The yellow stuff could be pollen, but we won't know until we see if there's a chlorine demand overnight, which is why we're advocating the overnight testing. If this OP loses chlorine overnight, then it's not pollen., it's something in the water eating the chlorine, and that thing must be killed!

There's a difference between your pool and the OP's, that will allow you to keep your FC levels a little lower than the best guess chart requires, and that's your use of the SWCG. When you have a SWCG, you're getting pretty consistent chlorination throughout the runtime of the unit, without the "peaks and valleys" of manual chlorination that happens only once or twice a day. That chlorine consistency allows for a slightly less overall chlorine level with no problems.Those folks who use chlorinators have that advantage as well, except that at some point with a chlorinator the CYA gets too high for the unit to put out enough chlorine--it can't be dialed higher than its max--to keep up.

Janet