Pool help, cloudy mess, no experience.

[aylad]

Man, I HATE it when I have almost the whole response typed out, then hit the wrong button and it all goes away!!!

Okay, here goes again...shorter version this time...

First, don't buy any "destabilizer", don't know what that is, but I do know that you don't need it. Second, high chlorine levels can cause falsely high pH results, but your beginning pH was fine, so we know it's okay unless you've added a bunch of acid. The other numbers were okay too, and shouldn't change much as a result of what you're doing, so let's concentrate on clearing up the pool and then you can tweak the other numbers later.

If Leslie's or WalMart has one of the cheapie drop-based kits that tests chlorine (even up to only 3 or 5 ppm), I can tell you how to dilute your sample so that you have a ballpark idea of your chlorine level until your good test kit comes in. Alternately, you can continue to use the test strips and just keep it as purple as you can--neither way is exact, but they'll both work until you get a good kit. Just a suggestion....it might help if you take a picture of the pool every day in the same sunlight, i.e. the same time of day, and look at them side by side. That will help you see that you really are making progress, even if it's slow!

About the liquid chlorine/bleach question.....

Basically, liquid chlorine is the same as bleach, just in a stronger concentration. It's the same chemical, but the bleach is typically either 5.25 or 6%, vs. the 10% in liquid chlorine form. However, we know that the higher concentrations are not as stable and tend to lose strength faster than lower concentrations. So the liquid may have been 10% or more when it got to the store, but if the store doesn't have a quick turnaround or stores it in a warm place, then it actually may be degraded by a good bit. So...whether it's better to buy liquid chlorine or not depends on the actual concentration and whether or not you have the ability to store and handle larger quantities of the chlorine. I'll do a search around the forum and see if I can link you to the post where CarlD, another mod, talks about measuring the actual strength from a sample. If it truly is 10%, though, and you can handle the quantity, then it's much cheaper usually to buy liquid chlorine over bleach. (I can't, unfortunately Louisiana isn't one of the states that can handle it). Regarding the powdered stuff, I would stay away from powder in your shoes. The reason is this: powdered chlorine is either dichlor (which breaks down into chlorine, water, and stabilizer--your stabilizer is already high enough and your pH is low enough that you don't need to use this) or calcium hypochlorite( which breaks down into chlorine and calcium) . Your calcium levels are already fairly high, and you would add more and possibly create milky water conditions if you used cal hypo for this job. This is why I need to know what kind of pool you have--vinyl liner, plaster, gunite, etc. so that I can better advise you when it's okay to use anything but bleach. So...you need to stick with either liquid chlorine or bleach for now (they break down into chlorine and salt water, no unneeded chemicals to worry about).

Hope this helps.....and stick with it, it will be worth it in the end!!

Janet

Edit: Here's the link to the post from Carl about testing strength of liquid chlorine.. I think restricted users can follow the link but if not, let me know and I'll copy/paste it for you.

http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthr...+concentration