New house with pool and first test- Free Chlorine is ~16ppm - sheesh!

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I would not say shot, just a new baseline.

You can live with the high CYA until spring. You might get enough rain to drain some and also the CYA does degrade a little so up to you. Just need to follow the FC/CYA Levels regardless of what you do.

You will not want to use that drain at your pump pad unless you get a hose to direct the water to your sewer cleanout or other designated drain point. 4000 gallons of water is alot.
 
mknauss said:
You can live with the high CYA until spring. You might get enough rain to drain some and also the CYA does degrade a little so up to you. Just need to follow the FC/CYA Levels regardless of what you do.

You will not want to use that drain at your pump pad unless you get a hose to direct the water to your sewer cleanout or other designated drain point. 4000 gallons of water is alot.
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Oh good! I thought I needed to address the high CYA right away. I do have a 2" hose and I found the sewer cleanout so I think draining will be easier than I expected. Is 1,500rpm on the pump OK for draining?
 
FYI - we do not suggest using your pool pump for draining large amounts of pool water. An inch or two, OK, but any more than that at once you can lose prime on your pump as the water level drops below the skimmer opening. So be ware of that.

Adjust the RPM to whatever flow rate your designated area you are sending the water to can handle.
 
OK, to clarify on the proper way to test for CYA...

Do I add drops until I can no longer tell at all that there is a black dot or do I add drops until the black dot gets fuzzy but I still know it's there (which is what I read somewhere and used to measure the 100 this morning)?

I just repeated the test with room temperature water and added drops until the black dot juuuust disappeared and it's about 85.
 
Here is the process I use.
Once you have your solution ready, back to the sun, etc. Fill the vial to a line, say 80, lower the vial to your waist level and glance for the dot, you see it, add solution to the 70 line, glance, see it, repeat until you no longer see it with a glance. Then use the CYA value one step above the line you read. So if you stopped at 50, use 60 ppm CYA.

The vial is in logarithmic scale. So it is not viable to interpolate between the lines. Just use the whole numbers, such as 50, 40, 30, ....
 
bertschb said:
OK, to clarify on the proper way to test for CYA...

Do I add drops until I can no longer tell at all that there is a black dot or do I add drops until the black dot gets fuzzy but I still know it's there (which is what I read somewhere and used to measure the 100 this morning)?

I just repeated the test with room temperature water and added drops until the black dot juuuust disappeared and it's about 85.
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Full up the tube to the first line and then look down through the liquid about waist level. If you see the dot, add more until the next line, check again. Repeat until you can’t see the dot anymore. Then record the previous reading where you could still see it as a higher number.

Also figure out why you thought you needed 8lbs of CYA. Something went wrong in poolmath.
 
I'm going to run the CYA test one more time. I tested it just a minute ago with the test sample I mixed an hour ago and got better results but I'm assuming you can't let the sample sit that long before testing.

I really appreciate all of your patience. I know what it's like to read forum posts from newbies (on topics I'm actually familiar with) doing crazy things. You are being very kind considering how bad I screwed this up.
 
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OK, here's the latest on CYA...

I ran the test with a fresh room temperature sample using the methods Marty and Bperry recommended. I could easily see the dot at 100 and 90. At 80 it was pretty fuzzy. At 70 it was "basically gone" unless you knew it was there and stared at it from multiple angles and light sources. So I guess my CYA is 80. Maybe I dodged a bullet????
 

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Hope so. I would let it go for a week and then retest.

Don't beat yourself up too bad. We all make mistakes. It's how we learn. Last spring when getting ready for warmer temps, I forgot about the temperature effect on the CYA test and as such, I added too much CYA. Fortunately I was right on the edge of too high and was able to manage it but I haven't added any since then.

I know you guys don't get a ton of rain, but as Marty said, CYA will slowly degrade and any rain you get until spring/swim season will help to bring it down. As long as it is in the 70-80 range, you should be good.

--Jeff
 
bertschb said:
but I'm assuming you can't let the sample sit that long before testing.
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You could leave it until tomorrow. It does not matter as long as the fluid does not evaporate.

You added enough CYA product to get to 90. So I would call it that based on your test data.

I know Poolmath showed that, but you should change the Goal to want you want. I had suggested 40 ppm CYA as a Goal as for the rest of the winter, until about March or so, you will be using liquid chlorine as the SWCG will not operate below 52F water temperature. So you need to follow the FC/CYA Levels for a Liquid Chlorine pool (non -SWCG) until your SWCG is generating chlorine on a regular basis.
 
mknauss said:
You added enough CYA product to get to 90. So I would call it that based on your test data.
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That's the problem. So much of the granulated CYA ended up in the MultiCyclone that it's really hard to say how much actually ended up in solution. Hard lesson learned though. As for the target goal, I was just using the default that PoolMath recommended. I have much more reading to do. Thanks again for your suggestions and feedback! Much appreciated!
 
bertschb said:
My CYA was zero and when I plugged that into PoolMath, it showed this...
View attachment 386403
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That may have been the problem. You can’t really tell the difference between zero and 20ppm. If the previous owners had some in there, you may have just been low.
 
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Here's the latest. After adding a ton of acid over several days (waaaaay more than I was comfortable adding), I finally got the pH to drop. I was shooting for 7.4 but got 7.2. TA is still way too high.

pH - 7.2 (started at 8.0+)
FC - 7.0 (started at 16.0)
TA - 225 (started at 240)
 
When pH gets to 7.8 to 8, lower it to 7.4. The TA will come down slowly. I would suggest you test your pH twice a week during this cold water time.
 
mknauss said:
When pH gets to 7.8 to 8, lower it to 7.4. The TA will come down slowly. I would suggest you test your pH twice a week during this cold water time.
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Will pH rise by itself or do I need to aerate?

Out of paranoia after screwing up my CYA, I've been testing pH multiple times each day as I added acid slowly.
 
It will rise on its own. Wind, ripples from your returns, etc are all forms of aeration. With your level of TA, the pH will rise.

No reason to test that often. pH on the high side only has issues with creating scale. At this time of year, that is not likely with cold water temperatures.
 

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