First season (mostly) in the books!

[IronMan13]

hey all! well with school starting up and the wife and kids starting back our pool usage will be limited to mostly weekends for the rest of the season I wanted to thank everyone here for the help i received with some issues that came up during our first season with our pool!!!!

I do have some thoughts/questions/observations I wanted to put out there to see if anyone could share some guidance/feedback on them

• My main concern is i haven't yet figured out how to properly control my FC and i'm not sure what i'm doing, or not doing, to help stabilize it for me.
  • During this season I basically had 4 "cycles" of cloudy water -> high chlorine -> low chlorine -> cloudy water happen
  • Every time the water would get a cloudy I would raise up my FC to 15+ until it was clear again, usually took 2 days to clear up. Then i would back off my SWG to let the chlorine get back down to the 4-5 range. Usually it happened that it would get down to 3 or 2 FC and I would set the SWG back up to my "normal" calculated setting, which currently is 40% SWG at 24hr pump run time. FC would start to go up but then all the sudden i'd have cloudy water again. so i would add more chlorine, water would clear up, reduce SWG % to let FC fall back down, repeat the cycle
  • So i'm not sure what variables i have going on thats leading me into these cycles, is 2-3 FC too low before i increased the SWG %? Is it because our pool usage is sporadic and we keep the cover closed 100% of the time we aren't using it? Is there something still lurking in my system somewhere?
• Irritated Eyes - My kids will complain about their eyes hurting after swimming without goggles and opening their eyes underwater. is this to be expected? or do i have something out of whack causing this (aka swimming when the chlorine is high in the above mentioned cycles)
• PH - I've read that PH will creep up over time due to the nature of the SWG. early on I did a couple of muratic acid additions in order to bring TA down. for the last probably 6 weeks my PH always shows as 7.5. guess i wasn't sure how long it takes for the SWG to "slowly" affect the PH and/or if i'm doing something wrong with my testing of it?
• Water level - I use the 2 screws along the side of the skimmers to indicate if the water level is high enough or not. I've had to add water at least 4 times over the summer to get it back up to the "top screw" because it had either made it all the way down to the "bottom screw" or about half way. Does that seem normal? i wouldn't think evaporation since we keep the pool covered when we aren't using it. We have had countless times where we've had a lot of people/kids over, can people getting in/out of the pool and kids getting out to jump in lower the water level that drastically? Or do i dare ask if i have a slow leak somewhere.....
• Is there anything i should have our pool builder look at before our first year is up to make sure its ok before we pass a "1st year warranty period"?

Thanks all!

 

[Newdude]

Hey iron man !!!

During this season I basically had 4 "cycles" of cloudy water -> high chlorine -> low chlorine -> cloudy water happen

Next year make it 2 cycles. High chlorine (but still plenty safe, well below SLAM level), and target range / slightly above target range. There is tons of leeway up and almost none below. Daily testing will let you spot the trend quicker before it gets low. Until you are at one with your pool, test morning and night. An ounce of prevention whoops a pound of cure here. Well worth the 2 mins of your time and extra reagents, which you’ll blow through having to SLAM anyway.

I would raise up my FC to 15+ until it was clear again, usually took 2 days to clear up

Sounds like you never completed a true SLAM. Apologies if you did, but from the way you described it, it sounds like there was residuals left after the water cleared and you kept battling them all season with varying results.

So i'm not sure what variables i have going on thats leading me into these cycles, is 2-3 FC too low before i increased the SWG %

You betcha. The SWG takes a day or days to raise the FC fully. Too much time is spent hovering at minimum and you leave the door wide open for algae to get a foothold. Anytime you need a now boost, use liquid chlorine which works in minutes. Then the SWG can happily maintain the higher level. If you see a 7FC but prefer a 9, Then fine. Let the SWG handle it because you have plenty to spare at the moment.

Irritated Eyes - My kids will complain about their eyes hurting after swimming without goggles and opening their eyes underwater. is this to be expected? or do i have something out of whack causing this (aka swimming when the chlorine is high in the above mentioned cycles

PH usually hurts the eyes above 8, but that wasn’t the case. CCs do also and all those cloudy times were making CCs as your FC ate up the algae.

Water level - I use the 2 screws along the side of the skimmers to indicate if the water level is high enough or not. I've had to add water at least 4 times over the summer

Do a bucket test and let it sit for a week to see if there is a big difference or just evaporation.

 

[IronMan13]

Hey Newdude! thanks for the reply, appreciate it!

Next year make it 2 cycles. High chlorine (but still plenty safe, well below SLAM level), and target range / slightly above target range. There is tons of leeway up and almost none below. Daily testing will let you spot the trend quicker before it gets low. Until you are at one with your pool, test morning and night. An ounce of prevention whoops a pound of cure here. Well worth the 2 mins of your time and extra reagents, which you’ll blow through having to SLAM anyway.

I'll admit, i didn't make testing a priority until I had an issue so will definitely add this as an improvement area for next year to stay on top of testing

Sounds like you never completed a true SLAM. Apologies if you did, but from the way you described it, it sounds like there was residuals left after the water cleared and you kept battling them all season with varying results.

You betcha. The SWG takes a day or days to raise the FC fully. Too much time is spent hovering at minimum and you leave the door wide open for algae to get a foothold. Anytime you need a now boost, use liquid chlorine which works in minutes. Then the SWG can happily maintain the higher level. If you see a 7FC but prefer a 9, Then fine. Let the SWG handle it because you have plenty to spare at the moment.

I thought maybe when i did a SLAM with the first round of cloudiness i may not have completed it. so when i had the second round i made sure to follow everything exactly, so unless i missed something i did complete SLAM towards the end of June. maintained 20 FC until the water was clear and did the OCLT and only lost .5 FC. That being said I'll admit that with subsequent rounds of cloudiness i did not re-SLAM. I just upped the SWG to 100% for a day or 2 until the water cleared up and then set it back down. FC would usually get up to around 13 when i did this.

PH usually hurts the eyes above 8, but that wasn’t the case. CCs do also and all those cloudy times were making CCs as your FC ate up the algae.

hmmmm..... this one does confuse me a bit. unless something is wrong with my tests i've yet to see PH above 7.5 and every time i tested CC, even when the water was cloudy, it was never over .5.

Do a bucket test and let it sit for a week to see if there is a big difference or just evaporation.

I assume to accomplish this test I would need to leave the pool uncovered for the same amount of time as well as not use it for it to be accurate?

 

[Newdude]

I thought maybe when i did a SLAM with the first round of cloudiness i may not have completed it. so when i had the second round i made sure to follow everything exactly, so unless i missed something i did complete SLAM towards the end of June. maintained 20 FC until the water was clear and did the OCLT and only lost .5 FC. That being said I'll admit that with subsequent rounds of cloudiness i did not re-SLAM. I just upped the SWG to 100% for a day or 2 until the water cleared up and then set it back down. FC would usually get up to around 13 when i did this.

So you did great on the first SLAM. !! Then you slacked with daily care and needed to fully complete another SLAM but instead left it up to the SWG to handle. It’s ok Ironman. You were new and what done is done. Going forward you got this now.

assume to accomplish this test I would need to leave the pool uncovered for the same amount of time as well as not use it for it to be accurate

Yes.

hmmmm..... this one does confuse me a bit. unless something is wrong with my tests i've yet to see PH above 7.5 and every time i tested CC, even when the water was cloudy, it was never over .5

The test you do is nothing but a momentary snapshot of that moment in time. CCs burn off in the sun and might be different throughout the day. Coulda been a little bit of funk that your SWG cleared, creating CCs, that burned off by the time you tested. Without a continual algae battle going on like if the pool was green, you might miss it.