Hi Bob,

1. The amount of FC you have is a little high, but not really anything to worry about. Doesn't pose a problem for folks swimming, but might want to wear older suits until it comes down just a little bit. Might want to dial back the output a little bit, though.

Are you sure you have CC of 2.0, and not 0.2? If it's actually 2.0, and nobody's swimming in it, then it needs to be shocked to get rid of whatever the chlorine is trying to fight. If you mean 0.2, then that's fine. BTW, if you'll use the 10 mL sample instead of the 25 mL sample, your reagents will last a lot longer. Each drop you put in represents 0.5 instead of 0.2, but it'll be close enough for what you need.

2. Your pH is actually just fine where it is. With a SWCG, pH tends to rise just because of the process by which the chlorine is generated, and the SWCG gurus tell us that a pH of 7.6 actually slows that rise better than any other reading.

3, Alk doesn't matter for your pool, which by the way isn't silly--you get just as wet in an Intex pool as you do in any olympic size pool! If you bring the alk down into the 80-90 range, it will help stabilize your pH and it won't rise as quickly. If your fill water has alk of 200, then you probably would be fighting a losing battle to try to keep it down. However, if your fill water is lower in alk, then you might want to lower it. The SWCG folks may chime in here too, because I'm not sure about the alk possibly contributing to scaling that can happen on your SWCG cell. Here's the link to the procedure for lowering the alk.. http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthr...-HOWTO-amp-FAQ

4. Calcium hardness doesn't matter for your pool in the sense that you don't have concrete to dissolve, so you don't need to be targeting any particular level. However, with a SWCG, you do need to pay attention to calcium scale that can build up on your cell and needs to be cleaned. I don't know a lot about the SWCGs, so those folks will chime in shortly, but I'm thinking that your calcium is fine, but the alk may need to be lowered for the reason I stated above.

5. Check with your SWCG owner's manual--most SWCG's require a CYA level around 80 ppm for the cell to work at its most efficient and to extend the cell life as long as possible.

6. All I can tell you about this is to check with your manual.

Regarding the poop in the pool, I would not let any kid with diarrhea into my pool. Even if it's contained in the swim trunks, the bacteria shed washes through with the water. I believe the kill time is around 10 minutes for the chlorine to kill the bacteria, but you can expose a LOT of kids in that 10 minute time. I also would shock the pool after all swimmers are out, if you have a kid with diarrhea swimming in it. That may be overkill, but there are some really nasty bugs out there, and as a pediatric nurse that takes care of kids with severe dehydration problems from diarrhea cases, I can tell you that I would rather shock a pool (and close it to kids for a few days until the diarrhea is gone) than take a chance of exposing more kids to it.