Phase Two: Cloudy water, cleaning out the crud, etc.

First, thanks to those who posted to help me and who put all this information up here. Even if my results haven't been an overnight success I feel a lot more in control of what's going on and now have the education to know what the numbers really mean, how they relate to each other, and what to do about them.

A few weeks back I started working on the pool, which was a green slime pit (or, for those from Louisiana who would get this joke, I called it the "Atchafalya Basin Exhibit and Heritage Center"). I went to the pool store to buy some equipment, namely an extra rake, a new pressure gauge, and a test kit. Leslie's sells rebranded Taylor test kits and I wanted to get started. They did not have the FAS-DPD kit in stock so I had to settle on just a DPD kit - the kid working there didn't know what I was talking about. Of course he didn't know about the leaf vaccuums that attach to a garden hose either. That was a funny experience post-forum, listening to people get told "buy 3 pounds of this, 20 gallons of that" etc. ... just had to shake my head.

I figure when my chlorine gets high enough that it really matters I will buy the smaller FAS-DPD chlorine-only kit if I can find it, or just the reagents since Taylor helpfully tells me exactly what is in each kit on their website.

I was pleased when my pool went from green to milky blue, but I can't seem to get it past there now. Since I know people will want test results, here are mine from earlier tonight:

FC: .5
TC: 1
pH: 7.4
CH: 220
CYA: <<30

I didn't test TA as I did that when I first opened the pool and it was fine.

I retested CH because I wanted a baseline to use as I have a bunch of cal-hypo 73% left over from when I was a pool store flunky. Fortunately it only adds .7ppm for each 1ppm of chlorine I add and I have a lot of leeway (I understand I should keep CH between 200-300).

After this, I threw 4 pucks of trichlor into my skimmer (still have a bunch of those, too) to add CYA as it's not always possible for me to keep running to the store to buy Cl and I figured a little stabilizer would help. They dissolve pretty fast, I actually put some in Saturday morning and they were mostly dissolved by that evening. So even though I'm backwashing constantly I think I'm getting somewhere, I know the CW here is to not worry about stabilizer until you get the pool clear.

I also added 60oz of my cal-hypo 73%, which according to the handy pool calculator (www.poolcalulator.com, thanks for that) was enough to bring me up to 15ppm of Cl for overnight but only raise my CH by a few points. I guess we'll see later this (Monday) morning how that went.

After this, I brushed the sides, which were pretty good already, and the floor, which though I couldn't see it must be covered in junk as it kicked up lots of brown crap that quickly made the pool a milky brown to where I couldn't even see the top step at the corner. I had been using the rake, but mostly what I was bringing up was sludge as this junk has been sitting on the bottom of the pool for a while - long story - yeah I kinda started with a foreclosure pool.

I don't know if there's a better way to get rid of the muck but I figured if I kick it up into the water and let the filter handle it that'd be the best way as just using the rake wasn't producing enough results and a lot of the stuff seemed to just go through the mesh anyway.

My questions right now are these:

1. Should I test twice a day?

2. Should I add chlorine in the morning? My pool is outside and gets the full sun on it all day long, and the days are long now. So I don't see the point myself. But then why test in the morning if I'm not going to do anything until the evening? Just to see if it will hold Cl overnight?

3. I am running my pump/filter 24/7 and have been for a couple of weeks. Do I need to give it a break or anything? I figure it can rest when the pool is clean, myself, but my wife keeps asking me as she doesn't want to buy a new one.

4. I have heard some people mention adding DE to a sand filter to help it clean out stuff that might get through normally. I am going to read more on this by searching but I'd like some thoughts. I remember back when I first got this thing and had it clean and operating, when the pollen hit (here in Georgia we have serious, thick yellow pollen that covers everything in the spring) the filter wasn't getting it and I basically had to just let it get eaten up by the Cl until it was gone. Would like to avoid that in the future and it made me wonder if maybe some of this other particulate matter isn't getting through, too. It's hard to tell if I'm cleaning anything out - if there's progress, it's slow. Sure I need to backwash my filter, so I know some stuff is getting through, but I'd think the water in the little bottle (the one on the filter you use to see how backwashing is going) would get A LOT dirtier than it has been.

OK, that's a really long post. Sorry about that, thanks for reading and any help you can give. If nothing else all this pool brushing is giving me a workout.