Worst pool yet? Can I get this clean?

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A

andy00018

0
Mar 25, 2010
19
Long Island, NY
Hello,

Took off the cover today. I purchased this house a few months back. Can I get this clean by filtering and shocking and keeping levels correct or will other measures have to be taken. I can't see further than a foot down. You can see what I am scooping out, it smells like raw sewage.
I guess its just organic material (leaves, sticks) covered in algae?


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I'm pretty sure that you'll need to remove the organic crud, or it will simply consume the chlorine as you add it. Scooping and netting, and maybe a large leafeater are pretty much what you can use.
The good news is that once you get the crud out, the pool water will clear up with chlorine and filtration.
 
This is actually not the worst I have seen :)

Yes, you can clear this - and yes, you do want to get as much solid stuff out as you can see before you begin to treat it. It's hard, scooping blindly but it's doable.

Please follow the articles in Pool School: Defeating Algae and How to Turn Your Green Swamp into a Sparkling Oasis. Also "How to Shock your Pool".

We're here to help.... post any questions you may have.

Here's one of the worst that went from Really Bad to Trouble-Free:
http://www.troublefreepool.com/how-...up-on-pool-stairs-and-dirty-walls-t15797.html

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So yeah, you can do it! :goodjob:
 
Oh yumm! A challenge :)

Scoop, scoop, scoop. Your first step would be to remove as much solid material as you can get out. IMO you have about an inch too much water in the pool now. In the one picture it's right up to the top of the skimmer opening which impedes the skimmer action. Once you have the organics removed as much as possible I'd drain an inch or so. Ideally, the water level is halfway up on the skimmer hole.

Then you'd dump in a bunch of bleach. Chlorinating liquid might be a little cheaper if you can find it. It comes in 3 or 5 gallon carboys sold by some pool stores and is somewhere between 10% and 12.5% chlorine. Use the pool calculator to figure out your shock value for FC and assume 0 ppm CYA for now. Presumably this is a chlorine pool, not a Baquacil pool?

You could of course dump bleach in there now. It might help with the smell but it's not going to be able to do its job until after you get the crud out.

And yes, you CAN clean this up. If you can give it some attention every day my guess is you'll have clean water within 2 weeks and clear water by 3 weeks.
 
Yes.

I've seen a worse pool at the Boy Scout camp where I worked for three summers. We started with a rake strapped to a pole to drag the bottom and pull debris out. The filter ran 24/7 for about a week. A couple times a day we added gallons of bleach and some acid. Imagine if I knew then what I know now - but this was before Algore invented the internet. We had no clue about CYA or shock levels.

Once you can sorta see through the green haze, you can start vacuuming where you see dark blobs. Expect frequent backwashing. At the time, I was ignorant that there were inline leaf strainers - we just stopped everything every few mintes to clean out the pump basket.

But to repeat the short answer- yes, you can get that pool clean. Once all the crud is out, the green stuff will disappear quite fast. You'll get some good muscles raking, brushing, vacuuming, and carrying jugs of bleach!
 
Trying to save that water is optimistic, expensive and a huge effort. Unless you are in a high water table you need to start from scratch.

Use soap and water to clean the exposed areas, hook up a vac behind the liner, wash the liner as you drain the rest of the pool, clean it out and refill.
 
renovxpt said:
Trying to save that water is optimistic, expensive and a huge effort. Unless you are in a high water table you need to start from scratch.

Use soap and water to clean the exposed areas, hook up a vac behind the liner, wash the liner as you drain the rest of the pool, clean it out and refill.
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Honestly I wanted to drain all the water and start fresh but have been told be almost everyone not to. The reason I was given have been that the liner will collapse and the sand base will be ruined. Is this true and can and should it be done or will I be OK with what I have planned (scoop, shock and filter)?
 

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You have to decide what is more expensive and less risky. Where I live, water is very costly, it would be cheaper for me to treat with chems than to drain and refill.

Draining a vinyl lined pool is risky and probably best left to experienced persons... you can end up with ruined liner and then have an even more expensive problem on your hands. There have been numerous threads showing were the liner gets displaced or wrinkled etc. because of high water tables or complete drains.

I suppose you could drain out about 50% - leaving at least a foot of water in any shallow end, diluting the murky water with fresh...

There have been 100s of threads similar to yours where the pool owner did not drain completely and start over. Of course, that's a personal decision.
 
It is a major project no matter how you approach it. If the liner is intact and more than a couple of years old, draining the pool could be a bad idea. Older liners are very likely to tear when the pool is refilled, and even after being reset will almost never go back into place completely correctly assuming they don't tear. Some of this depends on just how much debris is currently in the pool. If the debris is deep enough, it might be worth giving up on the liner. But if there is less than a foot of that stuff, it is usually simpler to scoop it out with leaf nets.

For light amounts of debris, scooping by hand is the best approach. For medium amounts, I would try sodium percarbonate, perhaps 1 lb per 1,000 gallons. You can buy it bulk or as ProTeam System Support. It will cause the leaves and a good portion of the other debris to float to the surface where they can be skimmed off with a leaf net far more easily than dredging everything up from the bottom, it also gives you a head start on fighting the algae. If the debris is very heavy then draining is probably the only feasible approach.

A rather technical discussion on the merits and challenges of draining the pool has been moved to Draining a vinyl liner pool in The Deep End. The conclusion was that a pro could probably drain the pool without problems using special procedures, but it is not something a home owner should attempt. JasonLion
 
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