Wait time for chlorine test results?

[NBWS6]

I have an old Taylor kit and just bought new drops for it a few weeks ago (at the pool supply store). I switched over to bleach instead of pucks this year also. My question is, after dropping 5 drops of reagent in to test chlorine, I get a lower reading than if I waited half a minute to read the results. I dont know if I should go by the immediate reading of 1.2 or the several second waiting period reading of 2.4. If I wait until 1 minute or so the reading could go up to 3.6!

My water is a bit cloudy but I think thats because I havent increased my filtering time yet and its hot here in Texas. And I had algae growing on the walls when I forgot to check chlorine levels for a few days and no chlorine was picked up by the test kit.

[waste]

NB, hi and welcome to the forum. I guess I'm the first one to see your post so I'll try to give you the answer. It sounds like you are using OTO to test your chlorine, turns yellow in cl's presence. It's my understanding that the immediate reading is for free chlorine, the stuff that does the killing, and any subsequent deepening of the yellow indicates the presence of combined chlorine, the stuff that has already done it's killing and is now just useless and smelly. A number of people have questioned whether or not OTO actually works for this. FAS or DPD tests can test for both free and combined chlorine which is useful when trying to combat an algae bloom. In short, the kit you have has it's uses, but having a way to accurately measure combined chlorine is a good idea so that you know you have sufficient sanitizer in the pool. Hopefully this is at least somewhat helpful, if you've any further ?s, please feel free to ask, the nice folks here are always willing to help with just about any pool problem.

[NBWS6]

Thank you Waste for answering. I'll look into the FAS and DPD testing methods, meanwhile I better add a bunch of bleach!