- Aug 25, 2008
- 72
I've had a lot of trouble getting my pool started this year. Had a pump go out on me, and the pool set for about a month with no care/chemicals/circulating water. I finally got all my pump and plumbing problems worked out and started shocking the pool to get rid of the algae/green swamp. I am 37 Bottles of bleach in now and wondering what I should be doing now as the water seems "stuck" with a foamy mess on top and is not getting any clearer (the green is all gone and now it's just really cloudy water). So the water background:
CYA was at 0 when I started so I started shocking with Di-Chlor shock so I could shock and add CYA at the same time (this was when the water was a green swamp) The green swamp cleared up within 24 hours, but left very cloudy water, and my next CYA test (about 48 hours later) showed over 100 CYA (in retrospect this may have been reading undissolved/undiluted CYA from the di-chlor shock or the cloudy water could have thrown the test off, but the water in the bottle didn't look that cloudy to me). SO I did a partial drain and refill and waited 24 hours and checked the water again.
My CYA was now 0!!! Complete test results were: FC 0 CC 0 TC 0 PH 8.4 t/a 260, CH 100, CYA 0. I added muratic acid to lower the PH (my Spa Spillover causes my PH to rise consistently when running the pump 24/7) to 7.2 and waited about an hour then I added my last two bags of di-chlor shock and went to get some bleach. When I got back from Wal-mart with 12 bottles of bleach I did a full water test: FC 1.0 CC 1.0 TC 2.0 PH 7.5 T/A 240 CH 100 CYA 25. So I checked the CYA/Chlorine chart and found CYA 30 to have a 12 ppm FC Shock level and that's what I used. I have now be shocking for 48 Hours with chlorine bleach and have hit a stand still. I was just testing the FC levels and maintaining since two mornings ago. As I wasn't seeing any improvement I raised my target FC levels to 20 and kept shocking. Last night I got lazy because we got home late and I just added 6 bottles of bleach to the pool for the night without checking the FC level 1st.
This morning there is still a thin layer of foam covering the entire surface of the pool and the water is still very cloudy. So I did a full set of test results and here is what I got:
FC 43, CC 1.5, TC 44.5, PH 8.4, T/A 240, CH 110, CYA 0. I got the CYA of 0 by running the test twice, once with just straight cloudy pool water and then again with the reagents and both times read about 25 so I am guessing my CYA was always 0.
WIth 0 CYA I'm not sure how long that 43 FC will last once the sun hits the pool, but I have a few more bottles of bleach on hand. So what do I do at this point? Let the chlorine drop back down to FC 12 and keep shocking? The water clarity has not changed in 24 hours and teh foam is going nowhere. DO I need to get some CYA in there? My concern is that if I have that bacteria that eats the CYA I will just be feeding it by adding CYA into the mix?
Thanks for any help you guys can give me.
CYA was at 0 when I started so I started shocking with Di-Chlor shock so I could shock and add CYA at the same time (this was when the water was a green swamp) The green swamp cleared up within 24 hours, but left very cloudy water, and my next CYA test (about 48 hours later) showed over 100 CYA (in retrospect this may have been reading undissolved/undiluted CYA from the di-chlor shock or the cloudy water could have thrown the test off, but the water in the bottle didn't look that cloudy to me). SO I did a partial drain and refill and waited 24 hours and checked the water again.
My CYA was now 0!!! Complete test results were: FC 0 CC 0 TC 0 PH 8.4 t/a 260, CH 100, CYA 0. I added muratic acid to lower the PH (my Spa Spillover causes my PH to rise consistently when running the pump 24/7) to 7.2 and waited about an hour then I added my last two bags of di-chlor shock and went to get some bleach. When I got back from Wal-mart with 12 bottles of bleach I did a full water test: FC 1.0 CC 1.0 TC 2.0 PH 7.5 T/A 240 CH 100 CYA 25. So I checked the CYA/Chlorine chart and found CYA 30 to have a 12 ppm FC Shock level and that's what I used. I have now be shocking for 48 Hours with chlorine bleach and have hit a stand still. I was just testing the FC levels and maintaining since two mornings ago. As I wasn't seeing any improvement I raised my target FC levels to 20 and kept shocking. Last night I got lazy because we got home late and I just added 6 bottles of bleach to the pool for the night without checking the FC level 1st.
This morning there is still a thin layer of foam covering the entire surface of the pool and the water is still very cloudy. So I did a full set of test results and here is what I got:
FC 43, CC 1.5, TC 44.5, PH 8.4, T/A 240, CH 110, CYA 0. I got the CYA of 0 by running the test twice, once with just straight cloudy pool water and then again with the reagents and both times read about 25 so I am guessing my CYA was always 0.
WIth 0 CYA I'm not sure how long that 43 FC will last once the sun hits the pool, but I have a few more bottles of bleach on hand. So what do I do at this point? Let the chlorine drop back down to FC 12 and keep shocking? The water clarity has not changed in 24 hours and teh foam is going nowhere. DO I need to get some CYA in there? My concern is that if I have that bacteria that eats the CYA I will just be feeding it by adding CYA into the mix?
Thanks for any help you guys can give me.