Giving up Chlorine Tabs cold turkey

Mar 9, 2017
4
katy tx
My pool was finished in October of 2015, for the past 16 months I have been using chlorine tabs and other chlorine shock treatments that have sky-rocketed my CYA levels. I have not had any major problems. Water has always been blue. (just some small algae blooms that brushed off the pebble tech and a little calcium scaling) but i have decided to completely stop the tabs per this website and switch to bleach. I have been using bleach for a week and I just received my test kit and recorded the following results. I was trying to get the FC up since my CYA has been high. I did all the tests twice to confirm.

FC 7.5
TC 7.5
PH 7.5
CH 575
TA 140
CYA 120

I have used a local pool store to test in the past and my CH and TA never seemed to be off. CYA has always been high which is what brought me here. Any advice to get me leveled out would be appreciated. Thanks
 
Hello and welcome to TFP! :wave: Great job on the TF-100. :goodjob: Now you see accurately what's happening. No doubt the CYA needs to be lowered. If I were you, I'd do a partial water exchange which is the only way to lower CYA. Easy math - if you swapped-out 1/2 of the water, that would lower CYA to about 60. That's good for summer if your pool gets full sun. We've had a bit of rain lately, so you don't want to lower your water level too much at any one time due to a possible raising water table. But the ideal goal would be to get the CYA down to about 50-60 before you do anything else. The bonus in this is that it may lower your CH a little as well if in the past you used any cal-hypo pool store products.

Once you lower the CYA, re-evaluate the water and any possibility of algae. If you need to "SLAM" to eliminate algae, that's the time to do it, after exchanging the water. Hope that helps answer your question.
 
You have come to the right place to save you some money and keep your plaster in great shape for a long time!

The above people have told you the best things to do. Listen to them and ask LOTS of questions!

Kim:kim:
 
So I've been seeing this a lot here: Clorox bleach works fine instead of "shock" (I guess that's bleach?) and the Clorox won't raise your CYA as where the Shock bleach will? Is that an accurate statement?

Sent from my 2PS64 using Tapatalk
 
So I've been seeing this a lot here: Clorox bleach works fine instead of "shock" (I guess that's bleach?) and the Clorox won't raise your CYA as where the Shock bleach will? Is that an accurate statement?

Sent from my 2PS64 using Tapatalk
No, liquid "shock" is nothing more than higher % bleach. It has no CYA
 
Yep, bleach, liquid chlorine and liquid "shock" are all exactly the same thing with different percentages. They are all sodium hypochlorite. Bleach is usually 6-8.25%, liquid chlorine is usually 10% and liquid "shock" is usually 12.5%.
 

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Stores sell a lot of products called "Shock"....there is no one product by that name so it may be liquid or granular. It may be nothing more than chlorine, or it could also include calcium or CYA. You can never tell unless you read the ingredients.

Household plain, unscented, normal indoor use bleach is nothing but liquid chlorine at about 8.25%. That is the ideal product unless you can find a higher % of liquid chlorine at a pool store. Just make sure it has no other ingredient in it.

PoolMath can advise you on how much to use for particular needs based on the % you input into the program. It can compute them all!

Yip :flower:
 
I did approximately a 60 percent water replacement. Here are my new numbers. Was hoping the CYA would drop more. The CH did come down a bunch though. I'm in Houston so it's about to get really hot. What should I do now?

New numbers...
FC 2.5
Cc 1
Tc 3.5
Cal hard 375
Alkalinity 150
Cya 90
 
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