My New Pool

[brajgreg]

So I did bring my CYA down to about 50, but I just was reading around and saw that if your pool gets a lot of direct sunlight (I live in Houston, TX and it's starting to get hotter and my pool is in direct sunlight for probably 70% of the daylight hours), you might want to bump the level up to 70-80. I'm using bleach to chlorinate my pool now, but as stated in the original post, I do have the in-line feeder with tri-chlor tablets. Should I use some of those to raise my CYA back up a bit? I don't think it's an emergency, but I thought if it would help something I'd go ahead and use some of those to bring the level back up some (instead of buying CYA and adding it specifically).

Any thoughts? Will the higher CYA cause me to use more bleach this summer? I'm not really sure what the idea behind having a higher CYA is.

 

[linen]

Any thoughts? Will the higher CYA cause me to use more bleach this summer? I'm not really sure what the idea behind having a higher CYA is.

Hopefully others with more direct experience in your climate will chime in here....

My understanding is that there is kind of a sweet spot for cya where much of your chlorine is protected from the sun, but still enough chlorine being available quickly use as a sanitizer when needed. This sweet spot can vary a lot and has many factors including amount of sun (and sun angle), amount of swimmers, other organics getting in the pool, temperature, etc. So, up to a point, a slightly higher cya concentration might benefit you since it will protect your chlorine in the pool from the sun (some is chemically bonded to the cya) and may reduce your overall chlorine consumption.

You may have to experiment find this "sweet spot" and you are at a good cya level as a starting point. If you are having trouble keeping your FC level appropriately high during the day for your cya level (and you are confident that it is not being consumed by organics and/or high swimmer loads), then a small bump up in cya concentration might help you. Remember, easy to add hard to remove!

Search the forums for something like "cya sunlight" (using the google search at lower left of page) and you will find people in more southernly locations that run a little higher. Be aware that many posters that are using higher cya levels are doing so in combination with a salt water chlorine generator (swg), which I believe is not your case?

 

[Bama Rambler]

Our climate is about the same and I get full sun all day long. I keep my CYA at between 50 and 60 ppm. I find that I use about 2 ppm FC per day at that level. I wouldn't go much higher than that unless I had a swcg.