Thank you both! It has been a frustrating year for this pool. Last year was pretty easy, but this year it didn't want to clear. I had used, as last year, about 2/3's well water from my iron rich irrigation well and 1/3 utility water. Last year, the iron went yellow when it hit chlorine, fell out and I vacuumed a lot of it up. I then used Natural Chemistry Metal Free and a clarifier (forget brand) and it looked quite nice at about two weeks or so into it. I was initially using bleach and Calcium Hypochlorite pool shock until I added an Intex salt to chlorine generator. This system worked well until October when some algae started trying to come in and I was ready to take it down anyway.
This year was very different. Some of it was my fault. I had gotten a deal on some pool shock, calcium kind, and used that for all my chlorine. I also used the Metal Free and clarifier, but it took about three weeks to even begin to start to clear. It was a yellow, green color. I did work the ph down with some powder, forget the brand and did add stabilizer.
I went to the pool store for help and they blamed the use of pool shock on the cloudiness which probably has some validity based on what else I've read since. They put me on trichlor tablets, however, as the main source of chlorine and the stabilizer rocketed. They also had me add acid to get the ph down which was probably right. They also sold me liquid chlorine to shock with.
Next, my six-year-old and a friend got into it after using a bunch of water color paint, and it was back to murk. After another week of cleaning, it started to clear again, but we went away for three days. I left the chlorine level high, but since I was using test strips, I am not sure how high it really was. When we got back, it was green and very murky. I gave it a lot of chlorine and went to the pool store. They said keep shocking and sold me the copper algaecide and clarifier.
After about four days, it still looked awful, so I dumped about 3/4's of the water and refilled with utility water. I also enlarged the holes for the strainers so I could get better water flow. This one had the 1 1/4 inch hole. The old one had 1 1/2 inch holes. Then I found this site and things here seemed to make sense (also gave me courage to cut that liner!). I had been having flow issues with the salt generator and the bigger holes did the trick. The 2,500 gph pump had been stalling, so I was using a 1,500 gph one. I went back to the 2,500 gph filter pump and verified the generator would work, but wanted to get the water a little better before running it.
I also bought the TFT test kit.
When the CYA came down substantially after dumping the water, I figured I would use up the remaining trichlor tables to get the CYA back up to a reasonable level. I also figured the dump would get rid of most of the copper.
I have been trying to keep the chlorine high, but slacked off a bit the last couple of days. I also had several kids in the pool and a lot of rain yesterday. I'll nuke it tonight.
I did use a polymer based algaecide along with a flocculent. The flocculent really helped drop stuff to the bottom, but I don't have a way to pump to waste other than in my yard. I'm going to come up with a solution for that. Since it was going through the filter, about half of it stayed in the pool, but it is much, much better after three nights of settling out and vacuuming. I also gave it a maintenance dose of the Metal Free which supposedly will take out copper as well as iron.
I got the salt generator going today and took advantage of the Wal-Mart deal on the Intex 14" 1,600 gph sand filter pump someone posted in another thread. It sounds as if that will be an improvement over the cartridge filter.
Beyond that, I hope that watching the numbers on the water and nuking it with chlorine will get it the rest of the way and keep it nice.I am thinking about the Boraxo/acid treatment too.
Thanks again and if you have time, suggestions would be appreciated.