Hate to tell you this but a saltwater pool is a chlorine pool, its just generated from the salt using electricity instead of added separately as a chemical. Your FC is too low and judging from what your saying you need to shock the pool, once the pool is clean and sanitary you can worry about balance. Shock the pool with chlorine (and maintain that level long enough for it to work...its a process!) but I would bring down the PH with acid first to get the PH closer to 7.2-7.6, your saltwater generator cannot create enough chlorine to shock the pool on its own....and yes you need to add chemical chlorine to do this...either liquid or Cal Hypo (usually liquid is preferred since it does not affect your calcium hardness). If you have read pool school you will know your PH will rise when adding any kind of chlorine so expect that, it will drop as the chlorine is used up so don't compensate by adding more acid. Read the section on shocking, its mandatory to know how and why you do it.
BTW its not the FC in the pool that most people have issues with its the CC that most people have reactions too, if you have ever went into a public pool and smelled chlorine in the air thats from CC (to me its noxious!). I usually maintain my pool at 5-9 ppm FC with zero CC (60ppm CYA) and you cannot smell chlorine...because its clean! There is a lot of misconception about chlorine pools and peoples reaction to it, its usually from public pool exposure where the bather demand is huge and public usage means lots of urine in the water not to mention sweat and other bodily fluids which creates combined chlorine...yeech!
Some people find periodic shocking is necessary to maintain sanitation and some don't have issues with it so they just maintain the FC level and check for CC to ensure its staying clean. Having a minimum level of chlorine in the pool does not ensure it won't grow anything, the wind and rain bring with it all kinds of things. In my area, wind brings dirt in from surrounding fields around the city and I need to shock twice a year to maintain sanitation in my pool...some people never have to shock...thats just the way it is. I find with my pool I need to maintain a slightly higher FC level than what is the minimum recommended to maintain my pools sanitation...so I keep it on the high side. Once you get more experience you will be able to tell from testing what your pool needs to maintain its sanitation...but for now you need to start at square one and that begins with
proper PH, and a properly shocked and balanced pool...in that order! Once you achieve those three critical things your saltwater generator will maintain your FC levels at the desired setting and you can fiddle with percentages to get that desired FC result and fine adjust your other mineral balances. In case no one has told you, the goal of having a saltwater pool is to reduce/eliminate the daily maintenance required with adding chlorine manually, it does not mean you won't ever have to add any because to shock you will have to add chlorine.
In my case I had to raise my FC to a slightly higher level because I was having persistant low level CC issues, I was trying to maintain a minimum FC level but that doesn't work in my area and I had to learn that lesson. Once I learned that, I went from shocking once per month to once every three months to keep the CC down to zero. My CC problems were not related to bather load but rather from dirt coming in with the wind and rain. You will likely not have the same issues as anyone of us here on the forum but I would imagine someone has had similar experiences that lives close to you. As your pool ages and matures it will change and you will have to adjust, learning how the chemical relationships interact is just one of the facts of life with owning a pool. Once you get your kit the accuracy of being able to measure all the chemical/mineral balances will allow you to gain control of your pools health and keep it sanitary, you will learn what gets affected by adding certain chemicals and how they interrelate.
Sorry if I am a little long winded but my family had skin and ear infection issues when I first bought this house with the pool and I didn't understand the importance of sanitation in my pool water, I assumed incorrectly it was too much chlorine in the water but the reality was I had things growing in the pool that wasn't being taken care of with daily FC maintenance...not to mention a sky high CYA level from the pucks that were used by the previous owners that I had to correct at the same time. It was a painful learning experience for all of us and one I won't ever repeat because I now know the importance of proper sanitation, its not really stressed all that much in the literature so its easy to make the same mistake as I did. It took a week long shock at very high levels and sanitizing all the pool accessories to get our pool into good health, believe it or not a scum line of grey dirt on the pool liner contributed to the persistant low level CC. Once I got the pool scrubbed and everything sanitized I could relax and enjoy normal daily maintenance and all our problems disappeared. Another thing I incorrectly assumed was that my incoming city water supply was clean enough to not need shocking when I refilled my pool to correct the high CYA...big mistake!
I hope you learn from my mistakes, remember just because the water is clear does not mean its sanitized.
