So background, I'm the lifeguard supervisor of a beach club on Long Island, New York. We have an outdoor pool that's 170,000ish gallons. They just redid the bottom of our pool during our off season and it's a quartz bottom. Flash forward to last weekend and my boss asks me to come in to vacuum our pool before opening weekend (MDW). I go in and there is lots of sediment on the bottom of the pool that I at first figured was regular dirt and sand. However, it won't come up easy and with a metal bristle brush it'll come up in certain spots after really aggressive brushing. Our shallow end has been brushed up a decent amount but it's near impossible to get the stuff up in the deep end. The spots are also very slimy. I think that it's some sort of algae, but my boss (who is also the CPO) thinks it's rust because we also had a boiler issue and filled the pool with regular freshwater. Any advice or insight would be greatly appreciated on where to move forward from here. I tend to stick to lifeguarding the beach, so this pool stuff has me completely thrown for a loop. Thank you all in advance! And if this post should go anywhere else I'll happily move it.
I might have algae?
- Thread starter spbaumgarten
- Start date
reggiehammond
Gold Supporter
- Oct 4, 2020
- 1,543
- Pool Size
- 30000
- Surface
- Plaster
- Chlorine
- Salt Water Generator
- SWG Type
- CircuPool RJ-60 Plus
Sounds like the chemistry is out of whack. I assume there's a pool company involved? Commercial pools are a different animal, with different regulatory requirements and mechanisms.
We do have a pool company involved, but quite frankly they tend to be super unhelpful and do the bare minimum and then shrug their shoulders. If I was able to share some measurements I get tomorrow would that be helpful? When I was there previously the Chlorine as 1ppm, PH 8.2 Alkalinity 80ppm and Calcium was super low. I know my manager has been adding and doing some stuff with the calcium and such throughout the week, so could get more up to date measurements tomorrow when one of my lifeguards goes in for pre-season cleaning. Also thank you for the reply!