Help me get my wife off my back.....

Spring is here, flowers are blooming, grass is growing, birds are chirping......and so is my wife, but not the kind of chirping I like to hear.

She wants the pool open and swimable yesterday.

I officially "opened" the pool about 10 days ago. The pool cover had been of for much longer but that was just to allow room for our saftey fence to be installed around the pool.

So, to start with the opening of the duck pond that I had (we really had ducks visiting our pool), I hooked up my pump and filter, took out the plugs, tested operation and let it loose. I added about 5 gallons of liquid chlorine to start clearing the water and within about 3 hours it went from black soup to hazy greenish blue. A good start I thought.

After it started lightening a bit I thought I would be able to assess the amount of debris in the bottom of my pool. (The pool cover was unsuccessful for keeping the majority of leaves out of our pool, but that is a fall situation now) It didn't look to bad. I could see some dark areas where the leaves had piled up and I figured I could use my skimmer to scoop out most of them and then wait for the water to clear up so I could see the rest and vacuum them out.

Lets move ahead to the present.......the water has never been clear enough to see the bottom. I have had my water tested and chemicals added but never clear. Today I went "diving". I donned my scuba goggles and fins and found the piles were much bigger than first expected. I have scooped up the majority of them but can only do so much at a time as I stir them up every time I scoop.

That is where I am now. A cloudy greenish blue pool with rotten leaves in the bottom (most are gone now) and these are the current readings from my test strip

PH at about 7.2
FC very high at 10 (I just added more chlorine last night)
Alkalinity is at 80
Stabilizer is at 30
Pool temp at 72 deg

Everytime I vacuum, I vacuum to waste. I have backwashed the last couple of days 2 - 3 times each day. I still have a cloudy pool and a chirpy wife. Do I need more patience or is ther something I am missing.

On another note I may have done something to my filter. I put about a gallon of chlorine directly into the skimmer and later that night my filter pressure, which was consistantly around 18 psi has dropped to about 13 psi. Did I do something.

Please help!!!!

Wild,
You need to get your free chlorine level up to 15 (or more) ppm, keep scooping or vacuuming all the junk you can from the pool, and have some patience.

Test the chlorine and pH frequently and keep adding enough chlorine to get to or above 15 ppm (3x a day is ideal but twice a day will probably work). Keep this up until your water is clear AND the pool maintains the 15 ppm free chlorine overnight. (Edit: The chlorine recommendation is from Ben's Best Guess Chart which can be found here.)

While I doubt the bleach harmed your filter, since you have an inline chlorinator, putting any kind of chlorine into the skimmer is dangerous. The chlorinator can explode if there's any tri-chlor residue left in there when that blast of bleach coming from the skimmer hits it.

" Help me get my wife off my back....."

Nuh-uh! I don't mess in domestic quarrels. I only do pool help!:D

How will adding chlorine up to 15 ppm clear my pool? With my test strips the reading only goes up to 10. Could I have a higher level than that and not know it?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by justawildchild

How will adding chlorine up to 15 ppm clear my pool? With my test strips the reading only goes up to 10. Could I have a higher level than that and not know it?

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wildchild,
The high levels of chlorine will help oxidize the gunk in your pool and disinfect the water (i.e. kill the bacteria and algae, and other "bugs"). Anything lower will probably not get the job done.

It will be difficult to accurately test any chlorine level, and certainly higher chlorine levels, with test strips. Getting a good test kit will pay you huge dividends. The gold standard of chlorine tests is the FAS-DPD test; that will allow you to test up to 50ppm. You can buy a great FAS-DPD test kit here or you can search the web for a Taylor K-2006 test kit. An OTO test will give you a quick and dirty rough idea of chlorine levels up to about 5 ppm. You can go higher than that by diluting the sample with distilled water (here's a post that explains that; it's the eighth one down).

Read everything you can here on poolforum; especially the stickies at the top of the chlorine forum. I think those will give you a good handle on keeping a clean, sanitary pool. Don't hesitate to ask if you don't understand something. The good folks here are happy to help.

Once you try the good test kits, you'll understand why we use them instead of the test strips.

Get your chlorine up to 15-20 ppm, keep it there by checking every 3 hours - if you can't do that, check before and after work and add as necessary.
Keep filter running, DO NOT BACKWASH until your pressure rises 6+ lbs from your "clean" pressure - a dirty filter filters better than a clean filter.
Your pool is cloudy due to all the dead algae in it, this stuff is very fine and a sand filter will not catch it unless it's dirty.
Once you can barely see the floor of the pool, add floculant or clarifier, follow instructions on bottle. It will help clump the fine debris and settle them to the bottom, clearing up your water overnight - vac this stuff to waste if you can afford to waste your water (I can't), otherwise, vac it into a dirty filter (it's just a bit longer process doing it the filter way).
It takes about a week from start to finish to properly clean a gunky mess up.
After all is said and done and you have relatively clear water, you can make the decision whether or not the remaining dust in the pool is to be cleaned out through filtering in a dirty filter or whether you want to dump in another bottle of floculant - it all depends on the severity of the initial mess.

Get yourself an owl or string fishing line 2' above your pool to discourage your ducks - I had 3 this spring too and the fishing line really works, but because of the work involved in removing and replacing it I recently opted to get an owl.

Oh, and add some stabilizer once it's clear - 30 is relatively low, you should be between 40-60. Remember that it'll take about 4 days before it registers so don't overadd.