That is not what I said at all. Here is my pool as of right now, on this rainy Saturday. Crystal clear.
Or on March 28th:
August 3rd, 2020:
July 17th, 2020:
Except for at the start of this year after the winter, my pool has always been crystal clear and
trouble free. Trouble free doesn't mean maintenance free. No matter what you have there isn't a pool yet that you can hand over to some technology and have everything be perfect and trouble free.
Oh yes, and this pool is maintained with liquid chlorine. Here's my garage last night, cause I'm terrible at breaking boxes down for recycling.
You can, to an extent at least. TFPC doesn't care
how the chlorine is added. It only cares that you maintain the FC/CYA at the appropriate ratio at all times. Generally speaking, the continuous use of tablets will lead to an ever increasing CYA level. At a certain point most people will end up with too much CYA, requiring a partial water change.
How fast, or if ever, this happens, depends on how much the tablets are used. Many people come here after using tablets as their sole chlorination method. You appear to be mixing in cal-hypo, so you're not 100% tablets. Many other factors apply. People in freezing climates need to do a partial drain and refill every year. CYA can get eaten by bacteria over the winter. Lots of backwashing and subsequent refilling will dilute CYA, as does lots of rain that causes overflowing or requires draining. Or in your case you said you vacuum to waste every week. So again, not everyone does have a problem with using tablets, it's just that in
general,
most people have problems using tablets continuously. It may indeed work fine for your particular case.
Your question though was:
And my answer was that trichlor is acidic, which seems to be the likely reason your pH was dropping.
So you can certainly use tablets if you maintain the proper FC/CYA ratio, but that won't change the fact that trichlor is acidic. If you want to continue using trichlor as your primary source of chlorine, you could try bumping your TA up higher using baking soda (not washing soda). Higher TA means natural pH rise is faster which can help counter the acidity of the trichlor tablets.
Now, let's discuss the cloudy water. I'm unsure why your pool went cloudy when you added washing soda. However, I'm a bit worried looking at your test results. As
@reggiehammond pointed out, your FC was a bit low a few weeks ago. Your last readings are especially worrying. Basically, as I understand, you:
- Added washing soda because pH was at 7
- Pool became cloudy
- Added cal-hypo
- Pool started clearing up
- CC went from 0 to 2
A cloudy pool that started clearing when chlorine was added, with an immediate jump in CC? That sounds to me like something was growing, causing the cloudy water, and when chlorine was added it started killing that stuff off, making the water more clear, and the CC is an indicator that the chlorine is doing work. At the very least you should
perform an OCLT, but I suspect you may
need to SLAM. Perhaps
@Donldson or
@JamesW can verify there wouldn't be any weird chemistry causing the cloudiness after adding washing soda.
