Hi justlane,

If your pH is between 7.2 and 8.0, don't worry about it until after all the algae is dead. When you shock the pool, the increased levels of chlorine will make the pH test read falsely high, so you don't want to adjust that based on false results, anyway. Don't worry about that. I also wouldn't worry about adding any stabilizer right not--you need all your chlorine available to fight the algae. That being said, you need to know what your CYA level is in order to know how high your chlorine has to be to clear up the pool--if you've been fighting it for weeks, then you're not raising your chlorine high enough, or not sustaining it for long enough. What you need to do is determine your CYA level, using that determine your shock level (see the "best guess chlorine chart" linked in my sig), and then shock the pool to that level and hold it there by testing and adding more chlorine as necessary to maintain that level until the pool clears. It may take several days, depending on how bad the outbreak is, but the more consistently you hold the shock level, the faster the pool will clear.

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