My husband & I bought a house w/ an inground pool last year. Here's the specs on the pool: inground 18x36, vinyl liner, holds 36,000 of water, 4' at shallow end & 10' at deepest end, new Hayward filter installed 2011, chlorine feeder. We opened the pool May 1, had to truck in water to fill it an additional 6-7". A company opened it for us, explained what we thought was everything & added 8 gallons of liquid chlorine. Two weeks after opening the pool & $400 less in our bank account, we've added slightly over 100 pounds of Aqua Blast shock (granual form that you mix w/ water before adding to the pool) 8 additional cases of liquid chlorine & we've been running our filter 24/7 since it's been open using 3" chlorine pucks w/ the setting at 3 on the feeder. I should add we've been working w/ another pool company to straighten this out; he's the one who told us to use all the shock. I use the AquaChek 6 way test strips & they're constantly reading ZERO FREE CHLORINE. Everything else is decent for now. Here's the water test results we had done yesterday: Free Chlorine-.55ppm, Total Chlorine-5.16ppm, Combined Chlorine- 4.61ppm, PH-6.8, Hardness-231ppm, Alkalinity-112ppm, Cyanuric Acid-21ppm, Copper-.05ppm, Iron-.06ppm, Nitrate-6ppm & Borate-60ppm. We do have well water which is why we had water trucked out to top off the pool. We do have confidence in the person helping us, but I wanted to know if anyone else has experienced this or if anyone has any explanation as to why this happened. Could it be the mild winter, the 80 degree temps we had in March, the fact the pool had 2 tarps covering it w/ water in between of the tarps (this was how the pool was closed using 2 tarps)? The pool guy also told us this is becoming a more common thing where the pool store is located as well as further north of the store. So much so that they just started carrying 25# buckets of AquaBlast shock instead of just the 1# bags we've been using. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks! p.s. I should also add the pool's no longer cloudy, almost totally clear!