Going out of town - pucks? PH?

[lvrpl]

I've got a trip coming up in a few weeks and was hoping for a little advice on how to handle the pool. I'll be gone for 6 days. The plan is to use pucks in a floater.

My current CYA is low at ~20 ppm, so I can afford to use pucks without creating a CYA problem, I think. Here are my questions:

-I'm losing about 2.5ppm FC per day and need to add ~30 oz of 8.25% bleach per day - how many pucks should I put in the floater? I've seen it mentioned that PoolMath has some info on how much an 8 oz puck will affect FC and CYA, but I can't seem to find that...sorry if I'm missing something obvious.

-Should I just leave the floater gate set wide open? I've never used a floater before so have no experience there.

-My PH has been rising most days from ~7.6 to 8.1 or 8.2 (had a new plaster completed about 45 days ago). As a result, I've been adding 15-20 oz of acid daily. Will the pucks help stabilize the PH at all? And how bad would it be if my PH raises unchecked for the days that I'm gone?

Thanks for any help!

 

[MarianParoo]

I can only answer the pool math part. Fill in all your parameters, especially pool volume at the top and near the bottom select troublefreepool in the drop down box in the last yellow section. Below that is where you find effects of adding.

 

[smackdab]

Looks like you need about 3-4 oz of trichlor to dissolve per day. That is three 8oz pucks total for 6 days. 3.5 oz trichlor will lower your pH 0.14 daily and you have been dropping it by 0.6 daily so they probably wont be acid enough to keep your ph down. You will probably want to fully open the gate on the floater and probably move it next to a return because they are hard to predict the dissolve rate. You will probably just have to take 3, 4, or 5 tablets and make a test run and see what happens.

 

[duraleigh]

It will be fairly easy for you to do exactly as you plan.......3-5 pucks for 6 days in a <20 ppm CYA environment and I believe you will come back to a clear pool.

 

[lvrpl]

Thanks for the input everyone. Should I be worried about having a high PH for a few days? I think I'd try to bring it down to ~7.2 on the day I leave, and then get some acid from the pucks, but it sounds like I'll still probably come home to a PH of over 8 or 8.2 even. How bad is that for 3 or 4 days?