IC60 stopped producing chlorine.. suggestions?

[darin.brown]

so this is my first summer with the pool here in DFW and everything was going fine chemistry-wise until recently. I'm running my pump 24/7 at a low speed, but enough to switch the SWG on and I've got it set to 95% now (it had been at 65% when behaving properly). Salt level per ScreenLogic was down to 2900 so I added some bags on Sunday and it's back to 3350 now. The FC level is still reading 0 however. I added a bottle of bleach on Friday and it was back to around a 7 on Saturday morning. Tested again Monday night and it was back to 0. Added a bottle of bleach Tuesday evening so we'll see what it says in the morning.

I know my CYA is low (40) for DFW and that'll cause the FC to burn off quickly if I understand all this correctly but curious as to why it would just now start to misbehave given we've been in the middle of summer for 6 weeks now.

I've been adding 2 chlorine pucks to a floater every 2-3 days in an effort to bump up the CYA to get it drifting upwards to the 70-80 range for the DFW summer.

Apart from that, am I looking at an OCLT to see if I've got anything growing? water is still clear and not cloudy. I figure the SWG may not have been happy at 2900 (low end of the happy range) and the SWG isn't meant to boost FC from 0 to 10 but rather to maintain current level. If the OCLT comes back okay is my next step to add enough bleach to get me around 10 FC and see if the SWG can keep me there?

I did check the SWG and had minimal scaling but cleaned it out Thursday/Friday and appeared to have hooked it back up properly so I'm sort of at a loss.

 

[Jimrahbe]

darin,

An IC-60 should be producing way more chlorine than you need, especially with your pump running 24/7...

So I see two options..

1. Your cell is really bad.. (20% of the time)
2. Something is in your water consuming your chlorine as fast as you are making it. (80% of the time)

What FC level were you running when the cell appeared to be working?? As you already know a CYA of 40 is way too low.. A CYA of 70 or 80 will help keep the FC from burning off so quickly.

I agree with you that you need to run an Overnight Chlorine Loss Test... Overnight Chlorine Loss Test

If you pass the OCLT then a call to your pool builder would be in order to get your cell looked at by a Pentair Warranty tech.

Thanks for posting,

Jim R.

- - - Updated - - -

For ref.. I run about 45% this time a year with my IC40, 24/7... Based upon that I would think you should be running at 30% or less...

 

[darin.brown]

FC was around 6-8 when things were running smoothly.

 

[darin.brown]

OCLT passed overnight (assuming setting the IC60 to 0% output is the same as turning it off completely). Salt level is back up to 3600 according to ScreenLogic so I'll see if it's able to maintain today though the cloudy/overcast forecast won't be the best conditions to troubleshoot under.

 

[Jimrahbe]

Darin,

What I would do is run the OCLT again with the cell at 100%... In theory, since the real OCLT passed, the running your cell in the dark will provide you with the cells chlorine output.

In theory, your cell should increase your FC by .58 ppm per hour. So if you run overnight at 100% for 10 hours your FC should go up by 5.8 ppm...

Thanks,

Jim R.