First SLAM (woohoo!)

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I think things regressed a bit. I got home this evening and the FC was 3, down from 22 this morning. The water seemed cloudier, but it's dark out so it may not be worse. Brushing kicked up a ton of "dust" though, hopefully dirt not algae. But I'm going to get someone to brush 2x daily moving forward.

PH was 8.2+ still.

The pump was also off when I got home, I must have had it on timer by accident. It's definitely on for good now.
 
Ran out of chlorine, could only make it to 18 tonight. Looks like I'm waking up early anyway to get some chemicals.

Side note: can MA increase in concentration over the winter due to evaporation or something? I've gotten it on my skin before no problem, but it left a nice little burn this time.
 
pinguy said:
Ran out of chlorine, could only make it to 18 tonight. Looks like I'm waking up early anyway to get some chemicals.

Side note: can MA increase in concentration over the winter due to evaporation or something? I've gotten it on my skin before no problem, but it left a nice little burn this time.
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On dry skin, it can take a while to leave a burn. On wet skin, the heat of hydration will cause a thermal burn. You skin was either sweaty or wet.
 

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On the plus side, things are looking pretty clear again today.

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However when I brush I still get big white clouds. I think it is calcium though. Here are the flakes I mentioned earlier that the vac is picking up:

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They fizz up really quickly when pouring MA on them. That means it's calcium, correct? Is this anything to be concerned about when it comes to the plaster?
 
Yup, that's calcium carbonate scale. Interesting that your water chemistry got so far out of balance.

No matter. You might try manually vacuuming it up and then you're probably going to want to do a deep clean of your filter after all the flakes are gone.
 
pinguy said:
Acid demand has been insane since the beginning. I'm going to add another gallon of MA today (blindly), but I'm pretty confident I won't have any LOW pH problems.
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I think you need to clean that calcium carbonate out of your pool. It is partly responsible for your acid demand. As you lower the pH, the calcium carbonate will dissolve, add carbonate to your water and shift the pH back up. It's not as fast-acting as sodium carbonate, but it has similar effect.

Can you manually vacuum it out? Then you should strip down your DE filter and make sure the grids aren't all limed-up.
 
JoyfulNoise said:
I think you need to clean that calcium carbonate out of your pool. It is partly responsible for your acid demand. As you lower the pH, the calcium carbonate will dissolve, add carbonate to your water and shift the pH back up. It's not as fast-acting as sodium carbonate, but it has similar effect.

Can you manually vacuum it out? Then you should strip down your DE filter and make sure the grids aren't all limed-up.
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I have the robot going now and will get the manual vac shortly. I don't see any visible flakes on the bottom. Just white clouds when I sweep

The filter grids were taken out and cleaned by the pool closing company last year.

My pump shut off again and the time reset. No error on the screen, it just reverts to scheduled mode. No breakers popped or anything. How can I troubleshoot?
 
pinguy said:
No I mean they took them out to clean them and then replaced them. I added 5.5ish pounds of DE at the startup this year.
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Ok.

If you vacuum up the carbonate scale you will, at the very least, need to backwash after that. That calcium scale is acting as a source of alkalinity that is keeping your acid demand high. You want to get rid of it as much as possible.

The other way to get rid of it is to drop your pH and keep it as low as possible and then it will start to dissolve. However, that means you will be putting that calcium back into solution.

My preference would be to get it out of the water but it's up to you.
 

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