Blue very cloudy water

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R

ronkel

0
May 27, 2014
5
Sanford. NC
Hi!.....I am new here but not to having a pool. I have had this pool for about 15 years and have never had this much trouble. The water is a bluish white color and been that way for 3 weeks. When I backwash the filter, it is like thin milk comming out and is staining my driveway white. I used to use the BBB method but somehow got away from it. I am using cal-hypo to shock with and have also put about 10 gal of 8% bleach in just recently. The underside of the clear basket cover on my pump is solid white(cannot see through it), very hard to scrape off using finger nail. Have also noticed white around the waterline. Thought it was just bleached out from chlorine ( and most is) but can scrape off with finger nail. I also quit using a cover many years ago because I could not get it out without dumping the 1000lbs (not quite) of wet leaves back into pool. I went to just a leaf net and now much easier but still get some in bottom of pool. This year I took off leaf net, water was green so started putting in shock and water turned bluish green and then onto blue. Started clearing up so I could a big dark clump in that corner that everything goes to. Got leaf net and started getting them out, ofcourse left a green slimmy mess in water but would settle and start to clear again. Got another big net full out and water turned green so added shock, water turned blue and cloudy and have not seen the bottom since. Have been putting 4 to 6 lbs daily in and still no improvement. I go to pool store and they tell me to keep shocking and vacuum to waste. I can't see anything to vacuum. I was brushing the sides and bottom, but pole slipped into pool and cannot find it. Today I took a sample to store again and he gave me (whoops....sold) some floc and said to put in and cut off pump and let sit overnite and then vacuum to waste tomorrow. I had a taylor test kit up till a tornado came through here 2-3 years ago and I guess someone in northern NC has it now, just havent replaced it. Anyway hear are my test figures from this morning:

FC - OVR 20.43
TC - OVR 21.63
CC - 1.2
PH - 7.9
Hardness - 450
Alkalinity - 83
CA - 34
Copper - .1
Iron - .1
Sat. Index - 0.39

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. I am at the point of ordering dirt to fill in.
Thanks
 
Welcome to TFP!

I can't tell everything that is going on, but clearly some of what is happening is calcium clouding. Your hardness level is already a bit high and PH is on the high side as well. Combine that with adding cal-hypo and you are essentially certain to get some calcium clouding. Calcium clouding can't usually be completely cleared by the filter. You need to get the CSI to be a little negative and the calcium clouding should clear right up. Now there might be something else going on as well, so that may or may not solve the whole problem, but it should get rid of the milkiness.

To lower CSI, reduce the PH to around 7.2 to 7.3, and then see if things start to clear up.

Separately, if your FC and TC results are correct, and I kind of doubt that, then you still have CC above 0.5 and need to continue at shock level. However, I don't believe the test results are likely to be precise enough to actually say what the CC level is.
 
Well.... you've probably read enough here to know you need a test kit, so I'll spare the stern lecture.

Milky white stuff sounds like maybe the pool store had you add phos-free. If you've been using Cal-hypo, they'll make a mess. And your CH is high enough already, so switch to liquid shock or plain old bleach to keep FC up.

Check out this recent thread, tell me if it sounds familiar.
 

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