Helping a friend who has opened to algae...

[midtngal]

Hello All! I am helping a friend tackle her recently opened pool that's full of algae. Here's what she sent me...



It's a 40K gallon pool so she's going to be buying out a whole of stores of their bleach! Her question to me was....will all this bleach destroy their liner? I've never seen anyone complain of that before but told her I would ask ya'll. They've had this problem before and used an algaecide that did almost eat through the liner and so it had to be replaced. So, naturally, she's a little hesitant, not knowing about "our" process.

Anything you can tell me to put her at ease would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!
Karen

 

[Swampwoman]

Greetings. The beauty of TfP is that with a good test kit and the pool calculator, hence, "precise" treatment, you stay within parameters that are safe for your pool surface. The "bleach" is chlorine, just like shock from the pool store is chlorine. The only difference is with TFP you are taking a more scientific and reliable course of action rather than blindly tossing stuff into your pool.

With that said, in your shoes, I would invite your friend to join the forum and read up on slam procedures herself in pool school to fully understand this and get good guidance step by step, starting with the purchase of a good test kit.

I say that because if she takes "half" your advice but doesn't test, etc., she may (given her history of liner troubles) feel that your advice would be responsible for any problems she encounters. A little bit of knowledge combined with multiple and conflicting guidance plus a boatload of chemicals can be a dangerous thing

You are a sweetheart for helping her. But to really really help her, teach her to fish, as the saying goes

 

[Azgirl71]

Shock will raise her CYA making it harder to shock. Bleach does not affect CYA. I have been doing a SLAM on our above ground vinyl liner. I have raised the FC level really high at times. I had a spot that the liner faded last year from a 1 lb bag of shock going in all at once on accident. I have some bleached out spots this year from using bleach and pouring it in to fast also in front of the return when the pressure was not great. As long as she pours bleach in slowly in from of the return it should not fade.

 

[midtngal]

Thanks ladies! We are going to start the process tomorrow afternoon. I'll take my kit until we can get her one. I've told her to be stocking up on bleach..14 of the 121 oz jugs is what I'm calculating if her TC is 0. I think that overwhelmed her! And of course, that's just day one! LOL

 

[jblizzle]

Hopefully she realizes that getting the pool to this condition was not a short period of time and they should not expect it to be fixed overnight.

Get her to order her own TF-100 with XL option ASAP so you do not use up all your reagent.

 

[midtngal]

Oh yeah, she does. I told her it could take as long as 2 weeks to get it beautimous but maybe not that long. They're cleaning out as much gunk today as they can. It makes me really glad I happened upon this site as I was building mine so I wasn't tainted by the PBs and pool stores! She has the guy that closed it telling her to dump a bunch of algaecide in it! I told she better not put a THING in it until we have numbers to work with! The guy that opened mine tried to pull that on me until I schooled him! I'm sure we'll be posting pics along the way just to make sure we're on the right path. We'll get that kit for her as soon as she sees how easy it is!

 

[Rere]

Tell her I dumped countless bottles of bleach into my pool for over two weeks and now it looks amazing. I know I used over 50 jugs. Of course it's poured in slow and smaller amounts so it didn't effect liner. I always pour in front of a return.

 

[unkyjoe]

Get as much of the **** out of the pool as you can, you will need less bleach that way. It is my understanding that the algae will hide under the debris making it harder for the bleach to get in there and kill it.

I cleaned mine as best I could "not being able to see the bottom" and once the bleach started to clear things up I noticed debris that I had missed, once I got that out the chlorine use went down and the water cleared within about a week.

 

[Beens]

Any updates? Pics? I'm nosy...