First and foremost, this forum has been very helpful in helping me understand chemical balance and how to properly maintain a pool. Many thanks to all the people who take time to answer questions and contribute!
I purchased a home with a pool about three years ago. This is my first pool and I went into it with no knowledge at all about proper maintenance. Through sheer luck I haven't had any issues these past few years even though I have been maintaining the pool myself. Recently I decided to educate myself on how to properly treat the water and equipment which is how I came to this forum. After purchasing a Taylor K-2006 test kit I ran all of the tests and everything looked great except for extremely high CYA levels. The dot disappeared well before reaching the 100 mark on the tube, after diluting and testing a few times I figured I was in the high 200-low 300 range. I have been partially draining and refilling the pool over the past few weeks (I don't have the time to do it all at once unfortunately) and I'm now around 90ppm CYA. I will continue to drain/fill until I'm around 50ppm which should be in the next week or two.
I switched from trichloro pucks to Home Depot liquid chlorine (10%) to avoid elevated CYA levels and my question is how many gallons of bleach should I expect to add per day to maintain proper FC? When I was using pucks I just put 4 in the chemical feeder and that was lasting for about a week, using LC it seems like I will need to add a gallon a day or so, is that typical? I guess I didn't think about chlorine consumption when I changed over to LC, if I run through 7 gallons a week on average that's a lot of chlorine bottles!
Test results as of last night:
FC 2.0 (shocked pool with Cal Hypo to bring up FC, will check again this evening and add LC as needed)
CC .2
TA 90
pH 7.6
CH 250
CYA 90
Temp 80 deg. F
I will try to run the overnight chlorine demand test tonight as well to check if I have any organics consuming chlorine. Pool isn't used a lot, maybe once on the weekend, and I scrub the walls at least once a week usually twice a week and the pool robot runs every day.
Thanks in advance for any comments or suggestions, it's greatly appreciated!
-Dave
I purchased a home with a pool about three years ago. This is my first pool and I went into it with no knowledge at all about proper maintenance. Through sheer luck I haven't had any issues these past few years even though I have been maintaining the pool myself. Recently I decided to educate myself on how to properly treat the water and equipment which is how I came to this forum. After purchasing a Taylor K-2006 test kit I ran all of the tests and everything looked great except for extremely high CYA levels. The dot disappeared well before reaching the 100 mark on the tube, after diluting and testing a few times I figured I was in the high 200-low 300 range. I have been partially draining and refilling the pool over the past few weeks (I don't have the time to do it all at once unfortunately) and I'm now around 90ppm CYA. I will continue to drain/fill until I'm around 50ppm which should be in the next week or two.
I switched from trichloro pucks to Home Depot liquid chlorine (10%) to avoid elevated CYA levels and my question is how many gallons of bleach should I expect to add per day to maintain proper FC? When I was using pucks I just put 4 in the chemical feeder and that was lasting for about a week, using LC it seems like I will need to add a gallon a day or so, is that typical? I guess I didn't think about chlorine consumption when I changed over to LC, if I run through 7 gallons a week on average that's a lot of chlorine bottles!
Test results as of last night:
FC 2.0 (shocked pool with Cal Hypo to bring up FC, will check again this evening and add LC as needed)
CC .2
TA 90
pH 7.6
CH 250
CYA 90
Temp 80 deg. F
I will try to run the overnight chlorine demand test tonight as well to check if I have any organics consuming chlorine. Pool isn't used a lot, maybe once on the weekend, and I scrub the walls at least once a week usually twice a week and the pool robot runs every day.
Thanks in advance for any comments or suggestions, it's greatly appreciated!
-Dave
As a general rule, we don't like to see pools use more than 4ppm of FC in 24 hrs unless there was a known heavy load (i.e. party). Using the 
