dba72 said:
Thanks again for the replies guys. I'm understanding more and more now. Last night I added borax and baking soda and also 4 jugs of 6% bleach from walmart. So by looking at the chart you provide (Chlorine / CYA Chart), I am currently trying to achieve the 100 mark which might make it impossible I guess by the amount of bleach needed. I didn't do any draining or refilling because basically if I did that, the water is going to go from about 80 degrees and plummet. That would even shorten the swimming season sooner. We probably really only have about 1 month (maybe month and a half) or so left here in central Illinois. The weather has been cool lately (low 80's during the day).
I still need to research on how to use bleach to do my chlorine now instead of the tabs. I have the borax and baking soda down now I believe, just don't know how to do the bleach.
My levels for chlorine went up instantly when adding the bleach and I checked again this morning, and they were:
tot. chlorine = 8
free chlorine = 25
ph = 7.0
alk = 100
What next? Do I basically have to drain and refill to get the CYA down? Is there an article on how to take care of the pool with bleach instead of tabs?
Thanks,
James
I hear ya. I'm near Chicago and we haven't been in the pool all week because of the mild weather. What a waste.
FC plus CC equals TC so your Total Chlorine can't be 8 if your FC is 25.... is your TC 25 and your CC 8? Then your FC would be 18? We need to sort that out..... :?
What kit did you end up with? (saw your earlier posts.)
With a CYA of 100,
if it's not higher, you need to keep your FC between 7 and 12 and NEVER below 7. (The test vials go up to 100, but very often the real result is much higher, and we don't find that out until you drain 1/3 of your water and the result again comes to 100. Sometimes people will do 2 or 3 partial drains and it finally goes below 100 so in reality their CYA was likely much higher than 100. This happens very often with the use of dichlor and trichlor products)
Do you know how to use the pool calculator? You test, and enter your FC result in the "now" column (be sure to enter your pool gallonage) and then in the "goal" column you put your target, say 12. Then "calculate" and the handy little tool will tell you exactly how much 6% bleach to add, or 12.5%, etc., to bring it to your target. That's basically how to add bleach daily, or every other day.... There's an article called BBB for Beginners....
here
It's good to know if you do have CC's what they are, if your cloudiness is gone you may have caught it time, but you may still need to shock which would be an insane amount of bleach. So confirm your test results, cause what you posted seems not right to me...? If you have cloudy water and a CC of more than .5 you should probably shock.
Tonight, after dark, test your FC. Record the result. Tomorrow morning before sun hits the pool, test it again. Compare the results. IF you lose less than 1ppm FC, you do not have live algae, and you are done shocking. IF you lose more than 1ppm, you need to shock to 40ppm. According to the Pool Calculator, that would be
15 small jugs of Clorox 
. If you have a source for 12.5% chlorine, that would probably be cheaper and easier to manage....
Hope this makes sense....
