Moblaine's pool

[moblaine]

Okay, now what? Last night I put in about 950 ounces of 6% household bleach as per Ben's advice (3 gallons per 10,000 gallons). Yesterday my FC was 0.4 and so was my CC. This morning, the results are not what I expected: FC 1.4 and CC 1.8. I anticipated CC would have been lower, not WAY higher. My current course of action will be to test tonight and put in a similar amount of bleach but wondered if there were any other recommendations.

[PoolDoc]

Hi Moblaine;

My apologies for posting the wrong links to your Pool History form and log; here are the correct ones. If you use them, it will make the pool clean-up more comprehensible, and will make it easier for us to help you.

Pool History Form
Pool History Results

Your dose -- 3 gal 6% per 10K gal -- is about 18 ppm. If you have TC=3.2 this AM, you still have some ferocious chlorine demand. There are only 2 ways to get rid of it, that I know about: drain & refill the pool, or chlorinate till it's gone.

Draining and refilling a vinyl pool requires professional help (and even then, old liners may not survive), OR a pool cover that's about 16' larger on all sides than the pool itself.

Chlorinating requires lots of unstabilized (bleach or cal hypo) chlorine. You can do a bucket test to get an idea how much, but knowing doesn't change anything. We've seen much more of this, this year, than any previous year. Probably something in the weather favored ammonia formation, but we really don't know what stabilizer-eating bacteria sometimes 'poop' nitrogen gas (harmless) and sometimes ammonia (what you've probably got).

The most efficient way to do this, is to add chlorine in the evening so all your loss is eating 'goo', rather than to sunlight. You can increase the dose to 4 gallons per 10K (10 gallons or 13 96oz jugs), but I wouldn't go higher lest you bleach your liner. You didn't report pH, but if it's below 7.6, add 2 - 3 boxes of borax (20 Mule Team, slowly, via the skimmer, pump ON) to raise the pH. The byproducts of oxidizing ammonia tend to be less noxious at a higher pH.

If you'll log your tests and doses in the spread sheet, it will be much clearer to you, what's happening.