Hey everyone! We bought our new house in March and the first thing I did was fall for the “bring your water to us and we’ll spend your money for you!” pool store gimmick. Surprisingly, they said my water was perfect (it didn’t look perfect) and I didn’t need anything (as a new home owner with no chemicals...I needed stuff). So they had a “pool reopening” kit that came with shock, chlorine pucks, and the brown weekly conditioner stuff that looks like it shouldn’t be in the pool. I got that bundle thinking “if you need this for reopening the pool, you’ll probably need it on an ongoing basis too”. Things were great for a while! The water looked great! That is, until I had my first encounter with algae. I used the SLAM method and got rid of the algae, my levels returned to normal, and all was good.
Fast forward to now. I have algae again because Tropical Storm Christobal dumped multiple inches of rain in the pool. Now my levels are all kinds of jacked up. Alkalinity is super high, pH is super low, CYA is basically non-existent, chlorine is basically zero, the whole shebang. I shocked the pool yesterday afternoon (less than 24 hours ago at the time of this post) so I would expect that the chlorine level would be sky high, but no...they’re at or right close to zero.
I know the first thing I need to do is to get a real test kit so I can KNOW what my water is doing. My question to you friends is what is the order of operations when all of your levels are out of whack? Pool math said I need like 82lbs of Borax, 3 gallons of bleach, and all kinds of crazy stuff. I’m not saying it’s wrong, I just feel like if some levels are dependent on other levels, which way is up and where do I start?
The pool is a little over 13,000 gallons (28 x 14, 3ft on shallow end, 6 ft on the deep end), rectangle shaped and in southern/central Florida
Fast forward to now. I have algae again because Tropical Storm Christobal dumped multiple inches of rain in the pool. Now my levels are all kinds of jacked up. Alkalinity is super high, pH is super low, CYA is basically non-existent, chlorine is basically zero, the whole shebang. I shocked the pool yesterday afternoon (less than 24 hours ago at the time of this post) so I would expect that the chlorine level would be sky high, but no...they’re at or right close to zero.
I know the first thing I need to do is to get a real test kit so I can KNOW what my water is doing. My question to you friends is what is the order of operations when all of your levels are out of whack? Pool math said I need like 82lbs of Borax, 3 gallons of bleach, and all kinds of crazy stuff. I’m not saying it’s wrong, I just feel like if some levels are dependent on other levels, which way is up and where do I start?
The pool is a little over 13,000 gallons (28 x 14, 3ft on shallow end, 6 ft on the deep end), rectangle shaped and in southern/central Florida