jcat said:
Piku i just read your posts, how are you doing? If my plumbing is at all functional i will be vacuming to waste and tackling the liner pull, while messing with the water chemistry, while messing with my run down fence, while working on a bathroom, while getting my 70's finished basement livable... i love being a 1st time home owner! I will take more pics the next time i pull the cover off again. I just ordered the tf100 kit, this should pin down what my chemisty is, extermlly bad!
I don't have the 70's basement (nor a basement at all) but I do have the retro urine colored carpet upstairs that I decided to just leave for now due to lack of finances. I'm in what sounds to be nearly exactly the same boat as you (first time home/pool owner). I replaced my rear picket fence but those side fences are pretty pricey at $50 or so a panel. I am going to rent a pressure washer to see if I can't spruce it up. My house thankfully is 100% functional right now so I just have to put up with the nasty old stuff until I recover from the shock of the initial purchase (and down payment).
With regards to the pool, I have a serious ammonia problem so my pool won't yet hold chlorine. When I first began, I turned the pump and filter on and had to manipulate the valves a bit to hold prime (it preferred the skimmers over the main drain for establishing prime). It ran in filter for a day or so. When I went to backwash everything fell apart and I needed a ton of gaskets. The spider gasket for the multiport valve was leaking a lot of water to waste, the 2 gaskets going into the filter housing were bad as was the drain plug gasket in the filter. Once I got that fixed I started filtering, backwashed repeatedly (2 25 pound bags of DE I went through) and vacuumed the tons of silt on the bottom to waste. My discharge hose which I got from Leslie's blew up (even though I was ultra careful with it) so now I am buying a hose from another pool store that looks to be much thicker. I _uber_ dosed the pool with bleach, trichlor and dichlor at the same time which is the only way I was able to clear the algae in the face of the ammonia problem but I wouldn't recommend it. My actions caused me to get a CYA level of 100 and now I will have to work at reducing that all summer long through lots of splashout and cannonballs
Mistakes I made:
1. Trying to dose the pool with chlorine before the solids and silt were cleaned up - don't bother. In fact it can really hurt you if you keep dosing under shock level and cause CC to build up.
2. Trying to dose the pool with too small amounts of chlorine blindly
3. Not trying to dose some of the pool water in a bucket to see how it accepted the chlorine (I could have established without wasting a bunch of money that I had an ammonia problem).
4. Not getting all the water off the cover (looks like you're past that).
5. Wrong parts - you'll quickly learn that the pool stores have no idea what they're doing. It's unbelievable!
6. Trying to save money.
7. Be very very careful with how much granular dichlor or trichlor you use to shock the pool due to CYA.
In my case a couple hundred of chlorine and a little over $100 in parts. Previous owner left poles but no vacuum head, hose, skimmer plate, skimmer baskets!, eyeball fittings on the returns, etc etc etc.
Hopefully your situation will be more typical and you won't need too much. Hopefully also your pool will hold chlorine better
With regards to how it's going, if you look to the end of the main thread I made, I posted some pics of it cleared up. The nasty brown ring near the top where the water level was lower than is also starting to fade away.