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So my water has stayed pretty well balanced over the summer. My pH would typically be around 7.6 and my alkalinity stayed around 80. However, as the temps have been starting to cool a bit here I brought out my solar cover and my pool has been mostly covered for the past couple of weeks. I...

I think there are a couple issues with this. I do agree that in a perfect world it would be best for the pool builders to hand over a pool with perfect water. And I do agree that it would be fair to expect them to fix the water in your pool before they hand it over. However, what I’m...

I was curious about this as well and emailed them about it. This is what they told me:

Honestly, I have a couple of thoughts on this. First, neither glass nor sand will cause or fix water chemistry issues. If you like the glass media then keep it. If you want the more conventional sand, then have them switch it out. It certainly sounds like they’re willing to...

To be honest, these two points are kind of mutually exclusive. You really need to either completely take over maintenance yourself (which most of us here would agree is the better option) or let the service completely manage things. If you are trying to do both then things are just not...

This is a big part of the problem. Until you get used to how your pool behaves and how much chlorine you need to add you *need* to test every day. And you need to add chlorine every day no matter what. After a couple of weeks when you get used to how much chlorine your pool uses you’ll be...

You can definitely use it, but just be aware that if it is degraded it might not raise the FC level by as much as you expect. Even though it’s labeled as 12.5% it might now only be 10% or even 6% depending on how much it degraded. So you might want to add a little extra and/or test the...

Liquid shock is normally just bleach under another name. I’m not familiar with blue shield shock, but I googled it and as near as I can tell it’s just 12.5% bleach. There’s definitely no problem using that. The only thing to consider is that if it’s old an/or has been sitting out in the sun...

That just means that it’s a higher concentration than ‘normal bleach’. Although there’s really no standard for normal bleach so it’s hard to tell exactly what the concentration is. But, for example it might be 10% instead of 6%. However, the thing that worries me about that particular bleach...

He did. In one post he said it started at 7ppm in the evening and in the next post he said it was down to 6ppm in the morning. That’s in the acceptable range. Just on the edge of acceptable, but still acceptable.

If your fill water has high alkalinity then you will likely need a lot of it. Given that your pool builder left you with 4 gallons, I suspect that you may have high alkalinity water. I feel like he wouldn’t have just randomly left you with acid otherwise.

So half a gallon of 10% bleach will raise the chlorine level in an 18,000 gallon pool by only 2.8. Your pool is almost certainly using more than 2.8ppm of chlorine in a day. You need to be adding more chlorine than that. However, even besides that, since your chlorine level has gotten so...

Yeah, it does seem like it must be testing error. If this is new water and you have literally only added 4 pounds of stabilizer to it, then your CYA can’t be any higher than 48. (According to poolmath, 4 pounds of stabilizer in 10,000 gallons of water will raise CYA by 48). And I would expect...

Both test strips and SWG readings are notoriously inaccurate and, frankly, I wouldn’t believe either number. The best test kit for salt is the Taylor K-1766. If you really want to know what your salt level is, then that’s the way to do it.

What are you using to chlorinate your pool? If you use tablets (which are likely trichlor) then that will add CYA to your water. If you use granular shock then that could be trichlor as well and that will also add CYA.

I’m not totally sure what you’re asking here. 64oz of 31.45% muriatic acid should lower the pH in 20,000 gallons of water by about .8, so that seems to be about in line with what you are seeing. It should also lower the TA by about 13. So if you are frequently adding acid to your pool then...

CYA is definitely one of my least favorite tests. The recommendations I have seen are to do the reading in bright sunlight, but with your back to the sun and the sample tube held in the shadow of your body at your waist. You are definitely not supposed to stare at the tube and examine it for...

Using tabs to raise CYA is not a bad thing and is often done, especially when someone has tabs laying around. However, I’m not sure about the crush and dump method. As the previous poster mentioned, those tablets can be quite acidic and can damage your equipment. Heaters are especially...

This is actually exactly the opposite of what you should be doing. It seems kind of counter intuitive, but a dirty filter will actually filter better than a clean filter (at least to a point). As the filter traps dirt and such the openings through the filter get smaller and smaller and it will...

First, it’s normal for chlorine to be consumed quickly. If you are using liquid chlorine then you should expect to be adding it every day. It’s also possible that you have the start of an algae bloom which will cause chlorine to be consumed even more quickly than normal. You can do an OCLT test...

You can certainly choose not to use a SWG if you don’t want to, but if this is why you’re not using one you might want to reconsider. As long as you keep the pool chemicals in balance and the SWG is sized properly the cell shouldn’t need cleaned more than once or twice a season and should last...

Honestly, if your CYA is already at 70 then you’re really close to the point where you are going to need to drain and refill. I wouldn’t use any more tabs at this point.

Ideally you wouldn’t even want to let it get below 4. Aim to keep it around 6 and add more if it starts getting close to 4. That gives you a little buffer because 2 is your minimum and it should never ever drop below 2. However, now that it is green you will want to do a SLAM to fix that...

@markayash, thanks for posting those videos. The one thing I learned from them is that I was going way too far and letting it get much darker when I was testing my salt. My SWG has always read a few hundred ppm lower than I was getting with the Taylor test, but I just figured that the SWG was...

8600ppm of salt sounds very high. I don’t think the reagents typically go bad, but there could have been some sort of testing error. I would try to do the test again and see if you get different results. Keep in mind that salt will stay dissolved in water at much much greater concentrations...

It‘s fine to have no skimmer. It means that you might have to net out more stuff that’s floating on the water (or vacuum out more stuff that sinks to the bottom if you don’t net it off the surface fast enough) but especially with a little pool those aren’t difficult or time consuming tasks.

The problem is that test strips are notoriously inaccurate. I get that a better test kit is more expensive, but by spending the extra money on a good test kit you’ll not only have way less frustration because your test results will be consistant, but you may spend less money in the end because...

When you say that your alkalinity keeps sky rocketing, do you mean that you get it down and then it goes back up? Typically alkalinity won’t go up on it’s own. The only time it would go way up like that would be if your fill water has very high alkalinity, and if that’s the case then this is...

Honestly, there are so many variables that knowing what works for other people won’t really help determine a good value for your pool. Pool size, SWG size, how frequently the pool is used, whether the pool is covered, how much sun the pool gets, even the temperature of the water can all make a...

I keep staring at it, but I do not understand that graph at all. The bottom axis is ppm CYA and as near as I can tell it’s showing that the higher the CYA level the more chlorine is lost to UV per hour. But I thought that the whole point of CYA was to slow chlorine loss from UV. What am I...