Confessions of a newbie: dead algae, clarifier, persistent cloudy water

Hi. Sigh. I wish I'd found this excellent resource before I attacked my algae problem:

Above ground easy-set pool, 6K+ gallons, wimpy pump with cartridge filter. I went out of town (on the river!) and since intex is out of stock on regular covers, I left the pool covered with a solar cover. It was very warm and slightly green upon my return, with areas of thicker growth on the vinyl walls that I had to scrub. I think I've killed it all (probably, I now read, with the wrong algicide but that's water under the bridge, or more-accurately, water still-in-the-pool)).

So the green is gone, the readings (on strips, I see now that's another bad thing but it's what I've got) are reasonable (for me, that means high pH and over-the-top total alkalinity, it's a desert here and that's the water that comes out of the well, although I see a thread about LOW pH and aeration but first this problem).

After I scrubbed and cleared up the green-ness, the water was still really cloudy - whitely cloudy. I tried for a few days to filter and vacuum and shock and such. Part of the trouble is the wimpy pump which doesn't really vacuum well.

Then I used a polymer clarifier that I found in the pool aisle at Rite-Aid. Now, I have cloudiness that settles to the bottom when the water is still, but when I try to vacuum it up, it spews back out of the filter outlet, seeming not to get caught in the filter at all. As soon as I get in the water, the cloudiness/polymer/dead algae/whatever stuff gets easily stirred up and the water is milky again.

Is this safe to put my body into? Can I get rid of it, short of draining the pool? I can't really do that, unless I throw in the towel for the season, because our water supply at this time of year is limited.

Thanks so much for sharing your expertise.

Debbie

Dead algae at the bottom of the pool is not a sanitation issue -- if you keep your chlorine up, that's all that's needed.

There's an aesthetic problem, of course: it doesn't look good.

Perhaps more importantly, if you have small children they can disappear dangerously into really cloudy water.

But, from a sanitation point of view, if the green is gone, and the goo settles overnight, and the chlorine is kept up (3ppm or more), you're fine.

Ben
"PoolDoc"