no cya in pool with SWCG

[luv4snow]

We put in a new vinyl liner this year and have added startup amounts of cya twice. We have a salt generator and about a 30,000 gal inground pool. I've been reading about bacteria basically eating the cya and changing it to ammonia. Any suggestions?

[Watermom]

How much total CYA have you added? How are you testing for it?

[PoolDoc]

membership upgraded.

1. Unless you have a Taylor K2005, K2006, or HTH 6-way (made by Taylor and sold by Walmart) you don't know what your CYA levels are. Testing for CYA levels via test strips is so inaccurate, it's virtually useless. I took some pictures today of test results on a local pool that has CYA = 60 - 70 ppm. The Taylor kit showed ~65 ppm.

I took a brand new 2013 unopened bottle of AquaChem 7-way strips, and tested BOTH the tap water (CYA=0) and the pool water (CYA=60+). The CYA pad on the two strips was the same. I took pictures that I'll post later.

2. The easiest, most salt compatible way of adding stabilizer is to use dichlor. Each pound of dichlor adds 0.55 lbs of chlorine and 0.5 lbs of CYA. (I know, that adds up to 1.05 lbs -- it's not a typo, but I'm not going to explain.) Sams Club is the ONLY reliable source of un-diluted dichlor we've found. Not Costco, Walmart, Kmart, Lowes, pool stores or Home Depot. (Occasionally Home Depot and some pools stores have pure dichlor.) If you have access to Sams Club, buy either their 24# pack of bags of dichlor 'shock' OR their 50# bucket. Otherwise, use the links below.

When people add granular stabilizer, they often lose it, for various reasons.

3. Bacterial decomposition does occur, but only when your pool is slime-y for several days, and usually, for more than a week. If your pool hasn't turned into a green mucky pond since you added CYA, bacterial decomp is not your problem.

4. Buy an HTH 6-way if you can find one. But order a K2006 as soon as possible (also not available locally). You also need to buy either the Taylor salt test (a bit of a pain to use) OR the AquaChem salt titration strips - which do work pretty well IF you read the instructions CAREFULLY!! Links to the test kit page in my signature block.

Kem-Tek Dichlor 22 lbs

Note that Amazon has been out of stock on some sizes of dichlor, but if you check the page linked to, you should see options for other sizes which have been instock.

24 lbs PoolBrand bagged shock @ Sams Club
Kem-Tek Dichlor 22 lbs @ Amazon