Starting over for the season ACCK!

[julie g]

Let me get it out so I can "talk" calmly. ARRRGH ok ..better. We have a 12x24 intex pool. We were doing pretty good with the cheepy test kit until the 4 days we were out of town. Then the green goblin came and took over. Finally found TFP ordered a test kit. Between the horrendous rain of 1 week, power outages and the already growing green monster........ we decided to drain the pool. Scrubbed the sides, got 2 jugs of chlorine from pool supply........ then once water level was appropriate.....plugged in pump........it was dead.
Went to buy new pump at local independent store. they are great but they wanted us to bring either pics or sand filter so we could get correct replacement pump and attachments so we did not have to make another trip.....which is at least 45 minutes from my house on a good day. That was yesterday. Today as we were about to drain and load, for giggles I plugged it in.... it worked. So at this point my pool is filled and has 2 jugs of chlorine in it.. I have started doing the testing with my tf-100 kit. My chlorine at noon was 2 it is now Zero! I tested it twice no three times to check myself. So I thought I could get this done and something beginning balanced today......right ........between the pool, 2 household autos acting up, and multiple other things... I am ready to throw in the towel....but I need my pool...... it is my sanctuary after a rough day at work
Here are my current readings.
FC: 0
CC: 1
PH: 7.5
TA: 250
CYA: 0
Found some of the chlorine tablets in the pool supplies and dropped those into the floater thing. I don't know if I should SLam or try and juggle getting this right. I have some granular stabilizer, but otherwise out of chlorine til tomorrow. Pool is clear with slight orangish haze......but we are on well water so this is the norm.
Where do I start? Is it beer thirty yet?

 

[robertmee]

Start by adding stabilizer to get your Cya to 30. Use pool math link at top and enter your gallons and cya current of 0 and target of 30. Add the amount of dry stabilizer in a nylon dock and hang it in front of your return. The pucks you added will also add some cya so take that into account. What chlorine you add is quickly being burned by the sun with no cya. Second your CC of 1 is a little concerning. It means the chlorine is killing something. If it were me I'd go ahead and slam by adding bleach to get my fc to 12 after adding the cya. With new water hopefully your slam wouldn't last more than a day or two and you pass the OCLT quickly once that CC drops to .5 or less.

 

[Richard320]

Welcome!

And relax. What you just described is normal. With no CYA and probably some residual algae spores in the filter, of course you'd lose all the chlorine in just a couple hours.

If you know how many pucks you added, you can get a close estimate of how much CYA you've added that way using Effects of Adding Chemicals in poolmath. Most pucks weigh about 8 ounces. And they're trichlor. If they're the tablets, make your best guess as to how much by weight. Your TA is high enough that the acidity in the trichlor won't mess up your pH.

My advice: grab a cold one and read some more. Pool School - ABCs of Pool Water Chemistry is a good place to start. You'll need more CYA. And you'll need a lot of bleach. Whether or not you need to SLAM the pool is unknown just yet. Anyway... the pH is good, so that is settled for now. You want to add enough CYA to get to about 30. Poolmath will tell you how much to add. Recommended Pool Chemicals will tell you what and how. As soon as that is in the sock and dissolving, then raise FC to about 10. Do it again around sunset tomorrow and leave the pump running and then check it after the sun goes down and do the Overnight Loss Test. If it passes, you're happening. If not, assume all the CYA is there and raise the FC to 12 and perform the SLAM.

If the Iron does not precipitate out and get filtered away, use the search box for Iron. There are a lot of threads.