costo's thread - chemicals for above ground pool

[costo]

I have been adding some bleach daily, approx a quart. I finally got a cheap kit today(have had the hardest time finding one believe it or not) and tested it. Ph was 7.5 but did not get a reading on chlorine level. Im assuming its because I dont have enough to register but not sure on this. I went ahead and put a whole jug of bleach in and about 2 lbs of CYA into the skimmer(started to put it into the return stream but it didnt circulate well enough and just fell to the bottom eventually so Ill be cleaning that up later im sure???).

[Watermom]

If you are only adding one quart of bleach one time a day without having any stabilizer in there yet, you are going to end up with an algae bloom. One quart will only add about 1.8ppm of cl to your pool and it will quickly be lost to the sun, leaving your pool unchlorinated for most of the day. It will take about a week for that CYA to totally dissolve. Until that time, you should be adding bleach several times a day. Please reread the first paragraph in post #4. Adding the whole 3 quart jug was good. That should have taken your cl to about 5.3ppm.

You also did the right thing to add the CYA to the skimmer. You don't want cyanuric acid granules laying on your liner. Run the pump 24/7 for the next 4 days or so while the CYA is dissolving in your filter.

Keep up the bleach additions and within a week when you retest the CYA, you should have enough in there that you can test and add bleach in the evenings only. You're getting there. Just have to keep it up a little longer.

[costo]

I finally got a chlorine reading this morning from the cheapo kit I had got at walmart. It was actually too high to test but I had added a big jug of bleach last night, I then ran the pump all night. Not sure what effect this would have on the reading but I have added the bleach at night before and it didnt even register. I also took a water sample to my local Ace as they test pool water free of charge. Here are the results from that:
Water Quality:
Using Algaecide: No
Using stabilizer:
WAter clarity: Clear
WAter color: colorless
chlorine demand: normal
Water volume: 9400 gallons

Total Alkalinity: 153ppm
ph: 7.2
calcium hardness: 93ppm
cyanuric acid: 10ppm
free chlorine: 6.7ppm

[Watermom]

Adding 2 lbs. to your pool should have added about 30ppm of CYA. It may be that it hasn't fully dissolved. I'd wait 3 days or so and test it again. If it is still only 10ppm, then you'll want to add a little more or you're going to have a hard time keeping chlorine in the pool especially on a hot, sunny day. Keep the chlorine levels up for another day or so. Test tonight an hour after you add bleach and note the reading. Then, test again in the morning within 2 hours of sunrise. If you have lost no more than 1ppm of chlorine, then you'll be in good shape. If you lost more than 1ppm, you'll need to shock it back up. Continue this cycle until you don't lose more than 1ppm of cl overnight.

Another thing you'll want to work on after you get your pool holding chlorine is lowering the alk. I'm going to go ahead and post the link so you can start reading about that process.

http://www.poolsolutions.com/gd/lowe...p-by-step.html