Good news and bad news! Need a pep talk!

Jump to latest Follow Reply
J

jwoods2006

0
Jul 31, 2017
5
Plympton/MA
Good news is we bought a house with a pool! Bad news? We bought a house with a pool!
No clue when it was last operational. Uncovered partially covered pool last season-no operational pump or filter. Found a black swamp with 20 or more frogs living the dream. Had pressure testing done and found 1 good skimmer and 3 good returns. Set up someones discarded sand filter on the edge of the pool and shocked the water and started moving it and cleaning it as well as I could. Soon realized there were 4 feet of leaves and branches on the floor of the deep end. Began digging...and digging... and digging. Paid someone to professionally close the pool for winter. Saved up for pump and filter. Purchased equipment at beginning of this summer and had pool man open pool, set up new equipment and give us a pool care lesson. This was the last week in June. After 2 days of filtering and backwashing I did not have enough water in my pool to run my brand new equipment. Spent the month of July trying to fill the pool from my garden hose (well water). No luck. $300 electric bill from running the well pump.Turned off equipment and resumed digging leaves out. Begged hubby for a water delivery. Drained the pool to 6 inches in the shallow end. Patched two tears in the liner, pressure washed the stars and deck. Water was clear in the shallow end-still couldnt see floor in the deep end. Had a truck of water delivered. Water delivery washed up brown dirt and leaves that I had obviously missed. As it filled I thought I was back in my environmental science class on a field trip to the wastewater treatment plant. It looked worse than ever. I cried. Ran filter for a day backwashed 4 times when the pressure went up to 20-24. Had to shut it down when water level went below skimmer again. That was last Monday. This morning I went out and found a bright green layer of bubbly slime covering the surface. I had more water delivered (enough to where it's up to the rim to allow for backwashing and much against hubby's wishes) and now my pump is running 10 lbs of granular shock through the system overnight. Any thoughts? I am a school teacher with summers off and a small child and two small Grandbabies. I would really like to get this pool swimmable. I need a pep talk!
 
You need to get a new degree and it can be had in pool school...sounds like you have a pretty bad leak somewhere. First thing first is to buy the proper fas/dpd test kit. While you are waiting on it, figure out your gallons in pool math and add the proper amount of stabilizer to get you to 30 ppm. Then start adding liquid chlorine to get your FC up to 12.

Read,read,read. You are gonna want to really study up on SLAM.

You are in good hands, we will have your pool sparkling soon.
 
Ok....here's the Cliffs Notes:

Stop putting "shock" products in the pool unless they are *Liquid*..... in fact, just check the price of liquid chlorine or household bleach and see which one is cheaper. Buy that. Buy lots of that.

Buy the TF-100 Test kit. Get the XL version, you'll need it. If you're feeling flush toss in the Speed Stir- *no one* ever regrets that after using it, but it's optional.

Carefully remove all solid debris out of the pool. Anything solid in there is chewing up all your chlorine and wasting it. You want to save your chlorine for the algae and cooties in the water. Be careful removing the debris that you don't hurt the liner.

Can you turn off your skimmer (isolate it) and just use your main drain at times? This way you can still circulate when the level is lower than the skimmer.

Read this--> ABCs of Pool Water Chemistry and this---> SLAM Process......and for homeword, read anything in Pool School up top that pertains to your pool.

After you have debris out, test kit in hand and lots of chlorine, let us know. We'll talk you thru the SLAM process to clean up your water.

It can be done!!!

Maddie :flower:
(school started in Georgia this week.... all the parents have their pools to themselves again, lol)
 
Thankyou Maddie! :)

YippeeSkippy said:
Ok....here's the Cliffs Notes:

Stop putting "shock" products in the pool unless they are *Liquid*..... in fact, just check the price of liquid chlorine or household bleach and see which one is cheaper. Buy that. Buy lots of that.

Buy the TF-100 Test kit. Get the XL version, you'll need it. If you're feeling flush toss in the Speed Stir- *no one* ever regrets that after using it, but it's optional.

Carefully remove all solid debris out of the pool. Anything solid in there is chewing up all your chlorine and wasting it. You want to save your chlorine for the algae and cooties in the water. Be careful removing the debris that you don't hurt the liner.

Can you turn off your skimmer (isolate it) and just use your main drain at times? This way you can still circulate when the level is lower than the skimmer.

Read this--> ABCs of Pool Water Chemistry and this---> SLAM Process......and for homeword, read anything in Pool School up top that pertains to your pool.

After you have debris out, test kit in hand and lots of chlorine, let us know. We'll talk you thru the SLAM process to clean up your water.

It can be done!!!

Maddie :flower:
(school started in Georgia this week.... all the parents have their pools to themselves again, lol)
Click to expand...
 
I quite sensitive to this well pump situation as I have one myself and I have to be careful to run the hose at very low flow when topping up my pool. But I'm not sure what exactly the problem is here, if you're pump has enough pressure to pump water out of the hose, then the pump has enough pressure. You lose water all the time to evaporation, splash out, backwashing... So anyway, you'll definitely need to figure out this issue at some point.

Maybe channeling rain water to the pool could help??
 
I agree with the above. The well pump must have enough pressure to fill the pool or you would not get water to the house (unless the pool is on a hill near the house ;) ). Your concern is more likely the flow rates and recovery that the well pump can achieve. The well should be able to add water to the pool at a slower rate.

Collecting rain water off the roof of the house and then using that to top off the pool is another good suggestion ... this is often done in the SW to help keep the CH under control due our high evaporation rates.
 

Enjoying this content?

Support TFP with a donation.

Give Support
Aftonjeeper
Yes. there is a bladder and when you first turn the water on, the hose puts water out normally but after the bladder is empty (4 minutes later), the pressure goes way down to a trickle and the well pump turns on and will never shut off until the bladder refills (which wont happen if the hose is on). When this is going on there is barely any water to the rest of the house. There could be something wong with it, for sure. We are getting exposed to alot of new thing with this new (old) house :)

- - - Updated - - -

Jblizzle
Haha. my pool is actually up on a small hill about 50 feet from the back of the house. how did you know? lol
I will look into the possibilty of rain collection for next season. Thanks
 
Ahhh, okay. Now I understand you're water issue. Yes, this is exactly the same issue I have. Just a little correction, it's not the bladder that 'refills', the tank refills. The bladder is always filled with the same amount of air, unless it breaks. This issue is that you have a low flow well pump and the well pump can not fill the tank as fast as the tank can empty through the hose. Water comes out normally until the tank is empty then you're stuck waiting until the well pump refills the tank which it'll never do like you said because the hose is still open. This took some learning on my part as well earlier this season and I have a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, but to my defense I had never had well water before.

You should be able to use your hose continuously if you barely turn it on. Basically all normal hose connections on your house should have a valve you turn about 3 times all the way around to open them completely. You'll need to restrict the flow such that the pump can keep up with flow out of the hose plus not lose pressure to the rest of your house. You do this by first turning the valve about 90 degrees counterclockwise just to open it up and get water flowing, then turn it back clockwise until water is just barely trickling out of the end of the hose. After some trial and error you'll get a feel for how much flow you can get from the hose without disturbing the water pressure to the rest of the house.

For instance, while I was desperately trying to reduce my CYA level earlier this year, I would reduce water flow from my hose to about 0.5 gallons per minute and start it in the evening, sleep, goto work, and check the level when I got home which was always about 1.5" - 2" of water level rise.
 
Just fyi, I've edited the post above a little.

Oh and the reason jblizzle said something about 'unless your pool is on a hill' is because if the pool is very high compared to the your water tank the pressure from the tank may be insufficient to raise the water that high, this is not the case as you said you can get water to come out of the hose for a while then it stops. And normal home well water systems maintain water pressure of about 40psi - 60psi, even at the low end of 40 psi, water will rise about 90 feet.

Okay, so I think we've now clarified your water filling issue, no matter what you'll need to top off the pool once in a while, and hopefully just barely cracking open you hose and running it for 24 hours should get a nice water level rise without disturbing the water to the rest of your house. Just fyi, since your pool is 18'x36', each inch of water is about 400 gallons so after you backwash an inch out of the pool, you'll just need to get the hose flowing at a rate of about 1 quart per minute (or about 3.5 minutes per gallon) which will refill that inch of water in 24 hours. This is easy guideline you can use to test and play with the hose valve, just get a gallon jug and time how long it takes to fill up. If it takes less than 3.5 minutes to fill up close the valve a little more and so on...

Okay so for the pep talk. You can definitely do this, just keep asking questions and stick around here, we don't mind helping out. Give this water filling idea a try as I've laid it out, 1 quart per minute 'should' be pretty minimal for your well pump. Of course I don't know anything about your particular well pump but if it can't handle that you'd notice problems just taking a shower. Now onto the next problem, do you still have tons of leaves and stuff in the deep end? If so, there's nothing else for you to worry about for the moment except getting as much out as possible. Get a net and a pole and start digging, just try to be gentle when digging against the vinyl liner, don't want to tear it.

After that we'll help you get setup to SLAM the pool and finally get some clarity to the water!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back
Jump to latest Follow Reply