How often to test & how much chlorine to add daily? Also, vacation upcoming...

[blessedbeingmom]

We haven't done much testing afterward, but will start doing that now. I did buy 4 large containers of bleach from Walmart today, thinking they probably move a lot more bleach. (Our last bottles were bought from 2 different Dollar General stores.)

I also bought some polyquat 60%. CarlD, if you are still reading this, how much would you recommend for algae prevention and a week away? Our pool is about 5000 gallons.

[aylad]

It will be interesting to see what your actual overnight chlorine loss is--measure tonight and in the morning, and be sure and let us know...

Janet

[blessedbeingmom]

Okay, numbers for the evening...

Last FC reported on this post was 11 ppm at 11:30 this morning (Thursday). We did not add any chlorine at this point.

At 4 p.m. today DH added 4 quarts of the Dollar General Bleach (tested to only be 3.5%).

Unfortunately we do not know how much the chlorine had dropped before the bleach was added at 4 p.m. since I wasn't home (stuck in line at Walmart with the whole store full of registers with computers down) and DH did not test at this time.

At 8 p.m. our FC level was 9.5 ppm. We added 2 quarts of the new bleach (Walmart brand), which should have brought our FC level to 15.5 ppm.

At 10 p.m. our FC level was 13 ppm. Either the bleach wasn't 6% or something is eating up the bleach.

We will test in the morning and I will post the results. Then I will probably add a maintenance dose of polyquat 60 to the pool.

Oh, I forgot to submit this reply when I wrote it about half an hour ago. Since then, we have done the test and verified that our Walmart bleach we just bought today is indeed 6 percent. However, we think the Dollar General bleach may have gotten a bad rap due to measuring mistakes. We used a pipette we had from a microscope set to measure the 1 mL bleach earlier today. However, we just found out that it wasn't accurate at all. I had ordered a set of scientific graduated cylinders (for our homoschool) and we got them today. Using the 10 mL cylinder, we found that what we though had been 1 mL bleach was actually only a bit over half (maybe 0.6 or 0.7 mL). We are retesting the DG bleach now to see what percent it really is. Well, we retested and still got 3.5% for the DG brand.

[blessedbeingmom]

Okay, so at 10 p.m. our FC was 13 ppm (last night). This morning at 7:45 a.m. it was 12 ppm. We only lost 1 ppm last night. This is good, right?
I think we are going to add the polyquat now.

[aylad]

yes, that's much, much better!! I would think that today's loss will be less than was reported yesterday, too--but testing won't bear that out because the Polyquat will probably drop your chlorine a bit.

Janet