mickey, we have those bugs here too - ugh. There's also a lot of little crawly bugs going into the pool and when fished out, they look like tiny armadillos, all curled up.
Great post from Waterbear and also great article from chemgeek - I had read that article a couple months ago and have been working many of the suggestions it lists. Thank you both for referring them.
I am still very shocked that pink algae visited my pool because I have always been a meticulous pool owner. What threw me off this year was that I was using test strips to test for cya, thinking I was doing a good thing. After opening the pool this spring I had a cya reading of 0 (huh?). So I added some along with using pucks, and continued readings with the test strips showed I still had very little cya. You know the rest of the story . . and by the time I got my TF100 test kit and tested it, I had a reading of 90 to 100. So, I didn't have enough chlorine for my cya level and those pink invaders moved in. We had to dump 12,000 gallons of water earlier this summer and replace it.
I was doing some further reading about pink algae - just by googling and buzzing around the 'net and found something that said that chlorine cannot penetrate the slime barrier well to kill the bacteria that's really buried in there; it kills the ones that are closer to the surface of the slime but those inside continue to flourish which is why this is so hard to get rid of. It continued to say that if MPS (oh gosh, I can't even spell this one but it's the non-chlorine oxidizer) is used, the slime will be broken down and the bacteria will be exposed. I'm so tempted to pour some into the skimmer to clean out the plumbing, but I don't have any dosage info or anything to go on. I had also read somewhere that by the time you see pink in your pool, that the plumbing is pretty well heavily infested. Nice, huh?
Anyway, it's not all bad . . the pool looks great but only because I have been maintaining higher chlorine levels and shocking it once a week - still a small price to pay for the pleasure of having a pool!
Jan