We bought a house with a pool last month and, after learning loads from you kind folks, maintaining it so far has truly been trouble free... until today. The pool has gone from sparkly to very cloudy overnight.
I realized then that the floating chlorinator was not in the pool (kids) and may not have been for two days. I have been using up a huge bucket of trichlor tabs and a few bags of "shock"/calcium hypochlorite that I bought before I found this site. The chlorine tested at zero so I put in 1 lb of "shock" (which I haven't had to use since the very beginning of owning it). I ran the pool cleaner and filter for a few hours and the water was clearing a little.
When I checked again, the filter pressure had suddenly shot up 10 lbs over normal. Since it has been a month of running it without backwashing (though with stable pressure), I thought I would try to do it and see if that helped the filter to clear the cloudiness. I didn't get very far because after draining out some water in the backwash mode, it was clear not cloudy or white as the directions said, which I believe means that the DE was not coming out as I expected. Then I wondered if somehow the cloudiness in the pool was related to DE. Afraid to run the filter if it somehow no longer had DE in it, I have shut everything off.
About 8 hours after the hypochlor was added, here are my test results:
FC 6 PH 7.6
CC 1 CYA 45
TC 7 TA 110
CH 425
We did have several hours of heavy rain last night after 3 weeks of none.
--Any ideas what is causing the cloudiness?
--What is going on with my filter and what should I do? (I was planning on teaching myself to disassemble it when I closed the pool next month but I could learn in a hurry if I had to)
Any suggestions would be very welcome as I am very new to this and eager to understand. Best wishes!
I realized then that the floating chlorinator was not in the pool (kids) and may not have been for two days. I have been using up a huge bucket of trichlor tabs and a few bags of "shock"/calcium hypochlorite that I bought before I found this site. The chlorine tested at zero so I put in 1 lb of "shock" (which I haven't had to use since the very beginning of owning it). I ran the pool cleaner and filter for a few hours and the water was clearing a little.
When I checked again, the filter pressure had suddenly shot up 10 lbs over normal. Since it has been a month of running it without backwashing (though with stable pressure), I thought I would try to do it and see if that helped the filter to clear the cloudiness. I didn't get very far because after draining out some water in the backwash mode, it was clear not cloudy or white as the directions said, which I believe means that the DE was not coming out as I expected. Then I wondered if somehow the cloudiness in the pool was related to DE. Afraid to run the filter if it somehow no longer had DE in it, I have shut everything off.
About 8 hours after the hypochlor was added, here are my test results:
FC 6 PH 7.6
CC 1 CYA 45
TC 7 TA 110
CH 425
We did have several hours of heavy rain last night after 3 weeks of none.
--Any ideas what is causing the cloudiness?
--What is going on with my filter and what should I do? (I was planning on teaching myself to disassemble it when I closed the pool next month but I could learn in a hurry if I had to)
Any suggestions would be very welcome as I am very new to this and eager to understand. Best wishes!