Hello Pool People

[Watermom]

Contrary to popular belief, it is not chlorine that turns blonde hair green, it is copper!

[aylad]

And not only can it turn hair green, as Watermom said, but it can also stain the walls of your pool green and create a whole new set of problems with your water chemistry.

Janet

[Cloud26]

I got my pool tested at the local store and I did buy some product from them. I know that is not the popular thing to do, but I had my reasons. My Pool was still GREEN and eating chlorine like candy.

Here's my numbers
CYA - 94
Total Chlorine - .4
Free Chlorine - 0
PH 8.4
Tot Alk - 211
Adj Total Alk - 183
Hardness - 127

I think all I really needed to buy was shock, but I was sold other products. 3.75 pnds of Lo'N Slo and 2 bgs of Smart Shock and Inhibit and the pool is back to cloudy. It is Monday and I just tested it with my little test kit and the chlorine is 3.2 and the PH is 7.8. Am I on the right track?

[aylad]

With your CYA that high, the only way to get rid of the green is to shock the pool up to 25 ppm and hold it there until the pool clears up. Whatever form of chlorine you use is fine, except that I wouldn't use anything else with stabilizer in it....we really recommend plain, unscented bleach or liquid chlorine, as Yeggim suggested. The Polyquat isn't going to do much for you now, but you can use the dry acid to lower the pH til it's between 7.0 and 8.0 (do that before shocking the pool, because you'l get falsely high pH readings with very high chlorine levels).

I agree with Yeggim to not use the copper--we've already talked about why.

Janet

[Cloud26]

I had been using 6% bleach (about a gallon a day) thinking it would act as a shock and I wasn't getting anywhere. What will be different this time? My PH is 7.8 so I think it is good. The pool is not green it's just cloudy. I can only see about 8in down. I'm just vacumming and back washing.

[Watermom]

"Shock" means to superchlorinate to high levels. "Shock" is not a product. You can use any form of chlorine to "shock" a pool except trichlor pucks. As long as you add enough to raise the cl to the appropriate level based on your CYA reading, you are "shocking" the pool. Perhaps you aren't adding a large enough dose of bleach at a time to reach shock level.
If you haven't already done so, take a look at the Best Guess table in my signature below.