I've bought a house with a 30K gallon pool, and I'm completely new to pool maintenance. It has a vinyl liner with an opaque cover, and since i'm in the northwest and rural we don't see a ton of warm sunny weather.

I bought a Taylor 2600 kit and tested yesterday, to this effect:

FC = 7.8
CC = 0
PH = 7.4
TA = 150
CH = 110

CYA was too high for me to measure, even after dilluting by half. I didn't try dilluting down beyond that level.

The CYA level is a bit alarming, but I guess it shouldn't be too surprising, given that the prior owner (I believe) was using trichlor pucks exclusively for chlorine the past 17 years. That said, he's been able to maintain this thing up to this point. In my residual inventory I have about 1/4 bucket of tabs left over, and another bucket still sealed (and thus, returnable), and a huge bag of baking soda. The water in the pool looks great and is pleasant to swim in.

I'm taking any and all advice at this point. My sense of this (which I post only so knowledgeable people here can straighten me out) is to take the sealed bucket of tablets back and go with calcium hypo or bleach for a while, to increase the FC level. I'm also inclined to use rainy days (and we get lots of them) to dillute and then drain the pool a bit trying to get the CYA under control, but maybe that's more trouble than its worth in that it would require a corresponding chlorine boost. Is there a point to continuing to try to further dillute CYA samples until i get an estimated level? Without that I would seem to lack a hard target for TA and FC.

My goal is to get through the year with some light use of the pool and minimal hassles, while learning to manage this thing myself.