pool for the last month during the night. We roll the cover up on it's reel in the morning and place it in the shade. The sun then hits it from about 12:00 until 1:00 when we move it again so it's in a new shaded area the rest of the afternoon. Well, today I...

I'm no scientist and I haven't stayed at a Holiday Inn Express lately so I need a little help understanding the effects of water temperature loss due to evaporation. Here's my hypothetical question... If my pool water was 80 degrees and the ground surrounding my pool was 80 degrees and the...

Being a new pool owner I've logged some strange data over the past six months that took me a while to explain. One of them was filter and IFCS pressure. I knew pump rpm would have a significant affect on pressure but I didn't realize how much of an effect the heater bypass valve would have...

I've been helping my neighbor with his pool during his conversion to salt water. I helped him get his CYA in the 80 range and told him with that CYA level, he should shoot for a FC level of around 6 in a salt water pool. I also sent him a link to the TFP chart showing the recommended levels...

My neighbor recently had his pool guy install a Pentair IntelliChlor IC40. He doesn't know much about salt water pools so he asked me for help. I told him I'm a brand new pool owner but I'd try to help based on what I've learned here at TFP over the past few months. He has two issues that I find...

I installed a Pentair IntellipH two days ago and noticed last night a bead of acid at the fitting that injects the acid into the pool plumbing. This fitting (I'm calling it the injector in the photo below) came from the factory with teflon tape on the threads and already screwed into the adapter...

I'm a new pool owner and found what I think is the overflow drain at the rear of my skimmer. I bent down and took a picture inside the drain hole and saw an even smaller roughly 1/4" hole inside as shown in the pics below. Is this typical and if this is an overflow drain, where are they...

I'm a new pool owner and have been using my Pentair heat pump off and on for the last couple months. I've been documenting the air and pool temps hourly while using it. I've learned the water temp doesn't rise after about 4:00PM. I get about one degree of heating per hour in the morning and...

My neighbor told me yesterday that his pool guy uses test strips rather than a proper test kit because they drive around in the hot Phoenix weather while servicing pools and the reagents in the test kit would be ruined with the heat. If that's true, I'm thinking an awful lot of test kits get...

We just bought a house with a pool that was installed last summer. All of the pool equipment is Pentair so I'm assuming it's a Pentair light. I know I can control it from my EasyTouch Remote and I can change the colors. The previous owners showed us that feature and thought it was pretty cool...

My wife and I bought a house at the end of December that had a pool put in last summer. The previous owners had a pool service "maintain" the pool. When I first tested the water on December 28th, this is what I had to work with: FC - 16.0 pH - 8.0+ TA - 240 CYA - 0 Thanks to all the nice people...

I've been a pool owner for six weeks now and thanks to this forum and a gazillion hours of research and YouTube videos, I'm pretty comfortable with my pool now with one exception - the heater! I have a Pentair UltraTemp 127k BTU heat pump heater (model 460965). I naively thought that to turn the...

We just purchased a house with a pool that was built last summer. I decided to clean the cartridge filter since it most likely hadn't been cleaned since the pool was built. The 600sf Sta-Rite S8M600 filter is large for the size of the pool. In fact, the largest System 3 filter Pentair shows on...

I've done a ton of searching and haven't really found enough information to help me decide if my idea will work. Here's the deal.... I have a manual Pentair valve that allows me to control the flow of water from either the main floor drain or the skimmer. When we bought our house a month ago...

We just moved near Phoenix, AZ and I've heard the water is very hard here and it's not good to use non-softened water for the auto-fill system so I decided to use my RV water softener to add about 1.5" of water to the pool (auto fill wasn't working - different story). Prior to doing this I...

So we went to our new-to-us house for a couple hours today (we move in tomorrow) and I tested the free chlorine at 15ppm using a 25ml water sample. Being new to this and sensing this was way too high I tested the water again using a 10ml water sample and that one came back at 17ppm. I'll do a...

I'm a new pool owner and I'd like to set my Pentair IntelliFlo VS pump to the lowest RPM needed to activate my A&A infloor cleaning heads. To do that, I was planning on buying the A&A pressure system test kit (part number 548295). It only costs a little over $100. You set the pump rpm to the...

I'm a new pool owner and although I've spent a ton of time here and on YouTube watching many hours of videos on pool care and maintenance, there is one thing I haven't figured out yet. Do I program the Pentair IntelliFlo VS pump at the pump itself or at the Easy Touch control panel? Does one...

We're buying a house that has a new pool that was installed this summer. I've never owned a pool before so I've spent the last two weeks reading and viewing everything I can find on pool equipment, maintenance and water chemistry. I plan to have somebody from the company that built the pool come...

We're in the process of buying a house with a pool near Buckeye, AZ. It's my first pool so I've been spending hours (actually days) reading/watching everything I can on pool equipment and maintenance. The pool was built just this year and although it's small at 13'x26' with a 6'x9' bump out...