Algae Outbreak?

After a very successful season with clear water, I am having some sort of outbreak and can't seem to get it to go away.

My CYA is above 100. Our pool is new this year and I was using the shock bags from Sam's to get the CYA up and then just kept going with them with the intent of switching over.

I've been using bleach to try to fight this algae, but I've been trying to keep the FC up at 25 for the past few days and it's only gotten worse. I'm worried about having too much chlorine in the pool based on the best guess chart. I haven't let anyone swim for 4 or 5 days.

Over the last day, it has gotten much worse and I can now not see the bottom of the pool and it's sort of a blue/green color. When I brush the bottom, the green puffs up into the pool.

I have used so many containers of bleach over the past few days, it's just eating it up. The really weird thing is the CC is always reading 0.

Is this possibly something else? If not, what levels are needed to kill this off? Help!

Post a complete set of current numbers. If your CYA is over 100, retest it with dilution. Take equal parts of pool water and distilled water, and then run the CYA test with that mixture and multiply your result by 2.

CYA: 160
FC: 17
pH: 7.6
Alk: 130

We were thinking just to hold off on cleaning it until the Spring and changed our minds again. My husband didn't hear me to wait, but he just put in 3 gallons of 8.25% bleach.

You don't want to close with algae. With a CYA of 160, chlorine levels of 17 are not high enough to kill it. Go ahead and take the chlorine up to 25. Keep it at that level until you meet three criteria:

1) You lose no more than 1ppm of FC from sundown one evening until within an hour of sunrise the next morning
2) You have no greater than 0.5ppm of CC
3) You have no signs of algae

Then, keep the chlorine high for one additional day and then let it drift down and keep it between 8-15 ALL the time.

Also, run the pump 24/7 while you are clearing the pool, cleaning the filter as needed.

http://pool9.net/cl-cya/

Do I need to be brushing and/or vacuuming. If so, how often?

Yes, I forgot to add that you should brush the pool daily while the chlorine is high. If you can vacuum some of it to waste instead of to filter, that will get it out of the pool but then you'll have to replace water. May just want to kill it first and then vacuum it to your filter and backwash it out.

OK it's taken almost a month but we're all clear again. So we're considering keeping it going through the winter. We're in SC so the temperature isn't as much of an issue. If people aren't swimming in it, how often should we run the pump?

If we choose to winterize it, what does that look like? We've usually just let it go and cleaned it up in the spring.

Read the closing stickies at the top of the start-up/shutdown section of the forum. Then, if you have further questions, let us know.