New Here, and I'm afraid I've Got a Problem ...

Hi All
First off, thank you for such a great resource.
It's really nice to know that Im not the only one losing my mind over my pool problems....

Pool Doc, I understand about the limited "Search" access for noob's, and I get it. Totally understandable.
So I tried your suggested method of including the site info in my Google search, and it worked great, I found exactly what I was looking for. But when I clicked it, it still blocked me.... I was logged in at the time. (?)

So, anyway, here's what Im trying to determine, maybe someone can help....

I think I WAY overdid it on adding chlorine to my 16 ft x 48in deep intex.
We had the fire dept bring us 2 loads of water. It looked great after the 1st load. Then they came back with a little more to "top it off" and all of a sudden, it was a brown ugly mess ! Apparently they got the 2nd batch from an "unflushed hydrant" for the last bit... ( gee, thanks boys !!! ) . Hard to complain when it was a favor...

So we literally had little things swimming in there, looked like tiny krill or something.
I thought the first thing I needed to do was shock the holy smokes right out of the thing, so I dumped in about a gallon and 1/2 of HTH 10% chlorine that we got at WalMart when we bought the pool. We have been filtering, and vacuuming, and cleaning the filter every couple hours, and even hooked up a 2nd Intex pump and filter we had from a previous pool, to help with circulating the water if nothing else. Now, its starting to clear up a little, from brown to a light yellow, and we can sorta see bottom. I though it was time to test pH and Chlorine, so I checked the levels with the HTH ( walmart purchased) " 3-Way Test Kit" where you drop 5 little drops of yellow or red stuff in and compare the color. the pH was a little too red for the chart, which I think we can fix with info from this site. The part that I don't know what to do about, is that the Chlorine tested bright orange, which is way off the chart, Im assuming too high. Anyone have any experience with this? what should we do to lower the chlorine level ? Also, should we add Clarifier to keep getting the water un-clouded and clearer ? We had a little of that from a couple years ago, which we added yesterday and it seems to have helped ( we think ).

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Happy 4th Everyone !!!

- Jason Jarvis

OK, here's an update on this.
We were able to fix it ! Most of the credit goes to my wife.

We bought a product called "Blue to Green" at WalMart. It was a 2 Part process, and came with 2 doses, each had 2 separate "parts". The first part was a stabilizer, and then the 2nd bag of stuff was a "flocculant" (sp?). We tried it 2 nights ago, and let it sit all night with no filter or pump running, and in the morning it was incredible what had happened. It was crystal clear, but with a thick layer of reddish brown nastiness covering the whole pool bottom.

Here's where we made CRITICAL mistake... We started the vaccum, but didn't unhook the hose running back into the pool from the filter, and it just immediately dispersed all the gunk back into the pool, because the filter couldn't even begin to handle it. So now we were back to square 1. It was crushing. We were devastated.

So we did the whole thing again last night, but this time with a plan. We set up the vacuum set-up last night so, so this morning we would be able to start it up without disturbing the bottom. That was the key. Then we 1st unhooked the hose running back to the pool, and clamped that to another long plastic hose, and piped that to the ditch. Then we started the pump and started vacuuming the bottom of the pool out to the ditch.

It worked !!!! We lost about 2 inches of water, and by the end of the clean-out process, we were dangerously close to getting the water level too low to use the pump, but we just barely made it. We now have a crystal clear pool, and the kids can swim !!! ( and us too, of course... ) Thank you for your help. this site is incredible.

I will try to post some "before and after" pics. This was really a herculean feat of accomplishment, if I do say so myself.
VERY satisfying.

Congratulations! You were inventive and curiously, got reasonably good advice. The Stabilizer and the floc are totally irrelevant to each other. You need stabilizer, but the flocculant pulls fine particles together to make bigger ones that stick together and sink.

Now you should read about our methods here and at our sister site, Poolsolutions.com (no membership needed there). You also need to get a proper test kit. We recommend the Taylor K-2006 and K-206C as the best and most useful kits on the market. Good testing is key!

You can get the Taylor K2006 through this link. (It won't be available locally.) http://pool9.net/tk/

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