Quote Originally Posted by Watermom View Post
Having a cloudy pool, (plus that CC reading of 1) means that you aren't done yet. A lot of the cloudiness is most likely dead algae, but you need to continue to keep the chlorine high (with bleach, not pucks) a little longer. Have you tried to overnight test? Test your chlorine level at sundown and then within two hours of sunrise the next morning. If you lose more than ppm of chlorine overnight, then you need to maintain the chlorine at shock levels. It is best to add bleach in the evenings rather than in the mornings, by the way, so all of it can go towards sanitizing the pool/killing algae instead of having part of it lost to the sun.

Keep running your pump and filter 24/7 while you are working to clear the pool. Watch your filter pressure and backwash whenever the pressure rises 8-10psi over clean filter pressure.

Also, those pucks are trichlor. You can't shock with trichlor so save them until you are finished clearing the pool and then you can use them. Hope this helps. Glad to see you back around the forum this year!
I can't explain why they CYA dropped from 50 to 0 in that short of a time period. Are you sure it is a testing error?
Thanks for the reply. I have actually kept track of my results this past week and I do generally test in the mornings and evenings. I am not always good about adding Cl at night as I'm usually on my way to work but now it's time to get real so I'll figure something out. I have made some good progress as at least now I am having FC when I test in the mornings. However compared to the previous evening I've always lost FC. I'm assuming btw that you meant that losing even 1 ppm of FC overnight was bad.

Brushing the sides this morning seems to have helped a lot as I had to backwash again tonight, making twice in one day. My gauge has the little dial that lets you set the starting pressure so you can see where you need to backwash, very helpful feature.

Tonight's results: FC 7.5 CC 1.5 pH 7.2 CYA 0

Unfortunately I am out of bleach and can't get any more until tomorrow - I only had one big jug left, which works out to 3ppm in my pool. But I will take the trichlor out in the AM and stick with using bleach until the water has cleared up. Trichlor is no good for shocking, obviously, but I just want to keep the FC as high as possible until I can get more bleach. The pucks are old anyway.

I retested the CYA and it still came up 0. I might have made an error in testing last week but I'm positive I read the results correctly - I had such problems with stabilizer last year that I went through a whole 2oz bottle of reagent thinking I was doing something wrong until finally I got cloudy test water! My theory is that, since the level of algae in my pool at opening was pretty low (light green as opposed to dark, dark green), that the stabilizer was OK until I started stirring things up by raking and brushing, releasing all the bacteria into the water that had been trapped under the layers of pine straw and leaves, and they ate the CYA.

I'll have to read up on CC as all I know about it is that it reads the level of chlorine bound to "stuff" that has not been filtered out yet so it indicates that there is still junk to clean up in the pool ... yeah need to read more on that.