No chlorine registering

[poolmama]

Have been trying to get chlorine reading on my pool for over a week with no success. I started by add 4 lbs of granule shock and nothing. Then I was told to add liquid chlorine so I added 3 gallons and nothing. I took water in to get tested and they said alkalinity was high and ph low. So I added a gallon of muriatic acid waited a day, then added ph+ When alkalinity and ph were acceptable, I added 5 gallons of liquid chlorine and still nothing. This AM, I took sample to a different pool store. They said everything but chlorine was fine and suggested I had chlorine with stabilizer. I added 5 lbs of super soluble. It's been 8 hours and I still have no chlorine reading. This AM results were:

Total Chlorine 1.2
free Chlorine .5
ph 7.5
alkalinity 147
total hardness 140
CYA 30

On a good note, it started out cloudy and is now pretty much clear. Please help!

[waterbear]

IF the chlorine was not holding and you initially had not CYA and the water was cloudy you probably had an algae bloom consuming the chlorine. The fact that you still have over .5 ppm combined chlorine (Total chlorine - Free Chlorine = combined chlordane, which is the 'bad' chlorine') indicates that whatever is growing in your water is still there. You need to keep shocking the pool (we like to use chlorine bleach here) until the free chlorine hold and there is no combined chlorine. With a CYA of 30 ppm you would need to bring the free chlorine to about 15 ppm and KEEP IT THERE (and do not test or worry about pH while you do this since it WILL read high until the chlorine level drops to normal) until there is no combined clorine and you are not losing FC quickly. Since I know knowing about the size of your pool I can't offer anything else now. Are you normally using trichlor tabs to chlorinate? I ask because of your problem with low pH. Adding acid to lower TA when the pH is low is also NOT a good idea since you probably dropped the pH low enough to cause damage to your pool surface and equipment (and also caused you to buy a bunch of unnecessary chemicals from the poolstore!) and then adding pH up to bring the pH up after trying to lower TA can actually cause you to end up with a HIGHER TA then what you started with (again causing you to buy more unnecessary chemicals from the pool store, are you seeing the pattern here?). There are instructions on the forum to lower TA that avoid all these problems.

[PoolDoc]

membership updated -ben

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PoolMama, I'm posting a couple of 'sticky' comments that are relevant to your issues.

Ben

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+ It's much easier to answer your questions, when we have the details about your pool in one place. We often 'waste' the first few posts back and forth collecting information. So, please complete our new Pool Chart form -- it takes about 30 seconds, but will save much more than that.

Pool Chart Entry Form

+ It's much easier to answer your questions, when we have the details about your pool in one place. We often 'waste' the first few posts back and forth collecting information. So, please complete our new Pool Chart form -- it takes about 30 seconds, but will save much more than that.

Pool Chart Entry Form