Confused pool owner

[kujibuji]

Hi everyone!

New pool owner here! 3 years so far and still learning.

So, I have successfully managed to keep my pool crystal clear for the most part of the last 3 years. However, I did run into some issues and would love some advice moving forward, I hope you all can help me out. I suspect my issues come from taking advice from friends, forums, pool store and seeing how conflicting everyone is, I guess this is the reason.

I have a vinyl 20x40 pool that I think is around 130,000 L, built sometime in the late 90's. I'm up here in Montreal, Canada and have it open for 5-6months out of the year, pump runs 24/7 and it's heated with a heat pump. I regularly check my levels with both strips and a test kit and everything seems great! Everyone loves the crystal clear water. (except for CYA but I'll explain later)

My close friend who's had his pool for 10 years gave me advice that I've been following, but I'm starting to think there are issues.

- I shock the pool at the start of the season with cal-hypo, up my alka, up my calcium until the levels are good
- Then, every night before bed I put ~250g of 70% cal-hypo into the skimmer and this keeps my FC levels good

Here are my issues:

- Last year I had a major cloudiness and scaling issue on all the internals of my equipment which I attributed to buying cheaper cal-hypo brand so I stopped using it
- Reading up more about this, I understand that using cal-hypo to maintain a pool is a no-no because it leaves calcium behind, which could explain the above so I'd like to stop using it.
- Reading on TFP, I see most of you are using liquid bleach and salt cells which would be great, but I just can't get my head around just how MUCH liquid bleach (2-5%?) I'd have to store and use every day to keep my FC levels similar to using 70% cal-hypo!
- .... unless I'm doing things wrong by keeping my CYA at 0? I stayed away from CYA seeing as everyone is saying it's bad because if you use tabs, then they leave behind CYA and eventually this makes chlorine ineffective. Unless upping the CYA initially and THEN using liquid chlorine WAY less frequently would be the way people do it? If I raised my CYA say to 40-50, does this mean I wouldn't have to keep adding chlorine every day? Maybe only once a week or every 2 weeks? Nobody I know here uses liquid chlorine for pool maintenance and I'm not even sure where I'd buy these large amounts
- My 5yr old liner is starting to bleach right across from where the jets are. This makes sense if I'm putting in strong cal-hypo every night and it's hitting those areas which is making me mad.
- My new liner is starting to have long wrinkles that worry me and after reading it seems they can be from many things including bad levels of PH. But could these be from my terrible maintenance of the pool?

Ok that was longer than I expected but I'm at a loss and would love some advice!

Thank you in advance,
Bartek

 

[Bperry]

Hi everyone!

New pool owner here! 3 years so far and still learning.

So, I have successfully managed to keep my pool crystal clear for the most part of the last 3 years. However, I did run into some issues and would love some advice moving forward, I hope you all can help me out. I suspect my issues come from taking advice from friends, forums, pool store and seeing how conflicting everyone is, I guess this is the reason.

I have a vinyl 20x40 pool that I think is around 130,000 L, built sometime in the late 90's. I'm up here in Montreal, Canada and have it open for 5-6months out of the year, pump runs 24/7 and it's heated with a heat pump. I regularly check my levels with both strips and a test kit and everything seems great! Everyone loves the crystal clear water. (except for CYA but I'll explain later)

My close friend who's had his pool for 10 years gave me advice that I've been following, but I'm starting to think there are issues.

- I shock the pool at the start of the season with cal-hypo, up my alka, up my calcium until the levels are good
- Then, every night before bed I put ~250g of 70% cal-hypo into the skimmer and this keeps my FC levels good

Here are my issues:

- Last year I had a major cloudiness and scaling issue on all the internals of my equipment which I attributed to buying cheaper cal-hypo brand so I stopped using it
- Reading up more about this, I understand that using cal-hypo to maintain a pool is a no-no because it leaves calcium behind, which could explain the above so I'd like to stop using it.
- Reading on TFP, I see most of you are using liquid bleach and salt cells which would be great, but I just can't get my head around just how MUCH liquid bleach (2-5%?) I'd have to store and use every day to keep my FC levels similar to using 70% cal-hypo!
- .... unless I'm doing things wrong by keeping my CYA at 0? I stayed away from CYA seeing as everyone is saying it's bad because if you use tabs, then they leave behind CYA and eventually this makes chlorine ineffective. Unless upping the CYA initially and THEN using liquid chlorine WAY less frequently would be the way people do it? If I raised my CYA say to 40-50, does this mean I wouldn't have to keep adding chlorine every day? Maybe only once a week or every 2 weeks? Nobody I know here uses liquid chlorine for pool maintenance and I'm not even sure where I'd buy these large amounts
- My 5yr old liner is starting to bleach right across from where the jets are. This makes sense if I'm putting in strong cal-hypo every night and it's hitting those areas which is making me mad.
- My new liner is starting to have long wrinkles that worry me and after reading it seems they can be from many things including bad levels of PH. But could these be from my terrible maintenance of the pool?

Ok that was longer than I expected but I'm at a loss and would love some advice!

Thank you in advance,
Bartek

Read through the pool school articles to get more detail but CYA isn’t a bad thing. It protects the chlorine from sunlight degradation. Chlorine will disappear within several hours without it.

In addition, chlorine without CYA bound to it is very harsh. The CYA buffers it’s effects somewhat. So a chlorine level of 1-3ppm without CYA can be much more harsh than chlorine level of 5-6ppm with an appropriate amount of CYA.

In normal pools, sunlight and heat burns through 2-4ppm of chlorine per DAY. If you start the day off with only 3ppm, you will have none at the end of the day without replacing it. It has to be replenished in any sanitary pool of water. The advantage of using the CYA is you can run the chlorine level a bit higher and still have some left at the end of the day as well as having it not burn off quite so fast.

The other side of the CYA is that it requires more chlorine (FC) to sanitize the water effectively as the CYA holds some of the FC in “inactive reserve” for use later. So as more CYA builds up, more FC is required to stay sanitary. But once CYA gets to 90-100ppm, it becomes not very cost effective to maintain the level of FC that requires. There’s no free lunch in anything.

So a few quicker points:
1. Welcome!
2. You should use CYA of 30-50ppm
3. You should not put any chemical in the skimmer.
4. Cal hypo will skyrocket your calcium levels over time.
5. Liquid chlorine or a salt water chlorine generator are the best long term chlorinating methods to avoid the problems caused by trichlor tablets (pucks) and cal hypo.
6. My 27k gallon pool uses about 1/4-1/2 gallon of 10% liquid chlorine per day.
7. Test strips are terribly unreliable for pool water testing. I would lose my TFP license if I didn’t recommend using your own test kit and stay away from strips and the pool store. The TF-100 or the Taylor K2006C are the only reliable kits though getting them in Canada can be tricky I heard.

The poolmath app is available to help you calculate how much chlorine you need to use per day in different forms.