Vacation for 5 days

[marianegs]

Hello, I am a newbe, but so far so good (fingers crossed) I have not needed to SLAM and my pool is sparkling! I usually lose approximately 1.5-2ppm per day of chlorine. BUT.... I am going away for 5 days... I do not have anyone to take care of my pool, so these are my choices:
1. Before I leave, put enough bleach to shock level and hope for the best;
2. Put pucks in my automatic chlorinator, that is hooked up and never used. (if so how many pucks?)
3. Use the floater puck thing, and again how many pucks do I put in there?


Anything else I should do? I hate to mess up my pool when I am on a "winning" streak.. Thanks for any advice.

 

[pabeader]

What is your CYA level? Pucks add to it and you want to make sure you don't go too high on that.

 

[Texas Splash]

You've got the right idea. Just before leaving, go ahead and raise your FC to shock level which hopefully will take a couple days to lower. At the same time, using your tablet feeder or floater with a couple tablets should work as well to help get you through a few days. If your pump is on a timer, let is run as programmed. If not, perhaps get a simple automatic timer to let is run for a couple hours each day. Have a nice vacation!

 

[marianegs]

My CYA is 40 as of right now. How much with say 2-3 pucks add to my CYA? I do have a timer on my pump that runs automatically, so that should not be a problem. Thanks for the help!

 

[Texas Splash]

A lot depends on your pool size and amount of water flow, to include which products you use. A common thought is that for every 1 ppm of chlorine you add with pucks, you add 0.6 ppm of CYA.
Here's an example (from a previous post):
- For every 10 ppm Free Chlorine (FC) added by Trichlor, it also increases Cyanuric Acid (CYA) by 6 ppm.
- For every 10 ppm FC added by Dichlor, it also increases CYA by 9 ppm.
- For every 10 ppm FC added by Cal-Hypo, it also increases Calcium Hardness (CH) by at least 7 ppm.

But you're only going to be gone for 5 days. A couple tablets will be fine. Also note that tablets add faster than floaters. I believe if you look at the bottom of the Poolmath calculator (link below) there's a way to anticipate CYA changes with pucks as well.