New Pool Owner, now what?

Hi everyone. My name is Brian, we have 5 kids and live in central Illinois. My wife brought home an 18ft intex pool the other day, and now we have a pool. I had zero idea why I was getting myself into. I'm so overwhelmed and confused as to what to do next. I don't want to have to dump it and refill it again. Help!?

I have filled out the pool chart thing. I have used an HTH test kit and it showed my clorine way way low, and my alk and pH high, above 8.2.

I'm standing in walmart trying to figure out which chemicals I need. We have a big box of 1lb shock bags, but I don't have the skimmer in place for clorine tablets, and I know I need to bring the pH down.

I'm so confused.

Read the Intex recipe here:
http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?17055

Read the muriatic acid sticky linked in my signature.

Hi Brian, and welcome to the forum and to pool ownership!!

There is very, very little at WalMart that you need, except for several gallons of plain, unscented bleach and possibly some stabilizer (labeled balancer, conditioner, or stabilizer--but the active ingredient is cyanuric or isocyanuric acid). The stabilizer is in the spa section. I would return the "shock" bags, if you've already bought them and just use plain bleach.

Before you do anything else, you need to get some chlorine in the pool. In 5750 gallons, each 1.5 cups of 6% bleach you add will raise your FC by 1 ppm. Until you get stabilizer in the water, you need to keep your chlorine at 1-3 ppm at all times to keep it from going green. Since there is no stabilizer to shield the chlorine from the sun, you will need to test and add more bleach a couple of times throughout the day so that the Cl never gets below 1 ppm. You can add the stabilizer via old tube sock suspended in front of your returns, and after it dissolves it wil help protect your chlorine so that you can just dose once daily. That's one option. Or...

Since you need to lower your pH and raise your CYA and chlorine, you could just use dichlor powder, which would serve all 3 purposes. The stuff they sell at WalMart has some "mystery goop" in it so we don't recommend it, but the dichlor that is sold at Sam's is as pure as you can get it. If you go that route, each 2.5 ounces of dichlor you add should raise your FC by approx. 2 ppm. Again, until your stabilizer (CYA) rises, you'll have to dose more than once daily, but once it comes up then daily doses should be fine.

After you get some chlorine in the pool, log out of the forum, go to the main forum page, and look at the first link under the second section of the forum. This is called "Pool chemistry for Intex type pools". Once you open that, look at the second sticky, called "Super simple pool recipe for Intex-type pools...". Read through that and see if it doesn't clear some of it up for you. If it doesn't, or if you have other questions, feel free to log back in and post them here, and we'll be glad to help.

Geez, Ben, we really do need that flag!! :rolleyes: ;)