bbb advice

[WOODYRI]

I just grabbed myself a test kit from namco pool supplies. It has five solutions with the tubes and colors and is called swimline. Should do the job till I can get the taylor. My readings are as follows, chlorine-0, ph-8.2, alkalinity-30. Do I get the chlorine up first and go from there? Ive had my pool for 13 years and never really got the chemical thing down to a science. Only thing I've ever noticed is if I got the alkalinity up first, the pool seemed to clear up quickly after that. What do U advise for the BBB method. P.S. my wife is very concerned about her hair!!!!! Thanks again, Jerry

[PoolDoc]

my wife is very concerned about her hair!!!!!

If you mean green hair . . . it's caused by copper in the pool. Avoid copper floaters, skimmer pills, ionizers and algaecides, and you will have no green hair.

[AnnaK]

If you add granular (not liquid) stabilizer it will drop the pH some. Stabilizer can be slow to dissolve. We recommend putting it in an old sock and suspending it in front of a return. Don't backwash the sand filter for about a week after adding stabilizer. You're shooting for between 30 and 50 ppm.

Raise the alkalinity to 80 ppm. Since your pH is at the upper end, use baking soda, not borax.

Have some bleach on hand and add enough to maintain 5 ppm FC. You can let that drift down in time to 3 ppm depending on how much stabilizer will be in the water.

Without knowing the volume of your pool it's hard for me to give you specific amounts to add.

[WOODYRI]

Im guessing my pool is around 22-23000 gallons

[PoolDoc]

Unless your deep end is more than 9' deep, your volume is likely to be closer to 20,000 gallons. Builders and liner makers quote volumes at the 'running over the sides' level!

[AnnaK]

Okay, using 22,000 gallons:

To raise the free chlorine FC from 0 to 5 ppm add 27 oz by weight of dichlor. This will also add about 4 ppm of stabilizer (CYA) and drop your pH by about 0.2, meaning we'd get it down to ph=8 without having to do the muriatic acid thing.
To raise the alkalinity (TA) from 30 to 70 add 200 oz by weight of baking soda. Add 1/2 that amount, let it dissolve and circulate for an hour, test again, see where you're at. Add more as needed. This will affect the pH a very small amount upward.
To get 30 ppm of stabilizer you need to add 88 oz by weight. This takes a while to dissolve and about a week before you can test it. Put some in an old cotton tube sock and suspend it in front of a return. It'll be dissolved within a couple days, sometimes less, but will not show up on testing for a while. DO NOT backwash the filter for a week.
Have some bleach on hand. You can get regular unscented household bleach at 6% or you can see if your pool store sells the 5 gallon carboys of liquid chlorine which is about 12%.
If using 6%, 21 oz add 1 ppm FC to 10,000 gallons. Calculate that out for your volume. If using 12%, it comes to 11 oz for 10,000 gallons.

If you're going to follow the BBB method, which is easy and foolproof and inexpensive, di get your own test kit as recommended by Watermom. Then, daily test pH, FC, CC and adjust as needed. Weekly, test TA. Your target levels are pH 7.2 - 7.8, TA 60 - 80, FC 3-5 (see this link for chlorine: http://poolsolutions.com/gd/best-gue...e-chart.html#a, CYA 30 - 50.

[Watermom]

Put some (stabilizer) in an old cotton tube sock and suspend it in front of a return. It'll be dissolved within a couple days, sometimes less, but will not show up on testing for a while. DO NOT backwash the filter for a week.

Actually, Anna, if she puts the stabilizer in a stocking in front of the return jet, it doesn't matter if she backwashes. It is only necessary to avoid backwashing for a week or so if you add the stabilizer directly into the skimmer and let it dissolve in the filter. In that case, the reason you don't want to backwash is because you'll end up just throwing the undissolved CYA out.

[AnnaK]

You're probably right, Watermom. My understanding of cyanuric acid, an organic compound, is that it's not very soluble in water and while the granules or flakes do break down into something too small to be seen, they may still be of a size that gets trapped by the filter. The constant abrasion against the filter medium eventually does break those small particles down and pushes them back out into the pool, and that may take up to a week.