Cammie:
If you check the "Best Guess" table you will see that the donut company's numbers are nonsense. If your CYA (Stabilizer) is 30-50ppm you MUST maintain your chlorine levels at the minimum at 3ppm, not 2ppm.

For 3 years I had a donut that held less than 4000 gallons and learned on it. Once I committed to following the PoolForum.com and PoolSolutions.com guidelines, my water problems disappeared. You have a real pool--everything works the way it does on a big pool, you just adjust your amounts to fit your volume. Been there, done that.

You cannot serve two masters. You must either follow the guidelines we lay out, or the ones the pool stores and the manufactuer laid out. You cannot mix and match. We have hard evidence that ours work.

Go to the top of this forum and to the testing form and read the sticky'ed threads. Go to the Alkalinity forum too.

Then go to PoolSolutions.com and read ALL the tips Ben has there.

Finally, get a full set of numbers on YOUR pool and we can tell you what to do to end your problems and keep them from coming back. If you have to have a pool store test it, so be it.

Come back with:
FC
CC
TC
pH
Tot Alk
CYA
Calcium Hardness

(you don't need calcium, but if the level is too high other problems result).