Ok time to start documenting.
I am going to try to give a lot of information in a smaller thread so that you don't have to read 8 miles of postings also I will try to add some of the items I was thinking about but seemed to never be mentioned or at least I may have missed it.
Why am I converting, well because of cost and that seems to be the only reason. This year was the last straw, took off my cover and pink algae everywhere (water mold), started immediately to brush, and kill with Shock and CDX, a lot of it, then changed my sand, now my water is crystal clear, well for a month or so, probably because my numbers were so high from getting rid of the mold. My water most of the swimming season is clear not cloudy, I am always fighting green algae growing on the sides of the pool and clumping on the bottom of the pool where it looks like small piles of sand. So I end up buying Sanitizer/algaecide $34.00 (2qt bottle) and Shock $19.00 (1gal bottle), from the point the algae shows up I and maybe you are immediately playing catch up, you have to put in the stuff, find out that you didn't kill it all, starts to grow back within a week, got to buy more, algaecide doesn't seem to work at all, calcium and alkalinity is starting to go up in price and come to find out you don't even need the calcium they recommend for a vinyl pool. Now the pool although it is clear it has a very light green tint to it, again, algae is growing, dangit, Anyway.....
26 July I added 2 gal Baquacil shock so that I could get rid of the algae because of my daughters birthday on 1 August, I figured I would start the conversion after that on a weekend. I have not put any baqua products into my pool since this date and am letting the baqua numbers come down as far as I can get them.
Also figured I might as well get 200 lbs of sand since I will need it, store it in the garage until I am ready for the change. Ordered the test kit on 26 July, started collecting the bleach, hopefully will have all that I need by the time I am ready to convert.
Went and got my water sampled to give everyone a sample of my baqua starting point.
28 July (evening)
Baqua Sanitizer – 57
Alkalinity – 93
PH Level – 7.7
Calcium – 160
Baqua Oxidizer – 238
06 Aug (evening)
Baqua Sanitizer – 18
Alkalinity – 70
PH Level – 7.6
Calcium – 190
Baqua Oxidizer - 102
Started this at 5pm this afternoon and will try to show on the hour, based on recommendations from different threads to make the conversion go a little quicker and I don't want to have to drag it out.
Started August 06, 1700 using the pool calculator -
DAY 1
1700 - FC was 0ppm of course. Added 423oz or 2.3 182oz bottles to get the FC up to 15ppm. Cheated used 2.5 (was easier to measure) LOL
1730 - FC was 1ppm for a loss of 14ppm. Added 2.3 to get the FC up to 15ppm
1830 - FC was 1ppm for a loss of 14ppm. Added 2.3 to get the FC up to 15ppm
1930 - FC was 5ppm for a loss of 10ppm. Added 1.5 to get the FC up to 15ppm
2030 - FC was 5ppm for a loss of 10ppm. Added 1.5 to get the FC up to 15ppm
2130 - FC was 5ppm for a loss of 10ppm. Added 1.5 to get the FC up to 15ppm
enough for tonight, going to bed, will start in the morning again.
hope I am doing this, pink takes a little bit while swirling to show up, once there use a piece of paper and swirl as I add until the pink disappears. double check with OTO or blue box that came with kit. I think I'm color stupid but we will keep going and see what happens. Wife watched me do it and seems that the pink is going away at 10 drops, comes back in a few seconds later but think that is right.