Conversion Help- Baquacil to Chlorine

[jgindy27]

Well, we have had it with Baquacil and threw bleach in our pool on Thursday evening. Today, it is pretty murky and we just vacuummed as best as possible from the outside of the pool. It's not as brown and nasty as I thought it might be. My neighbor gave us the advice on dumping the bleach in, but now, we're not sure what to do. Kind of dumb, but, we had just reached boiling point with algae and Baquacil!

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[JasonLion]

You need to keep adding bleach each day, or several times a day if you can manage it, till the water clears. When you add bleach you want to aim for a FC level of 15 (test the level, then add enough to bring it back up to 15. When the water finally turns clear you check to see if you are losing FC overnight and continue bringing FC up to 15 till you don't lose any FC overnight.

While this is happening you need to run the pump/filter 24/7 and keep an eye on the filter pressure, cleaning/backwashing as needed. When the conversion is complete you will need to replace your filter media (sand, DE, cartridge).

The water will often go through several different colors during this process.

 

[Wolfmarsh]

Look at this thread:

http://www.troublefreepool.com/viewtopic.php?t=1953

for some step by steps that a couple people worked on.


Also, i posted my pics of my conversion in a thread in this forum as well, check those out and maybe they might help you feel more comfortable about the "changes" your pool is going through. I know that once mine turned bright orange, my wife flipped out and claimed I had ruined the pool .

 

[jgindy27]

Ok, so I got a cheapo test kit from Home Depot. My water shows up as less than 0.4 and the range on this test is from 0.4-3.0. When everyone is saying 15ppm, is that really 1.5?
Thanks for help!

 

[Guest]

No, 15 ppm free chlorine is correct. You need a better test kit, either a Taylor K-2006 or the TF testkit sold at www.tftestkits.com

You're really going to need a good test kit anyway so you might as well get it now. It's going to save you a lot of money in the long haul! I would recommend the TF Testkit because it's a better value for the money since it includes some extra tests, does not include two tests that are not really useful (acid and base demand) and give you a lot more of some of the reagents that get used up pretty fast.

The conversion process can take a bit of time. How much time depends on how well you keep the FC level at 15 ppm. Once the conversion is done you will need to replace the filter medium. For sand filters this means changing the sand, for cartridge filters a new cart and for DE filters new DE and probably new grids.