Newbie Wanting Input...again

[hatchiedawg]

Okay so I was out for a week or so and the pool got slightly neglected with several big storms. So when I returned the pool had green tinge with little visibility. So I put about 3 gallons of bleach and loaded my feeder up with 3" chlorine tabs (yes, I know most don't approve, but my CYA has been low and I do frequent backwashing with a a sand filter so it's not such a big deal). Anyway, the green went away and has now been replaced by general cloudiness. My drop test kit came in a day or so later (which is not the one I should have gotten as it does not do CYA, again I know). Anyway here are my current numbers with the cloudy water with only about two feet of visibility.

Using my drop test kit:
Free Chlorine: 1.0
Combined Chlorine: 2.5
PH: 7.6
Total Alkalinity: 275

Using test strips:
Total Hardness: 250
CYA: 20 (or less)

Okay, so what to do for the cloudiness and where to go from here aside from getting a better test kit and dropping trichlor tabs completely, of course.

I have an inground with vinyl liner and sand filter. Went through an abscorbic acid treatment about a month or so ago and looked really good afterward, but I think the chlorine went way down during the week off. Filter has always been run 24/7.

Thanks for the input and the patience!

 

[mpacheco72]

It definitely looks like you need to shock, but without an accurate CYA reading it's hard to say how much bleach you'll need to use.

 

[duraleigh]

You clearly need to shock the pool. Perhaps not the way you have done in the past. If you follow the article exactly as it is written in Pool School you can get your pool clear.

As mentioned above the only issue is not knowing how high to elevate your chlorine because of the lack of a valid CYA test (strips just really aren't reliable... particularly, it seems, with CYA.