Need a little help CL not staying in

[joanie109]

I have a 18x34 doughboy AG vinyl liner with a deep middle. About 16,000 gallons.

I started the season and got the CL to stay and added the CYA by the pantyhose method and everything was perfect. Test results were great and I added a gallon of bleach every night. I went out of town last weekend and we had a ton of rain and I came back to a green pool. No CL and high pH. So I vacummed to waste like crazy and scrubbed the walls. Cleaned the filters and then kept the CL up to 15 for 3days. The water looks pretty clear now but it's a bit cloudy and I can't get the CL to hold over night. I added 4 gallons last night and 1 this AM and now I just tested at 7PM and here's what I got.

FC - 0 ppm
TC - 0 ppm
CC - 0 ppm
PH - 8.0
Alk - 150
CYA - 0

Can someone help me get this stablized step by step?

I am ready to through bleach in for the night and I want to make sure thats the right thing to do. The dirt devil d1000 is at work vacumming right now so do I need to backwash and then add CL? If it holds then can I add some more CYA tommorow AM? I'm worried about the pH and the Alk going higher.

HELP I'm confused.

THANKS!

[aylad]

The cloudiness that you see is algae that is dead but the filter has not yet removed from the water--sometimes that takes awhile. Just keep your filter backwashed, and run it 24/7 until it clears. If you're adding bleach at night, and the levels are falling before daylight the next day, then you haven't quite killed all the algae yet, and the answer is to get youir chlorine back up to 15 and keep it there until it holds overnight. However, if you're adding it at night and then waiting until later in the day to test, the sun is eating it all up and you're just wasting the bleach without having CYA in the water to help protect it. Try adding bleach tonight, then test for Cl early in the morning before the sun is on the pool to see if you're losing it to fighting stuff in the water or if you're losing it to the sun. The addition of bleach shouldn't affect your alk, and your pH is going to register falsely high with high chlorine levels. However, if you're measuring pH that high with zero chlorine in the water, then I'd use some muriatic acid to bring it back down to 7.2-7.4--it may help clear up the cloudiness a little quicker.

And you can go ahead and add the CYA, either through the skimmer (but make sure that you're not going to need to backwash for about a week or it'll all just wash out the drain pipes) or in a sock or nylon in your skimmer basket. It takes several days to completely dissolve, so if you really have zero CYA, I would go ahead and add it now.

Janet