Hello, and welcome to the forum!!

Conratulations for finding this site--I think we can get you up and running so you at least can get some swim time in your pool this summer!! Do not add any more phosphate remover or any other chemical to the water except plain, unscented, generic bleach (or liquid chlorine, which is the same as bleach but is supposed to be twice the strength, but some states like mine don't carry the liquid chlorine). Especially do not add the lithium chlorite--it's just another form of chlorine but is extremely expensive, and won't do anything for you that plain bleach won't do.

Do you know the source of your ammonia? Typically we see it at start up as a result of a pool closed with high CYA levels at the end of the past season. When the CYA is biodegraded by bacteria over the wintertime, sometimes it breaks down into ammonia, which does create a HUGE chlorine demand to overcome, but must be done in order to then maintain a chlorine level, as you well know. It seems a little strange to me that you did overcome the ammonia, but now suddently have it back. That shouldn't happen unless you've added something to the pool that contains ammonia (cheap algaecides, maybe?). How did you come to the conclusion that your ammonia was gone? Can the test kits that you are using measure combined chlorine?

In order to overcome it, you'll need to take the chlorine level up to 15 ppm and hold it there, as consistently as possible, until the ammonia is gone. This will take a few days, but the more consistently you can hold that shock level, the faster the process will go. You'll know when that happens because you'll be able to go from sundown one night to sunup the next morning, and not lose more than 1 ppm of chlorine, and your CC will be less than 1 ppm. You'll also start to see a pattern of increasing chlorine levels and decreasing CC levels before you get to that point. In order to do that, though, you're going to need a testing method that is accurate and that will test for combined chlorine. We very, very strongly recommend the K-2006 (see the test kit link in my sig), because it will accurately measure very high levels of chlorine and all levels of combined chlorine.

Edit: OK, Ben's post button is working faster than mine today, but the advice is the same!!