Hi All,
It's been great reading all of the very helpful information here about pool chemistry and trying to get up to speed on this new pool in this new house I bought a couple weeks ago. I'll do my best to explain what's been going on in those few weeks, and I appreciate any help you can provide.
I bought a house about a month ago and it had a pool. Wasn't looking for a house with a pool, but my fiancee was certainly happy about it. Anyway, the house was nice even without the pool so we bought it. Moved in about 3 weeks ago and had a 'pool guy' open the pool. He was just the guy that closed it last season so I just let him go for it because it was cheap. Problem was he also sold me a bunch of chemicals I probably didn't need like algaecide and stain / scale stuff. I assume he put some shock and algaecide in when he opened it as well. He definitely poured a couple bottles of stuff in there. At the time I didn't know much about the chemistry.
I got the automatic vacuum going with the help of a new bag and got most if not all the leaves out of the bottom. The water was at the point where I could start to see the drain in the deep end (8ft) when I had to leave for about 10 days for my wedding and honeymoon. I threw the solar cover on and left the pool frog in with it loaded with trichlor tabs. I get back from my honeymoon to a very cloudy blue pool and the solar cover blown half off from some big storms we had while I was gone. Not that big a deal so I just took the cover off and started running the pump and frog thinking it would clear. Went and had a water test at leslie's and everything looked ok except there wasn't any chlorine. So they sold me some oxygen shock that they said would free some up because there was 'locked up chlorine' which now I know is bogus.
So around a week ago I start getting wise to the leslie's racket and decided to start googling and found this awesome site. Bought tons of clorox at sam's club and a TF100 that just arrived today. Been doing a lot of testing and came up with an interesting anomaly that I can't explain and I'll also post my latest results.
The latest test from leslie's says my CYA is 60. Ok not bad so I've putting bleach in trying to clear the pool up. But with the TF100 CYA test I'm getting a zero CYA reading. I've read the directions very carefully and also tested probably 5 times just to be sure. I can clearly see the black dot even when the tube is completely full. My chlorine tests throughout the day don't show a huge loss of chlorine from sun, but I did take some trichlor out of the frog (took the frog out of the pool) and put them in the skimmer just to get some CYA in there if there really was none.
Any ideas as to why there's such a big difference in the tests? Is leslie's just incompetent and I don't have any CYA due to neglect of the pool the last year or so? The previous owners didn't use the pool much I'm told by the neighbors. I'm almost positive I just have to shock and keep it there to clear the water, but with the CYA being so off I'm just not sure where to go from here or how much chlorine to put in. Thanks very much for any help and my latest test results from this afternoon are below.
FC - 10.5
CC - 1
CYA - 0
TA - 230
pH - 7.6
CH - 280
It's been great reading all of the very helpful information here about pool chemistry and trying to get up to speed on this new pool in this new house I bought a couple weeks ago. I'll do my best to explain what's been going on in those few weeks, and I appreciate any help you can provide.
I bought a house about a month ago and it had a pool. Wasn't looking for a house with a pool, but my fiancee was certainly happy about it. Anyway, the house was nice even without the pool so we bought it. Moved in about 3 weeks ago and had a 'pool guy' open the pool. He was just the guy that closed it last season so I just let him go for it because it was cheap. Problem was he also sold me a bunch of chemicals I probably didn't need like algaecide and stain / scale stuff. I assume he put some shock and algaecide in when he opened it as well. He definitely poured a couple bottles of stuff in there. At the time I didn't know much about the chemistry.
I got the automatic vacuum going with the help of a new bag and got most if not all the leaves out of the bottom. The water was at the point where I could start to see the drain in the deep end (8ft) when I had to leave for about 10 days for my wedding and honeymoon. I threw the solar cover on and left the pool frog in with it loaded with trichlor tabs. I get back from my honeymoon to a very cloudy blue pool and the solar cover blown half off from some big storms we had while I was gone. Not that big a deal so I just took the cover off and started running the pump and frog thinking it would clear. Went and had a water test at leslie's and everything looked ok except there wasn't any chlorine. So they sold me some oxygen shock that they said would free some up because there was 'locked up chlorine' which now I know is bogus.
So around a week ago I start getting wise to the leslie's racket and decided to start googling and found this awesome site. Bought tons of clorox at sam's club and a TF100 that just arrived today. Been doing a lot of testing and came up with an interesting anomaly that I can't explain and I'll also post my latest results.
The latest test from leslie's says my CYA is 60. Ok not bad so I've putting bleach in trying to clear the pool up. But with the TF100 CYA test I'm getting a zero CYA reading. I've read the directions very carefully and also tested probably 5 times just to be sure. I can clearly see the black dot even when the tube is completely full. My chlorine tests throughout the day don't show a huge loss of chlorine from sun, but I did take some trichlor out of the frog (took the frog out of the pool) and put them in the skimmer just to get some CYA in there if there really was none.
Any ideas as to why there's such a big difference in the tests? Is leslie's just incompetent and I don't have any CYA due to neglect of the pool the last year or so? The previous owners didn't use the pool much I'm told by the neighbors. I'm almost positive I just have to shock and keep it there to clear the water, but with the CYA being so off I'm just not sure where to go from here or how much chlorine to put in. Thanks very much for any help and my latest test results from this afternoon are below.
FC - 10.5
CC - 1
CYA - 0
TA - 230
pH - 7.6
CH - 280