any way to control pH better?

[Furbabyvet]

Ben, I will email the pics to you.

Dan is right in his description of my pool. There is a pretty thick build up of calcium on the pebbles just above the waterline. It is higher in relief than the pebbles below the waterline. Both my neighbors have the same thing on their Pebble Tec pools, so I think this is sort of "normal" for this area. I have a similar build up on the inside of my glass shower door despite having a water softener, but that is an entirely different rant...

EDIT: the algae appears to be green, not black. I doubt this makes much difference in this conversation.
Maybe we will try lowering the water a bit and blasting the algae with 50:50 bleach every time we can and see what happens! Thankfully, it's not around the entire pool. We had this algae worse last year but it seemed to go away, especially when I shocked the tarnation out of it in June (60 ppm-- oopsy) but alas, I guess there were microscopic roots in there.

As an aside, I am using trichlor and liquid chlorine only because I already had the trichlor from last year and I need more CYA in the pool, so I thought I might as well use them up.

Hmmm. I was really thinking the borates were going to help stabilize my pH. Is this hopeless, or should I put some more in? The info here suggests 50 ppm but I stopped short at about 40 just to be cautious.

Tabitha