Problems with Intex SWCG

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Pv2 said:
IF, and I say "if" due to questionable testing, your stabilizer is at 100, that will explain why you have cloudy water and is most likely your biggest problem. buy the test kit before you buy any other equipment. the money you save from TFPC and testing yourself, adding only what you need and not a bunch of pool store magic products (much less miracle machinery) that can damage your pool, will pay for that kit in very short order.
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after reading ing through some of the pool school stuff i am just wowed... Your levels here are vastly different from intex and even clorox and are way higher than what I appear to need. At the end of the month more than likely we will purchase that TF kit as I appear to need something more accurate. What other way is there to remove calcium though? I see osmosis or draining and refilling but our hardness already sits at 1000 when we fill it up fresh when starting off. From what I have read though borates are bad for ours because we sit in full sun. although TFP recommends this..
 
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For the CH to actually be 1000 ppm, and we will caveat that with we do not know what it is until you get a proper test kit, the fill water would have to be close to that level. Local water companies in your stated location show CH to be more like 200 ppm. So are you on a well that has exceptionally hard water? Do you use a water softener in your home? Do your plumbing fixtures get scaled up quickly?
 
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You need a good test kit to get accurate information about your chemistry.

You need to know the calcium hardness and not the total hardness.

You should test the fill water for calcium and TA.

Rain makes the calcium hardness go down, not up.

Once you get the CSI under control, the cell scaling should go away unless you have a different type of scale than calcium carbonate.
 
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To be honest that doesn't make sense the more I think about it. Our levels have been that high almost the whole season and we have had amazingly clear water. this last cloudiness came after the rains and our chlorine levels tanked as well.
 
mknauss said:
For the CH to actually be 1000 ppm, and we will caveat that with we do not know what it is until you get a proper test kit, the fill water would have to be close to that level. Local water companies in your stated location show CH to be more like 200 ppm. So are you on a well that has exceptionally hard water? Do you use a water softener in your home? Do your plumbing fixtures get scaled up quickly?
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Our fixtures do scale up pretty quickly. We are not on a well though. We get a ton of impurities in the water though that cause the shower heads to leak, etc... plumbing company tried to say it was sand but I didn't truly believe it. the first year in our home they came and cleaned out multiple fixtures multiple times. as far as a softener, we have no place to put one. Everything is in our laundry room (natural gas on demand water heater) if we did do that I dunno where we we would put it. When I clean out the water heater yearly we follow the instructions and use a pump to circulate vinegar through it, I get a ton of scale that comes out, sometimes in small chunks, We get a ton of "white specs" That I am sure is calcium... enough to cloud the 5 gal bucket for sure. We will order our test kit today to try to get this under control.
 
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I added an algaecide yesterday along with adding manual chlorine. Haven't done a test yet but we are a lot more clear now, I have a TF100xl test kit coming that I ordered this am. When it gets here, I will post the results for the pool as well as our actual water and keep you guys updated. I will also try to see about getting borates to add as well. Thank you guys for the massive help so far, your help has kept us from solely ditching the SWG. I look forward to the continued help!!IMG_20210711_084834.jpg
 
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algaecide and is that a floater I see?, possible CYA over 100...suggest you load up on liquid chlorine, get those tabs out of your pool, and stop buying magic potions until you really know what you need. one thing for sure you are going to need is liquid chlorine and possibly a partial drain. don't put anything else into your water until you know what is going on. liquid chlorine ONLY, for now.
 
Pv2 said:
algaecide and is that a floater I see?, possible CYA over 100...suggest you load up on liquid chlorine, get those tabs out of your pool, and stop buying magic potions until you really know what you need. one thing for sure you are going to need is liquid chlorine and possibly a partial drain. don't put anything else into your water until you know what is going on. liquid chlorine ONLY, for now.
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Wasn't a floater at all. Just a moth that fell in and was spinning in circles trying to get out. We also don't use chlorine tabs either.. we use powdered chlorine and that's currently all we are using until my tf 100 comes in.. I think the algae is a problem though because chlorine tanks at night.. as for liquid chlorine we decided not to go that route because of not being able to store it for long.. a month of storage just isn't practical IMHO.. we are using the shock treatment at 5 ounces to get proper chlorine levels in the am. We turned off the swg until we could figure out what was going on.. on here there was a post talking about the liquid chlorine only being able to be stored for a month before it starts to weaken, that is correct right?
 
Pv2 said:
algaecide and is that a floater I see?, possible CYA over 100...suggest you load up on liquid chlorine, get those tabs out of your pool, and stop buying magic potions until you really know what you need. one thing for sure you are going to need is liquid chlorine and possibly a partial drain. don't put anything else into your water until you know what is going on. liquid chlorine ONLY, for now.
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I also know that I need algaecide because I have white algae collecting in my filter basket, hence the adding of algaecide
 
Pv2 said:
algaecide and is that a floater I see?, possible CYA over 100...suggest you load up on liquid chlorine, get those tabs out of your pool, and stop buying magic potions until you really know what you need. one thing for sure you are going to need is liquid chlorine and possibly a partial drain. don't put anything else into your water until you know what is going on. liquid chlorine ONLY, for now.
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H, the floater you are thinking of is our skimmer. I thought you were talking about water bugs, we get those as well here and there.. boatmen is I think what I saw when I read up on them
 

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mknauss said:
That has either CYA, or Calcium, in it. Check the labels.
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Calcium hypochlorite.. dang!! No cya though that I know of.. just says other ingredients 48%. Is there anyway to truly store liquid chlorine then without a lot of degredation? Or is there another powdered brand you recommend? Or should we just not worry about it degrading? Our kit just shipped this morning thank the heavens!
 
If kept in a cool, dark place liquid chlorine does not degrade very rapidly. Most homes in Colorado have basements. Do you? Or at least the laundry room.

There is no form of solid chlorine I will recommend. What you have been adding has calcium in it. You have stated your pool is very high in calcium. That is the cause.
 
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mknauss said:
If kept in a cool, dark place liquid chlorine does not degrade very rapidly. Most homes in Colorado have basements. Do you? Or at least the laundry room.

There is no form of solid chlorine I will recommend. What you have been adding has calcium in it. You have stated your pool is very high in calcium. That is the cause.
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Absolutely makes sense ugh. I wish I'd have realized that earlier, I feel like a dum dum now. We do not have a basement here in pueblo and a lot of use don't, it's more common up north near the springs and Denver area. We do have our laundry room for sure though with space being tight, I'll throw up some shelves for it. We were concerned about getting it since we had read that it only lasts a month before degrading
 
Ok, where do i start haha. We were told by usps that our TF100 kit was delivered so, I looked in the mailbox and nothing. Package receptacles and nothing. So, I contacted TF test kits and they stated they would send another. Low and behold I had a neighbor from the subdivision next to us that kindly brought us our package today due to them having a lot of stuff going on, I couldn't be more grateful. i started checking our water around 1130ish and this is what I came up with.. Btw the strips were way the heck off.

FC was 3.5 with CC at 1
PH: 7.4 (it bounced between 7.3 and 7.4)
TA: 230
CH: 450
CYA: 65
Salt: 3370
Temp: 74
CSI: 0.21


How does this look to you guys? Our water is clearish, we can see to the bottom but has a slight blue tint. I stopped adding the powdered chlorine as well due to the calcium and now have 3gal of liquid chlorine at 10% according to the bottle. It appeared that our chlorine was getting used during the night so I did enough to shock it last night which appeared to help a lot in terms of dead bugs, etc... as I read its more beneficial to add at night so you have the whole night to sanitize (we were adding early in the AM). We are also still having issues with the SWG performing like normal so we will submit a claim in regards to our cells. Next year we will be adding borates, due to how little we have left in the season (approx 1 month leftish.. snow typically starts at the beginning to middle of September) We also do solely measure in all of our chemicals as well with a scale that does ounces, grams, etc... because of the differences in following the guidelines of capful of this and that, etc...

I do have a few questions though:

1: should I aerate to raise my PH and then drop the PH and alkalinity into the ranges? I read on pool school that I shouldn't drop to the target alkalinity unless I had to slow down the PH increasing or had high CSI which I am not near the target level but also not at 6.1 or higher which pool math says is indicative of a problem.

2: Should I worry about said CSI level?

3: Should I replace the water (calculator says at least 42%) to bring the CH level down?

4: I do assume, I will need to slam the pool correct?
 
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digidoggie18 said:
Should I replace water to drop my CYA level down to between 30 and 40 as well?
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Up to you. As you do not have a big algae outbreak, I would try raising your FC to 28 ppm and hold it there for a day or so and see if things clear up.
 
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