Make sure I understand this

[epxroot]

SO I have been dealing with a cloudy pool for a month now. It was a swamp when I opened a little over a month ago. I thought I had all the debris out. CYA is at 30 and I have been keeping my shock levels up to 12. I read that the cloudy water taking so long to clear could be from things such as leaves and what not still in the pool. I vacuumed again and pulled a bunch of gunk out of the pool for about an hour. I believe I have all of it out now. Is it true that the debris still in the pool could have led to such a delay in the pool clearing up?

 

[bobandsherry]

Yep, any organic material in pool will negativity affect FC. If you spend an hour still pulling gunk out, that wasn't even close to being clean enough to slam. Get it all out, even backwash your filter too.

 

[Richard320]

Absolutely.

Bleach is an oxidizer. It oxidizes things -- flameless burning, more or less. It doesn't differentiate between tiny particles of algae or relatively large leaves or great big branches. It attacks all simultaneously, which uses up a lot of bleach. Now if you remove most of the stuff manually, the bleach can get right to work on the little stuff you can't fish out.

That's why in the SLAM article, one of the prerequisites is
Make sure the pool is free of leaves and other debris (at least as much as possible).

And the actual how-to part includes:
Brush and/or vacuum the entire pool once a day

If vacuuming loads up the filter necessitating a backwash, great! That means stuff is being physically removed from the water. No need to wait to dissolve it all.

 

[epxroot]

"Yep, any organic material in pool will negativity affect FC."

I understand it will have a big impact on destabilizing my FC. My question was more on will the debris in the pool make it harder to get rid of the cloudiness.

- - - Updated - - -

Absolutely.

Bleach is an oxidizer. It oxidizes things -- flameless burning, more or less. It doesn't differentiate between tiny particles of algae or relatively large leaves or great big branches. It attacks all simultaneously, which uses up a lot of bleach. Now if you remove most of the stuff manually, the bleach can get right to work on the little stuff you can't fish out.

That's why in the SLAM article, one of the prerequisites is
Make sure the pool is free of leaves and other debris (at least as much as possible).

And the actual how-to part includes:
Brush and/or vacuum the entire pool once a day

If vacuuming loads up the filter necessitating a backwash, great! That means stuff is being physically removed from the water. No need to wait to dissolve it all.

I thought I did. I netted my pool until I was pulling very little to nothing at all out. It was still green at the time because I tried getting as much out as I could before SLAMming. But when my pool was still cloudy after a month I started reading a little more. It isn't too bad right now. I can see the bottom of the shallow and also a good 5 feet in the deep end. So, I am hoping getting the rest of that gunk out will lead to my pool being cleared up in 2 weeks.

 

[Dirk]

No SLAM expert here, but I've read a bit about it. Don't forget that algae can be hiding in your pool, and contribute to the ongoing problem. Inside ladders, inside the skimmer, inside the light niche, etc. You have to hunt it all down, and clean it all out, or it just continues to perpetuate.

 

[bobandsherry]

I understand it will have a big impact on destabilizing my FC. My question was more on will the debris in the pool make it harder to get rid of the cloudiness.

Yes.