Good Day All!
I've been stalking this and other forums and resources for a while. I currently live in the Bahamas and purchased a home which came with a pool, unfortunately or not I have not yet decided! The house is 10 years old and I assume the pool is too. I'll amend this to my signature but here it is:
15'x30'x4' avg, 13,500 gal, IG plaster, 1 HP Hayward pump, Hayward EC65/75 sqft cartridge filter, 1.5" piping, pool girl on occasion
When we put the deposit on the house, the homeowners stopped the pool and yard maintenance and wham everything went green. We got them to resume it until we officially had the keys. It's been a PITA with different renovations, much worse than we thought one project leads into the next one, we've had a couple of algae blooms since then and it's been about 5 months.
A little history here - the Bahamas is one of those places where your grandaddy showed you what to do and you do that, no learning or trying to do things better. So I'm pretty sure every pool company here started from the one or two here decades ago. Their basic solution is the tablets, shock it once a week, throw granules in, and scrub and vacuum twice a week. That's about $200 a month for our pool. Only thing they balance is the chlorine and PH, and not sure how. So we stopped it and took it over ourselves.
We've got good and getting it back, changing the DE, I even cleaned and acid washed the filter recently. The pool looks good now, needs a vacuuming but we'll get there.
[attachment=1:2431h160]13848693007590.jpg[/attachment:2431h160]
Doing a lot of research I learned about CYA and trichlor in tablets, shock, pellets, etc. I did a test, it way maxed out the CYA test kit. We drained about a third and refilled but have yet to retest, however the chlorine is being more effecting and needing less often. We've stopped using the tablets and shock and are using liquid pool bleach, 10%. We have the HTH 6-Way test kit but are out of CYA reagent, which I'll get this week.
So short of having the full test results available, which I'll follow up with, here's what I want to do, in no particular order:
1) I have purchased a Jandy APURE35PLG AquaPure Ei Water Chlorinator to install and obviously add salt to the pool. Since we're using the liquid bleach now, this should be bringing our salt level up a bit anyways? We have Solar Salt for water softeners, will this be ok? I checked the pool companies and they few I checked didn't have it.
2) Add boric acid - while we don't have the 20 Mule Borax or anything similar here, we do have 1lb bottles of 100% boric acid for use in roach/ant control. Retails about $3.50/lb - is this what to use?
3) No drain acid wash - we'd like to do this ourselves using muriatic acid.
Primary question - in addition to those above - what order should I do these in? I was thinking to do the acid wash, then install the chlorine generator and get that figured out, then the boric acid.
Thanks for your help and the wonderful resource here!
I've been stalking this and other forums and resources for a while. I currently live in the Bahamas and purchased a home which came with a pool, unfortunately or not I have not yet decided! The house is 10 years old and I assume the pool is too. I'll amend this to my signature but here it is:
15'x30'x4' avg, 13,500 gal, IG plaster, 1 HP Hayward pump, Hayward EC65/75 sqft cartridge filter, 1.5" piping, pool girl on occasion
When we put the deposit on the house, the homeowners stopped the pool and yard maintenance and wham everything went green. We got them to resume it until we officially had the keys. It's been a PITA with different renovations, much worse than we thought one project leads into the next one, we've had a couple of algae blooms since then and it's been about 5 months.
A little history here - the Bahamas is one of those places where your grandaddy showed you what to do and you do that, no learning or trying to do things better. So I'm pretty sure every pool company here started from the one or two here decades ago. Their basic solution is the tablets, shock it once a week, throw granules in, and scrub and vacuum twice a week. That's about $200 a month for our pool. Only thing they balance is the chlorine and PH, and not sure how. So we stopped it and took it over ourselves.
We've got good and getting it back, changing the DE, I even cleaned and acid washed the filter recently. The pool looks good now, needs a vacuuming but we'll get there.
[attachment=1:2431h160]13848693007590.jpg[/attachment:2431h160]
Doing a lot of research I learned about CYA and trichlor in tablets, shock, pellets, etc. I did a test, it way maxed out the CYA test kit. We drained about a third and refilled but have yet to retest, however the chlorine is being more effecting and needing less often. We've stopped using the tablets and shock and are using liquid pool bleach, 10%. We have the HTH 6-Way test kit but are out of CYA reagent, which I'll get this week.
So short of having the full test results available, which I'll follow up with, here's what I want to do, in no particular order:
1) I have purchased a Jandy APURE35PLG AquaPure Ei Water Chlorinator to install and obviously add salt to the pool. Since we're using the liquid bleach now, this should be bringing our salt level up a bit anyways? We have Solar Salt for water softeners, will this be ok? I checked the pool companies and they few I checked didn't have it.
2) Add boric acid - while we don't have the 20 Mule Borax or anything similar here, we do have 1lb bottles of 100% boric acid for use in roach/ant control. Retails about $3.50/lb - is this what to use?
3) No drain acid wash - we'd like to do this ourselves using muriatic acid.
Primary question - in addition to those above - what order should I do these in? I was thinking to do the acid wash, then install the chlorine generator and get that figured out, then the boric acid.
Thanks for your help and the wonderful resource here!
