Hi, I've been reading around the site and am overwhelmed--apologies for asking a question that has already been answered.

I have an Intex 15' x 42" easy set pool, holds about 3490 gallons (got it about a month ago). The guy at Lowes said all I needed was a floater with the tabs plus AquaEZ non-chlorine (potassium peroxymonosulfate) shock. I put some of that in with a tab in the floater and we started swimming. A friend sent me the link to PoolSolutions and I only recently found the page for how to maintain kiddie pools (argh! wish I'd seen that before we filled the pool!). So I got a 3-way test kit from the pool store to test chlorine and ph. Both chlorine and ph were very low so I've also added a bunch of bleach (based on the calculator on this site). The sides are a little slimy and the water is slightly cloudy so we scrubbed the pool yesterday and added more bleach. This morning I saw mosquito larvae wiggling around--YUCK. I tested the water and chlorine looks like it's at 2.0 and ph is 7.6 (after taking a water sample and added the testing drops, how long do you wait for the correct reading? the ph has gone up in my little tube since I first did it an hour ago--I never poured it out. So what's the correct reading?)

I read the start-up info for kiddie pools and dichlor powder is recommended, but somewhere in the forum I saw that only liquid bleach was recommended for Intex pools (because the granular stuff doesn't dissolve well with the weak pump system??).

What should we do? When should I add borax and polyquat? I just want to make sure that the water is safe for my daughter to swim in and I feel clueless about how to determine that.

Many thanks in advance for help!!!