My little swamp of horrors
So I've been lurking about on the forums for a week or so, and I get the distinct impression that it might be remiss of me not to share my woeful pool saga with you. And yes, there will be pictures
So grab your popcorn, and Dr. Peppers and pull up a pew. Now, where to begin?
Last year, we bought the proverbial worst house in the best neighborhood. It came with an 18" round above ground swamp, complete with a half deck from which you could sit and admire the size of the mosquitos breeding in it. Having an awful lot of work to do to make the inside livable, and having somehow managed to sell our old house in less than a week, and having to live in, the unliveable, we did what anyone who didn't have a clue about pools would do, we chunked a couple of mosquito dunks in the swamp, and tried to pretend it didn't exist, at least until next spring.
"Look honey, it's got its own swamp"
So, its now spring.
I had been working on getting our back patio all nice and was getting eaten alive by the mozzies, when I decided, 'hey, why don't I make a start on the pool'! That was probably my first mistake. The second mistake was deciding this at about 3pm.
So I go out there and check, the pump plugs in and works and the sand filter does different things when you turn the handle like its supposed to. Now last year, we had gone to a local pool store and told them of our swamp and they had helpfully sold us a 'leaf eater' venturi style vacuum, and given us a bottle to fill with water to sample.
OK, so the pool has sat unused and uncovered for the better part of at least 3 years, and it is surrounded by trees. Now living in south Louisiana I am automatically an expert in swamps, and I can confirm, what I have before me is indeed a swamp, and a bad one. So I get down to business with the leaf eater.
Now the leaf eater seems to be mostly ineffective. Its quite hard to tell, but it seems like most of whatever horrific sludge is living at the bottom of the pool is simply passing through the net, and not many leaves are in there. This does not seem right. I decide to head on out to the pool store to get some supplies before they close for the evening. Well, its funny because apparently of the 2 pool stores in the little town in which I live, which happen to be next to each other, both keep bankers hours and were closed by 4pm. Great. So I head to Walmart. Now its not like the previous owners had left anything equipement except for one broken long pole and a vacuum head that had lost all of its little bristles. So, $189 later I walk out with a 6-way testing kit (please note, at this point I had not yet discovered this forum), a pole, a flat skimmer net, a vacuum, a hose and a box of something called green to blue, figuring it would get me started until I could get to the pool store when they opened in the morning. At 10am.
I get home and decide to attempt to vacuum. It didn't appear that there was any kind of vacuum plate left, so I took the one from the spare pool, and at this point I should probably digress and fill you in on the situation.
Having always wanted a pool I finally manged to convince the husband to get a 15' pop up about 2 years ago, mainly because the dog tore the equivalent of his knee joint and needed rehab. Yes, whining wife - no pool. Poor puppy - immediate pool purchase. I make huge use of it, while sometimes letting the dog in, and take care of it well. By the end of that summer some very good friends of ours find a massive deal on a house with an in-ground pool, only they can't sell their old house with an above ground. In order to rent it out to cover expenses they have to get rid of the pool so they can afford the insurance on it. Heck yes I'll take a free 24' AGP with all the trimmings including a deck. Now they had been running the pool on a SWG that they were sold with the pool. Needless to say it was rust city. We managed to get the warranty folks to cover part of the cost of a new wall and rails, and then we also purchased replacement parts for anything else that had more than just surface rust. Also we bought a new liner. All said and done it was about $750 in new parts. And no, we didn't take the SWG. By the time we had got done with fighting the warranty folks and finally got all the parts in, it was of course too late to put it up and swim in it, so we saved the money to get it installed and decided we would book an installation in the new year.
Then, and I swear I wasn't really looking, I found this house on zillow. A lot of work, yes, but a great deal. And hey a pool. Sadly not in ground, and not as big as what we have in boxes, but we'll just get it up and running and use it for a year, then plan on installing the bigger pool the next year, and restructuring the deck to fit (and using that for a few years or so, then power whining till I get an in ground installed, muwahahahah
- and I really hope my husband never finds this thread... :uhh
Okay, so back to the story in hand. I hook up the vacuum and it really doesn't seem to work well. Now I've emptied the skimmer basket (ewww), but there is no water shut off between the skimmer and the pump and I can't see into the pump basket seeing as the 'clear' lid is congealed with algae. Removing the lid just causes a flood. I head indoors to use my legendary 'google-fu'. Apparently I need some kind of 'skimmer door' or at 'rubber plug', but among the sites I have found I have found this one. I bookmark it as it looks like I may want to read it later.
I head outside, knowing I'm going to have to put my hand in a basket filled with doom and empty it as fast as possible while a flood commences around my feet. I do this. I really need to hose the basket and lid off with a water jet, but the faucet is coincidentally further away than our longest hose, and I don't fancy leaving it flooding. I do my best and leave the lid to the algae. It was full of junk, just full. Also the skimmer basket had a split in it. Which probably explains why. But holy heck the water now just jets out the return. However the vacuum, still not so much. Reading the lid on the skimmer, it says to use it as a vacuum plate. This makes no sense. So I decide to chunk the green to blue stuff in there to work overnight, and head back inside to the internets.
The internets teach me the following things. Apparently I need some kind of hose adapter to plug the vacuum in to a port beneath the skimmer. I assume there is one there. I cannot see that far down into the water. My 6 way test kit is Crud. I will need something much, much better. I will need bleach. Lots and lots of bleach.
The next morning I head out to the pool and its a miracle. The water is blue, and I can see black piles of I'm assuming sludge at the bottom beneath cloudy water. I'm seriously remiss for not taking a picture of this but in all fairness, it was a) my birthday and b) I was late for my own birthday lunch and c) I still had to run to the pool store.
This is where it starts to get amusing. In that sad, hang your head kind of way.
I get to the first pool store. It is 10am. The doors are locked. As I turn and walk away, someone runs up to the door to open it. Apparently, they don't like to leave them open. Erm, okay. Right next the Visa/MC sign is a handwritten sign saying cash/check only. So I enquire if that is true. Apparently 'business has been bad' and they can't afford to pay the Visa fees. Okay, so I'm not into carrying huge amounts of cash on me just in case I run across a store that won't take my debit card. I mean, what if I was fixing to buy a $1000 robot cleaner. Oh well. I bet you'd take it then right? Not to mention that I also run a business and know its a major violation of the Visa agreement to refuse to take it and it really irks me when I see others pulling that Crud. But that's a vent for another time.
So I head next door to pool store number 2. No Visa sign on this door, and also only takes cash/checks. Anyway, apparently they don't carry anything that will fit my pool because its a Doughboy and the dealer is 18 miles away in the next town. But I make them test my water anyway. Because.
My numbers were something like
FC 0
TA 70
CH 120
CYA 0
PH 7.2
I hemmed and hawwed about their recommendations for chemicals and left. I wasn't about to buy any and since I don't carry cash or a check book on any given day of the week, I couldn't anyway.
So I leave my birthday get together early because I've got to drive 18 miles to a pool store that hopefully has parts for my pool, and yay! they take credit cards. So I get myself new skimmer basket, a skimmer weir door (how do you loose something like that? including the hinge part
) a vacuum adapter, a leaf rake - something with small holes to the bag, a brush and a timer. Now at this point, I should add something else. Yesterday when it was flooding, I was mildly horrified with having to plug and unplug the pump to turn it on and off. You see, firstly it was sitting on a couple of half rotten 2x12s, the cord attached to it had a DIY plug on it and it was fixing to come off. Also it was plugged in to a regular outlet.
The first person to ask me if the pool was bonded is going to get a nasty look...
However when I ask them for a skimmer door, they look at me blankly and ask why I need one. Well I say, I can't clean the pump lid without it flooding, how do I stop that? Bear in mind the following. From the best investigative techniques I know (google earth with timeview), the pool was probably installed new sometime between 1995-1998, since its a Doughboy, and the only area dealer is them, and they've been in business since 1978, I'm guessing they installed it, especially as its hard plumbed underground. There are no shut off valves anywhere. Well they looked at me like I was born yesterday, and told me, well, you just shove an upside down water bottle in the skimmer...
Now, at this point I have to say, I'm posting on a board, advocating a DIY pool maintainance system and having searched extensively to a solution to the floods, no where on this board, or any where on the internets (and I am widely known for my excellent google-fu) find anything that bloody simple to solve the problem. A water bottle. Nope that came from the professionals who installed it, without any valves. There is something so out of whack with this picture...
From the pool store, I head to home depot, and one long garden hose, an appliance cord, a GFCI, and in use cover later, I'm on my way to Leslies. Now I'm kind of an impatient person, so I didn't want to wait on shipping for a test kit, and I picked up what I though was good enough because it did FC and CC at Leslies. Apparently the letters FAS do make a difference. (Its all good though because at this point I do have an FAS-DPD kit on its way in the mail and I'll just have to muddle through with what I have until it gets here). My final stop was the dollar store where I literally clean them out of bleach.
Once home, after having rewired the pump and plug (and yes I am that handy, because I learned long ago if I waited for my husband to do it I'd look like this by the time it was done)
I get to vacuuming to waste. I quickly learn its a 2 person job, because having to stop and empty out the skimmer basket every 3 mins, sure is a pain. There is a lot of crud down there, including lots of leaves. So much for the leaf eater huh? I barely make any headway into the seemingly huge black piles at the bottom of the pool. Again, I wish I'd taken pictures. I didn't. I deserve your fury. At this point, I'm running out of daylight, there is rain a couple of days away, and I think I should start shocking or I'll just get more algae forming and cleaning it out will be for naught. So I dump enough chlorine in get it up to shock levels according to 'the' pool calculator I've now found thanks to TFP. I sacrifice one of my knee highs to hang CYA in front of the return, to get it up to around 30-40 so at least the sun is one less thing chomping my dollar store bleach. I also dump some bicarb in, to bring my TA up.
It didn't seem right to have a pool *this* bad without a frog infestation...
Day 3. Sadly, my pool is back to murky central.
I have a plan though, I'm going to alternate the leaf eater and vacuuming to waste. I start with the leaf eater. Now it's not a great design, the cinch thingy that holds on the net is quite dodgy and I don't trust it so I also tie the cord in a knot. I bring the leaf eater up to empty it, and lo and behold, no bag. Oh boy. I'm pretty sure the algae has been in there so long, it has evolved fingers and is defending itself. I decide to have a go at vacuuming some more. Maybe my vacuum will find the net. I prime my one day old walmart hose and discover there's a tiny leak. Great, I'll pick up a decent hose at the PS. But anyway, I'll do what I can before I go out. I prime the hose, connect it to the vacuum port, and go to turn off the pump so I can install the lid as vacuum plate. I turn around and my vacuum on a pole has slipped into the depths. Sigh. I go to pull it out by the hose, only to come up with, you've guessed it, the end of the hose. I am not about to dive into the sludge to find it. I'll buy another, I can always take the other vacuum head back to walmart when I find it, and poles are always useful.
I head out to PS2. They check my levels, because frankly my half assed diluting the water with distilled and multiplying the numbers for FC is not seeming very accurate. Especially since my DPD test is not changing colors when I add the reagent for TC, and I don't believe there is a snowball's chance in heck, my CC is 0.
TC 10
FC 8.1
pH 7.6
TA 130
CH 175
CYA 10
I ask about flock and shock and the girl asks me why don't I just flock it. I tell her because its fixing to rain for 2 days. She looks at me blankly. I'm not sure she comprehends the point that the rain is going to disturb the water and make settling nigh impossible. While I'm there, I decide to pick up some DE as there really is no discernible difference at all in cloudiness after 24 hours. I asked the girl if they had any. She looked at me blankly and asked what it was. I said it goes in a DE filter. She said, you mean like sand? I literally face-palmed and walked out.
I decided I'd give PS1 another try, I did after all dig out my checkbook just in case. At least she's heard of DE, but doesn't have any in stock. She can order some, it only comes in a 25lb box and is $49. I tell her I'll think on it. I ask about a hose. Its $49 and is literally identical to the walmart one, same font on the plastic ends, just a different brand name on the end and $20 more expensive. Yeah, not gonna waste money on that. I'll go return the one I have to walmart and get another POS for $20 less. She also tells me just to drain the pool and start again. Its only 7500 gallons, and water can be prorated for a pool fill apparently. To save on money on chemicals. At this point, I start to wonder whether she is right or not, or if its even worth considering putting up the other pool instead.
On the way home I swing by Lowes. Now they sell a different brand than HTH and its cheaper than walmart. I shall be shopping at Lowes from now on. Besides we are renovating our house, its not like I don't go by there on a daily basis anyway. Go figure, they also sell DE. A 25lb box. $20. I now know why business is bad at PS1. People apparently don't like to be fleeced.
While I'm in Lowes I pick up another leaf rake, because the one I bought from the dealer PS, is so fine I can't drag it through the crud in the water.
I get home, amend the water according the the pool calculator, using some Cal-Hypo I picked up at wally world seeing as my CH was low, but didn't add any stabilzer because I'm pretty sure I read somewhere it takes a while to show up on a test.
Day 4. It rained so much last night the pool is full to the brim. Still the same murky green. Okay, I decide I'm gonna throw on my cajun reeboks, and go out there and vacuum to waste in between rain showers and save me some money on refills. This sucks. Its very wet. I'm trampling in mud and to top it off the hose becomes blocked with leaves. Yeah Doughboy, fantastic design to make the valve connection to the skimmer even smaller. Really smart. Can't find the mechanical fingers we own either, so I'm reduced to using a pair of tweezers and a foul mouth to clear the clog. To top it all off, I had started writing this story out on my iPad and then lost it, when 2 hours into typing (between breaks for testing and adding chemicals and vacuuming between rain showers) I had to plug it in and lost everything I'd typed. At that point I lost my sense of humor for about 2 days. I decided to have a go with the Lowes leaf rake, and I have to say, that did about the best job of hauling out crud from the swamp. I filled a trash can full of foul smelling sludge and leaves.
Day 5. No change in the swamp. Spend the day raking and testing and adding chemicals. I have now resorted to 'bright orange' on the OTO test as an acceptable means of whether or not I have enough bleach in there. I don't trust either of the local pool stores, my DPD test doesn't seem to be all that accurate especially since I'm having to dilute and multiply to try and get above the 5ppm range on the test. I wish I had my new FAS-DPD test kit in already. Now I've been brushing the whole pool as best I can every day right before I head inside for the night, but there's just this really nasty ring around the waterline. So today I go at it with a handheld scrubber and get it as clean as I can. The liner is all bleached out anyway, and is probably the original liner, at least since the deck was built around it. You can see why in the froggy picture! That's kind of why I'm not too worried about fading it with chlorine, but a dirty ring, is not going to help those CCs come down when I finally get to test for them nor my feelings about swimming in it. (I'm the kind of girl who wouldn't be seen dead in a dirty looking pool, or a swimsuit :uhh: I gotta start working on that diet, or taller fences)
Day 6. Concidentally today. No change in the cesspool in the backyard. None. I decide to test the CYA again, because of all the rain/vacuuming to waste and because its been a few days since I added some, and hopefully it will appear in the test. The water is so murky I strain it with a coffee filter, a tip which I vaguely remember reading about. Todays figures with the Leslie's kit.
FC 12
TC 12 (yeah, right I WANT MY TEST KIT NOW WAHHHHHHH)
CYA 50
CH 220
TA 120
pH 7.5
I head out to the pool, add my bleach and get to leaf raking. I'm no longer getting much up with each sweep. I decide to have a go at vacuuming. Now last time I vacuumed, every 3 mins I had to stop and empty the basket. So this time, I'm not losing suction. So I keep going. And going, and I notice that my water levels and getting to the point where I might be able to suck it down below the return. This gets me thinking. There had been no improvement at all in 6 days of filtering. I should probably take the top of the filter, shove a hose down in there and try and clean the sand as best I can. There are no water shut off valves on the pool and I hadn't thought of a way to get them below the return in order to be able to do this before. Also there's the problem of it being hard plumbed with no unions. Well it gets down below the return. I've had enough of my little swamp not clearing, I've just vacuumed to waste blindly from full to below return and gotten very little in the way of crud in the skimmer basket, so there should be some color change in the water surely. I have to take the top of the filter. If I have to cut the hard return pipe, then so be it. I have to fix it so it can be disconnected in the future anyway, and put in valves. Now I know to lift straight up on the top, so I don't damage the lateral assembly, so I do. Off the top comes, complete with half the pipe that attaches to the laterals. So now I think I have a good idea of why my pool wasn't clearing...
Thank heavens I have a spare filter.
Tomorrows plan involves parts for putting the plumbing back together, some valves, 200 lbs of sand and lots of pictures.
:
. 
So I'm going to have to set up the 'new' filter next to it and moving the old one will be a job for the husband. He is useful when it comes to brute force. Although he did suggest I try and tip the old filter over to empty it. 
Stay the course.