Please help with test results, etc.

[aylad]

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

[famousdavis]

The overnight test you and others are advocating as a debugging test is something I hadn't noticed before when I first starting coming to this forum (I'm sure the advice has always been used, I just didn't pop into any threads where I saw that advice). A few months ago, I saw that suggestion given so I've periodically taken an evening reading an a morning reading just before the filtration starts-up, to see how much chlorine I've lost. The difference has always been 1 or 0.5, so that's given me confidence that all is well with our pool.

You're right that the SWCG keeps the chlorine consistent, but when we had a high bather load recently, I was surprised at how the chlorine level dropped! Usually my SWCG is between 50% and 70% (running 8 hours a day), but I wound up putting it at 90-100% to bump up the FC level back to >= 3; it had fallen to about 1 after a lot kids and swimming. With just my family in the pool (4 of 6 of us who use the pool frequently), I can generally keep it at the lower percentage.

[aylad]

Yeah, "people goo" will use up a lot of chlorine. We don't normally advise folks to shock the pool on a weekly basis "just because", like the pool stores do, but after a few days of especially heavy bather load (especially if the swimmers are under 10 years old), even with my chlorine in the right range, I still will shock it.

Janet

[famousdavis]

Not shocking a pool on a weekly basis was one of the best pieces of advice I learned from this pool. As a new pool owner, I began by using the "shock" setting (100% for 24 hours) on my SWCG, but I'd have to remember to run the pump after the scheduled off time, and then the pool would stay at a high chlorine level for most of the week, only to be shocked all over again the following week. Very shortly after becoming a pool owner, though, I learned here that shocking is used to get rid of high CC, but if CC levels are low (0.5 or less), it's not really necessary. So, I don't ever regularly shock my pool.

Like you, aylad, I do kinda shock my pool now if I know it's going to get a lot of heavy use. But instead of adjusting the SWCG, I just pour in a 1.5 gallon of grocery store bleach before the hordes of kids come over -- I can't say for certain that that's really necessary, but it makes me feel good about re-entering the pool after everyone's left and gone home again. :-)

[aylad]

I'm with ya 100%

Janet