Quote Originally Posted by waste
Ubalr, welcome ot the forum! Your numbers are certainly from a pool store, honest folks who do their own testing get numbers that end with "0". Your cya and hardness results make a partial draining a good idea, but only if the fill water is lower in calcium. My best advice is to get a good test kit and learn how to use it, take control of your pool. Your pH is way low, dump a box of Borax in ASAP, and a couple gallons of regular (unscented) bleach in the pool -NOW (with your cya so high, you need a lot of chlorine) I'm sure that others who know more about the chemistry side will post, but do what I'v said as soon as you can. Good luck with the pool, you can escape the Biocrud cycle if you take matters into your own hands.
Thanks Waste. Not sure I understand this "honest folks who do their own testing get numbers that end with "0"." We do have our own tester that we use on a sporadic basis. Our numbers are in the ballpark with the pool store. We just added 12lbs of sodium hydrogen carbonate (aka., soda ash, baking soda, sodium bicarbonate). We'll see what that does. The water in my area is very hard (19-20 grains, ?ppm). So, I am thinking of switching the auto-fill supply from hard water to soft water. I should have done it summer before last when we drained the pool. Still considering (researching) the whole liquid bleach approach.