Blue water but still using up too much chlorine

[fishandfly]

I started this year with the fas-dpd test kit and using bleach.

Last week I failed... I left town for a week and thought I'd be ok with just shocking before I left. I have had an excessive chlorine usage for the past few months, so I should have known that I'd have an algae breakout after a week.

I returned to a green pool.

My numbers are:

Atlanta GA
ph = 7.2
ALK = 110
CYA = 35
CC = staying between 0 and .5

So I started with keeping it at a shock level of 16ppm, testing and adding more bleach 4x a day as well as backwashing, vacuuming, etc. I'm now re-shocking every evening.

5 days later and my pool is now beautiful blue, but CL levels are dropping too much.

I'll add bleach to 16ppm at about 10pm and it will end up back at 8ppm 24 hours later.

Am I on the right track to just keep doing this? My CC levels are staying very low (less than .5ppm) so I think I'm shocking to the right level, but whatever is eating up 8 ppm over 24 hours is just refusing to die.

[chem geek]

Can you see if the drop in FC is during the day or if it is also occurring overnight? That might give us a clue as to what is going on. I've seen two reports on another forum of unusually high chlorine demand during the day but not at night acting as if there were no CYA in the water when there clearly was.

Richard

[fishandfly]

Well, it's been a couple days.

I've been out of town, so my wife has just been testing and adding to 16ppm each night.

so:
7-2 11pm - wife brought it to 16ppm
7-3 11:30pm - at 7ppm, shocked to 16.6ppm
7-4 9:00am - 14ppm

So, the loss from 9.5 hours at night was 2.6ppm.

[chem geek]

So you're losing 2.6 ppm out of 16 ppm FC overnight. That's a little high. If your 24 hour loss is still around 8 ppm FC, then that would be an additional 5.4 ppm FC loss during the day which wouldn't be that much out of line in strong sunlight. So it seems you have some sort of persistent loss from chlorine fighting something in the pool.

If you want to see if you can try and kill off whatever it is a bit faster, you could target 20 ppm FC as your sustained shock level. Keep track of the loss and see if it diminishes over time (especially the overnight loss). If it does, then you're on the right track. If not, then there is something else going on such as something getting introduced into the pool (such as pollen or other organic matter).

Be sure and check your filter since perhaps organic matter (including dead algae) has accumulated there and chlorine may be getting used up breaking it down. You should clean your filter after fighting an algae outbreak. Of course, check your skimmer as well, clean out your pool sweep bag, etc.

There's one other possibility you should eliminate -- the chlorine may not be as strong as you think. If you are assuming it's 16 ppm FC you are getting to at night based on the quantity of chlorine, you should instead wait at least a half hour (with good circulation; an hour if poor) and test the FC level, then test again the next morning. It's possible the chlorine you are using is weaker than you are assuming.

Richard

[CarlD]

If Richard is right, here's how I test it:

1) Test your tap water for chlorine...that's your baseline.
2) I bought a glass eyedropper that's marked from .2 ml to 1 ml.
3) Fill an empty 2 liter soda bottle with tap water to the 2 liter level the soda was at.
4) Add .2 ml of the bleach/LC to the soda bottle. Cap and shake a while.
5) Test the soda bottle's chlorine level. Its level minus the chlorine level of the tap water, is the actual strength of your bleach.

If you want to be more accurate, take a 5 gal bucket and add 5 soda bottles of tap water and 1 ml of bleach and test as above. The concentration ratios will be the same but with more water and more bleach the variation is smaller.