Green Swamp with Dreams of Sparkling Oasis - help!

[pokey]

OK, so I'm losing about an inch of water a day in sunny Dallas, Texas. This may be a leak and it may be evaporation. I do have bubbles in one of my returns and in the pump basket so I'm thinking there's a crack in a skimmer throat. Regardless, I let my pool go to seed while I fooled around looking for leaks and measuring water levels and doing bucket tests and now I just want to get my pool back to where it was so I don't have a green swamp of standing water during mosquito season in July. My BBB conversion was going so well this spring/summer and now I've completely lost all the ground I'd gained.

I'm following the Swamp-to-Oasis method and my CYA is between 60 and 70 (although I hear murky water can give you falsely high levels) and my pool's 15000 gallons so I poured in 5 182 oz jugs of Chlorox (Maybe half a jug too much).

My FC numbers have been as follows:

TIME FC
9:50 pm 7/13/12 27.5
10:20 pm 7/13/12 31
11:45 pm 7/13/12 26.5
12:55 am 7/14/12 25

A little weird, but whatever, it's circulating I suppose. Among my problems could be erratic circulation. But it's not dropping as quickly as I assumed it would. Since I want to keep it above 24 at a minimum (murky water's effect on CYA results notwithstanding), my inclination is to pour in another jug, leave the system running all night and check on it in the morning.

Anyone have any ideas why the FC is not plummeting as one would expect? I promise there is no shortage of algae in the pool - you can't see the bottom and I haven't put bleach into it for two weeks now (water level tests combined with business travel all last week).

Tomorrow and Sunday I have all day to brush and test and pour (assuming I don't run out of chlorine testing reagent, I should have stocked up - is there a way to use less water and fewer drops?) so I'm hoping I can get this taken care of. I know I'm supposed to be backwashing frequently, right? Do I need to replace the DE in my filter every time I backwash? Honestly I've had the pool for a year now and I've only backwashed and replaced the DE once, I feel like I should be doing that more, but the psi has never gone up from where it was a year ago.

Anyway, I'll keep letting people know how it's going - any advice would be appreciated. I've seen so many success stories on here, I'm hoping that I'll be able to turn this thing around as well.

 

[pokey]

I should add that I poured the chlorine in at 9:15 pm.

 

[techguy]

I would assume all of your loss is due the CL fighting the algae since you are not losing any to the sun. You are above the 20 for shock at CYA70 so you are making good progress. It's never fast enough.

Do you find yourself standing at the microwave telling it to hurry up? I know I do..

 

[frogabog]

I think you could do a 5ml sample and count each drop as 1ppm. That would cut your drops in half.

I also think your losses are ok looking, and that first one was just because it hadn't circulated fully yet. Imagine if you were at shock level and lost 5ppm in one hour like you saw earlier. That's a big loss. Even 1ppm per hour is enough to set one back pretty quickly if not kept on top of. At shock level. So, since you're so far above that you've seen a big chunk of algae get killed at first, and then a more consistent death rate afterwards. And, you haven't had to add chlorine so you're all itchy for something to do :~}

I think I'd be far more comfortable running a few ppm's above shock level if I was doing a swamp. Leaves you some room to sleep for sure...