I have no idea what I did or if today was just a easy day for the pool but I went up instead of down or the same. I was probably 5 this am and tonight after a swim I decided to check as I felt something was different with the pool. Test came back as 7ppm. Maybe it was cleaning of filter, shutting off swg so could spray it out and inspect, adding the other half of gallon of stabilizer or just today didn’t stress the level? Which if it was weather the whole cloudy day before would have made it rise also. Maybe there was funk in filter or I just misread stabilizer test and didn’t add enough. Hope I can put it back to 50% or a little lower again
New pool and first summer season
- Thread starter Cmelser
- Start date
It looks the experts no longer care about this situation anymore! The update if anyone still cares and will be my last post to try to help other rookies.
It looks like the issue was pretty much related to my stabilizer level. Getting test right is important and hard. I originally thought I was at 70, then after the pool store test of 50, I tested again on my own for practice and found to be 50 or less. I am guessing now it was less than 40. I added a half gallon of liquid stabilizer first and it should have put me right on, however no real improvement of chlorine retention. Test looked to be 70 but must have been less or I did it wrong. I added the rest of the bottle Saturday and started climbing levels. However I did clean my filter which I hadn’t done in a month and I did turn off system to inspect cell. So I don’t know if it was a combination of it all or not. Today I was at a fc of 8 and had climbed since yesterday. Tonight was at 8. Did stabilizer test and it was really easy to spot it at 70~80 felt closer to 80 but don’t trust it yet. Decided to try and bring my system down from 80% to 50% and see what happens in the next couple days. So for other rookies, test stabilizer before weather changes and if in doubt add a little and retest, at least you will be prepared for the weather change hopefully and have a smooth transition and not a few weeks up chasing your tail like me.
It looks like the issue was pretty much related to my stabilizer level. Getting test right is important and hard. I originally thought I was at 70, then after the pool store test of 50, I tested again on my own for practice and found to be 50 or less. I am guessing now it was less than 40. I added a half gallon of liquid stabilizer first and it should have put me right on, however no real improvement of chlorine retention. Test looked to be 70 but must have been less or I did it wrong. I added the rest of the bottle Saturday and started climbing levels. However I did clean my filter which I hadn’t done in a month and I did turn off system to inspect cell. So I don’t know if it was a combination of it all or not. Today I was at a fc of 8 and had climbed since yesterday. Tonight was at 8. Did stabilizer test and it was really easy to spot it at 70~80 felt closer to 80 but don’t trust it yet. Decided to try and bring my system down from 80% to 50% and see what happens in the next couple days. So for other rookies, test stabilizer before weather changes and if in doubt add a little and retest, at least you will be prepared for the weather change hopefully and have a smooth transition and not a few weeks up chasing your tail like me.
I know this is old thread now but I appear to have finally fixed the issue. After battling this constant chlorine loss for weeks I called the pool company out. He was at a loss, he was impressed with the water balance the clarity and said the salt cell was good. He was baffled by the chlorine loss and agreed I should set way lower in percent. He said let’s test the phosphates just to see what they are. His kit ws bad so he sent me to the pool store, one store got 100ppb and another store got 350 neither felt the need to sell me anything. So again still lost. So I read everything on here read other articles in different places, kept going back to phosphates. So I emailed Hayward. Hayward says, we are confident your issue is phosphates or nitrogen/nitrates. So I decided to buy phosphate remover as I was aiming to go for a warranty claim so jump the hoops. Pool store recommended two 1lbs of cal-hypo., figured if I am going to sin might as well buy more stuff. So I treated phosphates, right about 24 almost 48 we were swimming and felt we smelled more chlorine than usual. I had already cleaned filter and removed some white particulate and drained out milky water from the filter tank. We sometimes would smell chlorine while on the deck and thought it was something with the splash out water, tests never showed any CC, just constant FC loss. So I decided to throw a bag of shock in FC went to 17ppm after an hour. Smelled a lot more chlorine. In the am about 12 hours after shock FC was 8., chlorine smell seemed gone water slightly cloudy. Cleaned filter again FC held at 8.5 all day and about 6:30 dropped to 6.5, non of these tests appeared to show any CC. I have now held 5-5.5 with swg set at 25 for 12 hours instead of 1.5-2.5 at 50 for 12 hours. Going to retest all levels tomorrow to see if all is in harmony finally. I have no idea what caused this issue but it was a PH battle then a chlorine battle and no signs of algae, no real smell that was a sign, no sign of CC being over 0.2. Two pool stores baffled, pool company baffled and I totally have no idea. My guess after tons of reading was either Hayward salt cells do not like phosphates at all or I had a balanced stalemate between ammonia and chlorine. Maybe lowering phosphates allowed chlorine to start working which unleashed the smell and then shocking kicked the build up out? Either way I don’t want to do this again and I hope it’s fixed.
- Jul 21, 2013
- 52,422
- Pool Size
- 35000
- Surface
- Plaster
- Chlorine
- Salt Water Generator
- SWG Type
- Pentair Intellichlor IC-60
- Jul 21, 2013
- 52,422
- Pool Size
- 35000
- Surface
- Plaster
- Chlorine
- Salt Water Generator
- SWG Type
- Pentair Intellichlor IC-60
CYA testing is not that precise. Variations of +/- 10 ppm is not significant.
Ok I know the test its way less cloudy than it was prior to this nightmare. I have maintained 4.5-5 for a few days now so whatever it was seems done. Pool guy seems to think it may have been phosphates and someone else and myself feel it was ammonia. Pool never dropped below 1ppm so everyone is a little confused. I am partly interested as I don’t mind a investigation but this was nuts. Don’t want to fight this again but I know some phosphate remover and a bag of cal-hypo seems to have been the cure. I know way against this site but no fix seemed to fit.