No I agree and I appreciate the straightforwardness, it’s just that I already started the method from the pool store before coming to this forum.
If it were me I'd stop what Leslies told you to do.
Have you been adding the Green to Clean? It's just an expensive fancy ammonia product. While ammonia will kill algae, it also wipes out chlorine.
While Powder Plus 73 sounds impressive, it's nothing more than CalHypo which is adding just as much calcium to your water as it is chlorine. Your above ground pool doesn't need that much calcium.
What you need is chlorine and some good numbers we can use to see what is really going on with your water. If your pool has been on a diet of tabs and granular shock I can believe the CYA/Stabilizer is high and it's where all your problems stem from.
Understand, in it's natural state, chlorine is a gas. Many large commercial pools actually use gas injection systems to chlorinate their pools. Now, to change chlorine into something we can use at home it needs to be bound to something to turn it into a solid. The "somethings" that are commonly used are stabilizer (also known as CYA), calcium, lithium, or --- get this water. All of these add a little salt to your water, but they add something else.
Cal-Hypo add calcium
Tri-Chlor and Di-Chlor (tabs and most granules) add stabilizer
Lithium hypochlorite adds lithium
Liquid chlorine adds - water.
All of these things can be bad for your pool (except the water) in large quantities. The stabilizer helps shield the chlorine from UV degradation, but at higher levels it also impairs the ability of chlorine to do it's work. The higher the stabilizer level you have the higher the amount of chlorine you need. Too much calcium and you start to get scaling on the walls and floors of your pool.
So, why do pool stores push these products? Several reasons.
- Money would be the first. Unless a pool store is in Florida, Arizona or other year round areas they must make their profit in a short swim season. So, they need to sell you as much as they can as quickly as they can. Additionally, chemical sales is their bread and butter. Profit on a bucket of tabs is much higher than on a gallon of liquid.
- Secondly, we are an immediate gratification society. We want a magic potion that will fix our problem right now. This is where the industry has tried to ad items like clarifiers, floculants and the like which in a perfect world help get the bad stuff out of the water quickly. They sold you the Green to Clean or Yellow out because it kills algae, but didn't tell you it wipes our chlorine on contact.
- Third in my book is training. Most pool store employees learn on the job or through seminars taught by chemical salesmen. So, bad information is handed down from employee to trainee and the chemical salesmen teach them to push high profit items. This is especially true in large chain stores where employees are paid commission and managers jobs are based on how much product flows out the door.
Pool store methods can work for a long time and many are oblivious to what is happening in their pool. If you are in an area where your pool is drained down a lot each winter and winter snow/rains fill an overflow the pool each spring you are starting with a blank canvas, chemically speaking.
Are there good pool stores out there, yes! But, most of them are in the "sun" states where a family can own a small store and operate it 12 months a year, give good service and make a profit.
In the rest of the country you mainly have a high school/college kid who has about an hour training testing your water and telling you what to buy to add to your water. I guess that's like going into a carpet store and asking if you need to buy new carpet.
Unfortunately the pool industry has evolved into sales by scare tactics, misdirection, misinformation and marketing hype. Go in to the store and tell them your TA is low and they are going to sell you baking soda in a fancy package at four times the cost of WalMart. Do they have a right to make a profit, yes - but lets be reasonable. Heck, even their definition of "low" can many times put you on a pH roller coaster that's hard to get off of. Is that lack of knowledge or a sales technique to sell you more chemicals to control your pH????
Is that lack of knowledge or a sales technique to sell you more chemicals to control your pH????
What do we propose? We base our pool care system on accurate testing and only adding what the pool needs, when it needs it. Which leads to
TFPC tenet - Never put chemistry in your pool when you do not know the outcome
) and head for the nearest Powerball Lottery sales agent!