Quote Originally Posted by tyandnikki View Post
I don't have a good test kit yet, but I will post what my Wal-Mart test kit is telling me. I have a 30,000 gallon in ground pool with a vinyl liner and I am a first year pool owner.


Total Chlorine is between 5 and 10
PH is 7.2
TA is 110
CYA is 100

All my levels where good, but my water was cloudy so I shocked the pool and added 4 or 5 chlorine tablets (both bought at Sam's). My PH was actually a little low (7.0), so I added some PH booster. Now my CYA is really high and I can't clear up the water because of algae. What would cause the CYA to spike like that?

We have had the pool open since the beginning of May. We finally had the water clear about three weeks ago and have been fighting it ever since.

This used to be my grandparents', then my sister's and now mine. Their answer is to shock the heck out of it, but that just doesn't seem right to me.

Please help!
Your CYA may very well be HIGHER than 100. My understanding is that the turbidity (black dot) CYA test is only good up to around 100... over that, and it may be much higher than the test can show. If it is... you may need to dump some water to get it to a manageable CYA level. I'll let others-- more experienced-- recommend a course of action for that. My concern is that it will be difficult to maintain high enough CL with a CYA of 100+ and you will likely get recurring algae problems. Happened to me years ago before I found this forum and the BBB method. Good luck with this-- it is fixable and then your pool will be much easier to maintain.