Start-up with chorine after 2yrs of Baqua-yuck

[csupp]

First, I want to thank you folks for providing the inspiration and knowledge I needed last summer to finally end a 2-year nightmare with Baquacil. At a certain point, I calculated we were spending over $100 per week just trying to get the water clear enough to see the drain at the bottom. My local pool store/service replaced the sand in my filter 3 times last summer. I let this nonsense go on for far too long, before deciding I had to become better educated.

Here is where I'm at right now...

Pool just opened last Thursday (May 19). 27500 gallon IG with vinyl liner. We are located in East Central Illinois. We are starting up with something close to the BBB method, but I'm afraid mistakes have probably already been made. Step One is incomplete because I've ordered my test kit from Amazon, but it won't arrive for several days. Thus, I'm still on the pool store teat, simply for their testing service (they are only a few blocks from the house).

Upon opening the pool on Thursday, we shocked the pool with 3lbs (3 bags) of HTH "Shock 'n' Swim" (granulated cal hypo). Premixed in bucket and poured in front of skimmers. And then lots of brushing. Over the weekend we did 3 backwashes of the sand filter, timed so we weren't flushing the chlorine. I took water sample to pool store Sunday morning - I will post numbers below. The chorine levels were very low, obviously, so Sunday we did another shock with 3lbs of the cal hypo in the morning and another 3lbs in the evening. We also dropped a HTH tri-chlor tablet in each skimmer, but unfortunately it's the "dual-action" with the copper (which I now read to be a no-no).

I will say that the water looks good. Certainly better than it did at any point with the Baquacil. But obviously without the test kit at this time, I'm throwing darts with my eyes closed. I'm assuming I'm still in start-up/shock mode, so I will keep juicing the chlorine levels until the kit arrives and I can get more specific with the chemistry. Any advice in the meantime is welcome. Thanks in advance.

The levels from the pool store test...

FC - 0.3
TC - 0.6
CC - 0.3
TA - 127
pH - 7.8
Calcium - 152
CYA - 0

The advice of my local pool store was to Add 20# of Calcium over 3 days (which I understand to be completely unnecessary for a vinyl liner pool). And they advised I add 1 gallon of muriatic acid over 2 days to lower the pH (which I didn't think was elevated).