Foreclosure House with an in ground Pool! No Chlorine...

[Melt In The Sun]

You have enough stabilizer already, and yellow-out is a waste of money! Trust your own readings; pools stores are often horridly wrong. I think you should take that stuff back if you can, and stay on your current course. You're doing fine, it just takes time!

 

[cheddar85]

I'm still a semi-newb myself, but from what I've read on here - DON"T TRUST POOL STORE NUMBERS!! I also have the K2006 test kit. I love it! Now that you have yours, YOU are the master of your domain. Trust your test results! The CYA test can be tricky. I usually do it 3 times, (refilling the squirt bottle with the same solution each time) and go with the best out 2 of 3.
Do not add what the pool store sold you. Trust in continuous shocking with bleach and your pool will be sparkly in no time.

Exactly. You can't pick and choose advice from here and the pool store, you won't get anywhere. Everyone here is giving great advice. You just have to keep at it, keep the chlorine at shock level and keep cleaning those filters! It took a while for it to get that bad, and it will take a while for it to clear. Just be patient and keep at it!

 

[muckraker]

Thanks for the encouragement! My wife and I are getting obsessed with this. We have goals of seeing steps into the pool. We are up to being able to the third step and water color had changed from, black to redish brown to green to now a lighter green.
Some people have told us to get rid of the cartridge filter and get DE.....we almost did that today but the pool store talked us out of it and sold us "The Bomb" a box of toxic chemicals to kill any living creature every created! It's very difficult to clean between the tight pleats in the cartridges.
When the cartridge is first cleaned the pressure is around 12 to 15 and quickly raises to 20 and 24 or higher. Have been cleaning 2 or 3 times a day.

I am concerned about my chlorine readings. The free chlorine reads 24 and combined or total chlorine reads 1.0..does that sound possible? If so how do I get the total chlorine up.

Below is a photo shows our progress since opening end of April.

 

[mkenyon2]

Hmm... chlorine numbers sound fishy.

Do you really know what the pool store sold you to put in the pool? It might be interesting to compare what they sold to using just bleach/borax/baking soda. I compared a bucket of 'shock' to bleach, and found that even tho I'd have to buy 25-30 jugs of bleach, I would still save $20!

 

[Melt In The Sun]

"The Bomb"??

You may have a CC of 1 and FC of 24, that would mean TC=25. That would make sense.

You're on the right track, and the pictures show great progress! Cleaning cartridges is a pain, but necessary. A DE filter would require even more cleaning and maintenance than your current filter.

 

[muckraker]

Hey, I almost embarrassed to say that this afternoon while cleaning my old large Cartridge, I found a fairly large break (hole) in the bottom...oops. I used that cartridge for about three weeks and wondered why the pressure never really went up. I believe that's called the school of hard knocks!
I read in the Taylor Test Kit Book you can filter the water through a coffee filter to reduce some of the particulate and get a better CYA reading ..plan to try that in the morning.

No question that I got better controlable results with plain old bleach! Just my impatience kicking in..it's a NE thing.

Thanks for the info on the Chlorine, to get total chlorine add, FC plus the CC.

 

[mkenyon2]

muckracker, what part of NE? I'm from CT, and have family in Mass., RI, and Maine.