Fixing my swamp

So I never got around to buying the cover I needed last fall and waited too late. Leaves were already falling bigtime.

I went out about every day and scooped up leaves from the surface and emptied the skimmer but I know some fell. The last few days I've been trying to scoop any remaining leaves from the bottom of the pool with the leaf rake. I don't think there are a lot left. But I can't see either since it's a swampy green.

I got the alkalinity up and then started dumping in Ultra Bleach 6%. I started off with 4 gallons in my 18x36 inground pool. My test kit only reads up to 5ppm but chlorine levels were way above that... much "redder" than the chart went to.

That night I added 2 more gallons of bleach and retested... levels still way up. The next day the water was noticeably more milky blue than green. I thought things were going well since it looked like I was killing the algae. Then it started happening. All this brown slime is coming to the surface and floating there.

I was hoping the skimmer would get it all but it's so thick it just gunks up the skimmer and it doesn't go down into the drain. I have to scoop it out with my hand.

I've been taking it off the surface with a leaf skimmer on the pole but I could do this forever and not get it all.

Any ideas here?

Thanks,
J.T.

Anyone?

Any easier way to get this junk off the surface of my pool? Any way to make the skimmer actually suck it into the filter for me instead of it gumming up in there? Once it does that it just quits flowing into the skimmer at all.

We are actually here for you! I think the trouble is that no one has a better suggestion other than scooping the 'stuff' off of the top:( If you want to spend the money and make it a quicker ordeal, Proteam has a chem called 'system support' which will raise all the submerged stuff to to surface in ~ 1 - 2 hours --- you still have to manually skim the surface and you have to add a good bit of acid to the pool (the stuff has a very high pH), but you get all the debris out of the water quickly and it seems to help clear the water more quickly than bleach alone. If you don't want to spend the extra $ for it, you'll have to deal with the problem as you have been - it becomes a question of how quickly you want the pool to be clean. I'm afraid that the manual skimming will be necessary whichever route you go:mad:

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Originally Posted by waste

We are actually here for you! I think the trouble is that no one has a better suggestion other than scooping the 'stuff' off of the top:( If you want to spend the money and make it a quicker ordeal, Proteam has a chem called 'system support' which will raise all the submerged stuff to to surface in ~ 1 - 2 hours --- you still have to manually skim the surface and you have to add a good bit of acid to the pool (the stuff has a very high pH), but you get all the debris out of the water quickly and it seems to help clear the water more quickly than bleach alone. If you don't want to spend the extra $ for it, you'll have to deal with the problem as you have been - it becomes a question of how quickly you want the pool to be clean. I'm afraid that the manual skimming will be necessary whichever route you go:mad:

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Hi thanks for the reply. This stuff :
http://www.poolgeek.com/Proteam-System-Support.htm

I read that it takes all the chlorine out of the water??

Will it really make all the leaves and gunk surface? Sounds great if it will. I know that as the algae is dying I keep seeing more and more leaves in my pool that must be coming up from the bottom - I consider that a good thing!