need help with Dad's pool - green water

[Marin]

I can rebuild a pool blindfolded, but maintenance & chemistry? Forget about it. Hoping to learn a thing or two here.

My Dad has been fighting green water all summer. He's doing what the stores tell him. Not working. Stopped by last night and you couldn't see a foot down.

At the beginning of the year, his town changed water treatment from chlorine to chloramine. Don't know if that makes a difference.

Here's his latest test results;
Saturation IDX - 0.5
TDS - 700
CYA - 100
Tot. Chlorine - 7
Free Chlorine - 7
pH - 7.7
Total Alk - 110
Adj Tot Alk - 80
Tot Hardness - 380
Copper - 0.5

It's a free form kidney in ground plaster pool. Traditional sand filter. Approx 24,000 gallons.

Any help would be appreciated.

[robbym70]

I think a good place to start is to spend an hour or two reading through the new posts and spending time in the "dealing with algea" subforum. Most of the community here have shunned the pool stores and for good reason. A trouble free sparkling clean pool doesn't really help their business model and most of the regular posters here seem to know far more about pool chemistry than employees of the pool stores.

Methods to keep pools clean and sparkling that are espoused here rely on ingredients and chemicals you can buy easily at your local Walmart or Sam's club. Specifically--bleach, baking soda and borax. A very good summation of the process can be found here:

http://poolsolutions.com/gd/the-BBB-...pool-care.html

and here:

http://www.troublefreepool.com/bbb-f...ers-t5208.html

The approach is fairly simple but it requires the user to understand pool chemistry and to have a reliable and fairly accurate means of testing your own pool water. This comes in form of a test kit and most of the regulars posters here including myself own a test kit made by Taylor Testing Technologies. The kit of choice is a Taylor K-2006A or K-2006C. Follow the link below (thanks watermom) to find more information about how to get one of the test kits:

http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?14994


People with more experience than myself will probably chime in but....

I'll recommend you go buy a few jugs of non scented bleach at Walmart or Sam's club to start. Bring your pool to shock level using the "Best Guess chart" - http://poolsolutions.com/gd/best-gue...ine-chart.html - run the sand filter 24/7 and test your chlorine and PH levels at least once per day. The algea will die (make sure you vacuum it up) and eventually the water will clear gradually (stand by for caveats). When the chlorine level holds over night without more than (help me here experts) __________ ppm loss than you can reduce the amount of chlorine in the water until you reach a suitable level to maintain clarity and cleanliness. After that it's a simple matter of adding the right amount of bleach at the right time to maintain the proper level for your pool. The proper level will vary based on your CYA level as documented in the best guess chart.

Now for the caveats--Overusing chemicals suggested by the pool store and using chemicals not suited for the situation may have affected the pool water in ways that our more experienced users will be able to talk about. I'm talking about things like copper algeacide, magical clarifiers and a host of other hocus pocus chemicals the pool stores love to move off their shelves. Now is a good time to take inventory of exactly what has been added to the pool and then come back and report if possible.

I've been a member here for about three years. I bought a house with a pool and knew nothing about how to keep it clean and clear. I'm so grateful to Ben and the other longtime moderators because following their methods and advice my pool has been a joy to own and use almost from day one. I had an algea bloom two weeks after taking off the pool cover for the first time but then I found this place and its been easy since then. At first it all sounds complicated but in the end its really simple once you understand the dynamics. Results require patience at times and this is a key factor. Many of the pool owners coming here to clean up messes didn't have enough patience and resorted back to the pool store. the pool store sells them chemicals which don't help and may have made things worse in many cases. I spend 5-10 minutes a day on my pool and an hour a week vacuuming and that's it. I spend about $100 a season for bleach, borax and baking soda and I'm a believer that an informed pool owner is the pool store's worst nightmare.

Good luck. I look forward to your update and get cracking on reading some of the stories from this part of the site :

http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/forumdi...lgae-amp-Slime

[sabres07]

I think a good place to start is to spend an hour or two reading through the new posts and spending time in the "dealing with algea" subforum. Most of the community here have shunned the pool stores and for good reason. A trouble free sparkling clean pool doesn't really help their business model and most of the regular posters here seem to know far more about pool chemistry than employees of the pool stores.

Methods to keep pools clean and sparkling that are espoused here rely on ingredients and chemicals you can buy easily at your local Walmart or Sam's club. Specifically--bleach, baking soda and borax. A very good summation of the process can be found here:

http://poolsolutions.com/gd/the-BBB-...pool-care.html

and here:

http://www.troublefreepool.com/bbb-f...ers-t5208.html

The approach is fairly simple but it requires the user to understand pool chemistry and to have a reliable and fairly accurate means of testing your own pool water. This comes in form of a test kit and most of the regulars posters here including myself own a test kit made by Taylor Testing Technologies. The kit of choice is a Taylor K-2006A or K-2006C. Follow the link below (thanks watermom) to find more information about how to get one of the test kits:

http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?14994


People with more experience than myself will probably chime in but....

I'll recommend you go buy a few jugs of non scented bleach at Walmart or Sam's club to start. Bring your pool to shock level using the "Best Guess chart" - http://poolsolutions.com/gd/best-gue...ine-chart.html - run the sand filter 24/7 and test your chlorine and PH levels at least once per day. The algea will die (make sure you vacuum it up) and eventually the water will clear gradually (stand by for caveats). When the chlorine level holds over night without more than (help me here experts) __________ ppm loss than you can reduce the amount of chlorine in the water until you reach a suitable level to maintain clarity and cleanliness. After that it's a simple matter of adding the right amount of bleach at the right time to maintain the proper level for your pool. The proper level will vary based on your CYA level as documented in the best guess chart.

Now for the caveats--Overusing chemicals suggested by the pool store and using chemicals not suited for the situation may have affected the pool water in ways that our more experienced users will be able to talk about. I'm talking about things like copper algeacide, magical clarifiers and a host of other hocus pocus chemicals the pool stores love to move off their shelves. Now is a good time to take inventory of exactly what has been added to the pool and then come back and report if possible.

I've been a member here for about three years. I bought a house with a pool and knew nothing about how to keep it clean and clear. I'm so grateful to Ben and the other longtime moderators because following their methods and advice my pool has been a joy to own and use almost from day one. I had an algea bloom two weeks after taking off the pool cover for the first time but then I found this place and its been easy since then. At first it all sounds complicated but in the end its really simple once you understand the dynamics. Results require patience at times and this is a key factor. Many of the pool owners coming here to clean up messes didn't have enough patience and resorted back to the pool store. the pool store sells them chemicals which don't help and may have made things worse in many cases. I spend 5-10 minutes a day on my pool and an hour a week vacuuming and that's it. I spend about $100 a season for bleach, borax and baking soda and I'm a believer that an informed pool owner is the pool store's worst nightmare.

Good luck. I look forward to your update and get cracking on reading some of the stories from this part of the site :

http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/forumdi...lgae-amp-Slime

X 2 for what's written above. That is a concise and clear explanation of what this site is about.

If you follow instructions found on this site TO THE LETTER with no deviation, you will have a sparkling pool with minimal effort.....the biggest most important concept is patience and persistence. If you are committed, you are in the right place with this forum.

Step one for you would be to order a Taylor 2006c test kit.....

Step two would be to read through this forum while you have some quiet time in order to fully understand the chemistry of a pool...it seems complicated at first but very soon you will see that it is actually very easy.

Step three is to stay the heck out of the pool store...unless of course you wanna buy a pool float for the new and sparkly pool you will have.

Good luck!

[Watermom]

When the chlorine level holds over night without more than (help me here experts) __________ ppm loss than you can reduce the amount of chlorine in the water until you reach a suitable level to maintain clarity and cleanliness. After that it's a simple matter of adding the right amount of bleach at the right time to maintain the proper level for your pool. The proper level will vary based on your CYA level as documented in the best guess chart.

The missing number is 1. Keep the chlorine high until you lose no more than 1ppm of chlorine from sundown one evening to within an hour of sunrise the next day.

By the way, in a 24K gallon pool, each gallon of 8.25% bleach will add just about 4ppm of chlorine.

You definitely need to have him order a K-2006 kit. With a CYA reading of 100 (and it actually could be higher than 100 since the test cannot differentiate anything higher than that), you will have to run higher than normal chlorine levels per the Best Guess Chlorine Chart. (Link in my signature below.) He also needs to quit using any stabilized forms of chlorine -- meaning no more trichlor pucks and no more dichlor powder. Both of those will continue to add CYA and you don't want it any higher!

Run the pump 24/7 while you are trying to clear the pool and backwash whenever the pressure rises 8-10psi over clean filter pressure.

Repost if you have further questions.

[Marin]

Thanks all. I'm reading.