I'm renting a house with a 20' x 40' inground pool (approx 24k gallons, I think).
Last year I managed to get the pool running with minimal help from a neighbor (the landlord doesn't really know anything about pools, so I'm in this alone), but this year I'm having trouble and doing it without any help.
I opened up the pool to a swampy mess, pulled out the plugs and connected the pump, filled up the water to the skimmer line, and proceeded to dump shock into the pool, and backwashing regularly. The water is starting to clear up, but the walls of the pool are quite dirty, and I still can't see to the bottom of the deep part. It also smells like something rotting a little. But the real issue I'm having, is that I can't seem to shock the pool- no matter how much chlorine I dump, my test strips come up zero. I tried using a kit that uses drops, and it confirmed- my pool has no free chlorine. This was after about 8lbs of shock. So, I went back to the store the next day (today), and bought 2 more boxes of shock (5lbs each, "shock and swim" brand granules, 10lbs total). Dumped it all in, filter running and all.
Still shows nothing on the FC test, although the water got considerably cloudier and little white dots rose to the surface- dead algae perhaps?
I guess I'm not hitting this thing hard enough, but I'm reluctant to keep throwing more money into shock if its not working. I'm really short of cash at the moment (going through a shaky job situation, just lost a lot of money), but I'm too heavily invested in this to give up (I just purchased a new solar pool cover and fixed a pipe as well as some other things before I knew I was in financial trouble).
Here's the vitals according to my test kit:
FC 0
PH ~ 7.8
Hardness 200
Cyn - can't tell from the color, it appears to be higher than 50, but still much less than 100. Maybe 60?
What do you guys recommend? Am I in over my head with this? If this is going to be a very complicated and expensive thing to recover from, maybe i'll just put the cover back on and wait until next year or something. Am I even heading in the right direction?
Thanks!
Last year I managed to get the pool running with minimal help from a neighbor (the landlord doesn't really know anything about pools, so I'm in this alone), but this year I'm having trouble and doing it without any help.
I opened up the pool to a swampy mess, pulled out the plugs and connected the pump, filled up the water to the skimmer line, and proceeded to dump shock into the pool, and backwashing regularly. The water is starting to clear up, but the walls of the pool are quite dirty, and I still can't see to the bottom of the deep part. It also smells like something rotting a little. But the real issue I'm having, is that I can't seem to shock the pool- no matter how much chlorine I dump, my test strips come up zero. I tried using a kit that uses drops, and it confirmed- my pool has no free chlorine. This was after about 8lbs of shock. So, I went back to the store the next day (today), and bought 2 more boxes of shock (5lbs each, "shock and swim" brand granules, 10lbs total). Dumped it all in, filter running and all.
Still shows nothing on the FC test, although the water got considerably cloudier and little white dots rose to the surface- dead algae perhaps?
I guess I'm not hitting this thing hard enough, but I'm reluctant to keep throwing more money into shock if its not working. I'm really short of cash at the moment (going through a shaky job situation, just lost a lot of money), but I'm too heavily invested in this to give up (I just purchased a new solar pool cover and fixed a pipe as well as some other things before I knew I was in financial trouble).
Here's the vitals according to my test kit:
FC 0
PH ~ 7.8
Hardness 200
Cyn - can't tell from the color, it appears to be higher than 50, but still much less than 100. Maybe 60?
What do you guys recommend? Am I in over my head with this? If this is going to be a very complicated and expensive thing to recover from, maybe i'll just put the cover back on and wait until next year or something. Am I even heading in the right direction?
Thanks!