Any advice on where I should start?

[luma33]

I am new to the site and reading through everything is making m head spin. Here is my situation, our pool is about 8 yrs old (we bought the house about 5 yrs ago) and we have been maintaining. We have staining and have just been shocking and putting in Chlorine tabs. I left this job to my husband and he is now wanting to give it to me.

Our pool is 11,000 gal and plaster. I checked the levels today and here is what I got:
FC .5
BR 1
TC .5
pH 7.5
TA 170 ppm
CH 620 ppm
CYA 90 ppm

My goal is to lower the CYA and start stain removal. Realistically I do not want to partially drain the pool - we live in Houston and we have really hard water here.

Any advice on where I should start? Stains then CYA/BBB?

Thank you!

Steffanie

 

[JasonLion]

The first step is to stop using chlorine tablets. They contain CYA, and your CYA level is already too high. At least for now, and possibly permanently, you should switch to using either bleach or liquid chlorine to add chlorine to the pool.

If that were my pool, I would replace about 25% of the water. You can get away without doing that, but it will make everything more difficult.

The next step is to make sure you have completely gotten rid of all of the algae. Give that your FC level is so low and CYA is so high, I suspect that you currently have algae. You don't want to start on the stains until the algae is completely gone.

Because of your high TA and CH levels, you don't ever want your PH going over 7.5. Until you can get either TA or CH down, you should lower the PH to 7.2 each time it gets back up to 7.5.

By the by, you don't need to note the BR level. BR stands for Bromine, which you are not using.

 

[luma33]

Thanks!

We will stop the Cl tabs and start with bleach. We have never drained the pool, I may have toconsult a pool guy to at least see how it is done safely. I used the pool calculator and will start that tomorrow evening. What recommendations do you have for the algae? What should I use? Then should I get a stain id kit for the staining?

Thanks a million. Gonna order new cartridges for the pump too.

 

[waste]

Welcome to TFP!!

It'll be hard to reduce the CYA without draining (though R/O [reverse osmosis] could be an option).

If you haven't already, please check out all the links in my sig.

You're showing both chlorine and bromine readings - you can only have one or the other It's probably chlorine.

(I see Jason has responded while I was typing - I'd trust his take on the chems over mine so I'll just stop here and reiterate my welcome and remind you to please keep up the questions as long as you have any )

 

[JasonLion]

Do a little reading at Pool School, see the button near the top right of every page of this site. There is lots of good stuff, but one important one for right now is Defeating Algae.

A stain ID kit may be overkill, it won't hurt aside from costing some money and you many end up needing it, but we can probably figure out what kind of stains you have without it. I would start by holding a vitamin C tablet against one of the stained areas for 30 seconds and look to see if the stain lightens in that spot or not.

 

[luma33]

UPDATE!

Decided to drain the pool, found a replastering/renovation company with a great quote to drain and clean. So now that we will have fresh, clean water when should I start BBB?

Hopefully everything will be sparkling and new!

 

[anonapersona]

What do they do when they clean the pool?

You can probably find out what sort of chemicals you will need to replace by playing with the Pool Calculator. It would help to have an idea of the state of the tap water first. You know CYA will be zero. TA may be quite high in tap water, mine is 340 in The Woodlands. CH will probably be quite low, assume near zero but that might be incorrect.

Input those numbers to the calculator to see what sort of chemicals you will be buying to get the pool back to normal conditions... that is CH 150 - 350, TA 70 - 90, pH 7.5 - 7.8. If your water has high TA like mine, you will need a lot of Muriatic Acid to burn the TA down to reasonable levels; I was adding cups of MA every few days when I was trying to lower TA. You may be buying the 4 gallon packs of MA in that case. To increase CH, you may be adding something like 25 lbs of hardness increaser. To get CYA back to 30 from zero, you'll add something like 2 or 3 lbs. You may want to price all that, just so you are not surprised.