New User - Introductory Post

[mjfrederick]

One other data point: Salt reading is at 3560.

[Watermom]

I think you probably meant 0.2ppm of chlorine and not 0.02. By the way, if you use the 10mL sample instead of the 25mL one, it will make your testing reagents last longer. You would multiply the number of drops by 0.5 instead of 0.2. (Also, if one scoop of powder turns the water pink, you don't need to add the second one.)

You need to add some chlorine. Since you also need CYA, a good choice for you to use would be dichlor as it will add CYA and chlorine at the same time. Some places sell blended dichlor which you don't want. Sam's Club and Amazon both sell some dichlor that is fine to use.
http://www.samsclub.com/sams/shop/pr...oductId=108822
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...ZA/scouscho-20

CYA, cyanuric acid (also called stabilizer) is kind of like sunscreen for your chlorine. An outdoor pool that has none will not be able to keep any chlorine in the pool as it will quickly be lost to the sun. Most SWCG manufacturer's have a specific CYA requirement for their unit to operate properly. Check your manual and then use the dichlor until your CYA gets to that level. Then, you'll want to switch to an unstabilized form of chlorine such as bleach. Since you have a gunite pool and your CH is a little low, you might want to use cal-hypo for awhile instead of bleach until your CH is somewhere between 200-400 and then switch to bleach.

No need to run the CYA test daily. In fact, wait until you have been using dichlor for about week to 10 days before you check it again. You don't want to waste your reagents and it won't change too fast. (For every 10ppm of chlorine that Dichlor adds, it will add about 9ppm of CYA.)

You can edit your signature to update it. Just click on the link in my signature below.

Hope this helps.

[mjfrederick]

Thanks for the advice! For the CYA, I have a 10 LB bucket of Haviland Stabilizer from last year. There is not a list of ingredients, just says it contains CYA. Would you recommend using this. or will it introduce other unwanted additives into the pool?

[Watermom]

As long as it is just cyanuric acid (may say isocyanuric acid), it is probably fine. Do a search online and see if you can find the ingredients. Typically, CYA has nothing else in it.

[PoolDoc]

Haviland Stabilizer is fine.

Keep in mind that, on your pool, each pound of stabilizer will add 3 ppm of CYA. Also, you need to allow a week of pump RUN TIME to dissolve the CYA, if you add it via the skimmer. You might want to put in a sock in the skimmer, instead of just pouring it in. That way, it won't be lost when you clean your cartridge -- OR if it sinks to the bottom of the filter case when the pump is off, and just sits there in a pile.