Wahoo....our new to us house has a pool.....uhh...now what

[ThreeLs]

Hello All,

Similar story to most of you, we bought a house, it has a pool that's been sitting for a year. I've finally had time and energy to tackle get the pool back into working order. So after the pool sat dormant for a year, sometime covered, it has collected a lot of leaves and junk on the bottom, and I think the Lochness monster's cousin lives in it.

All kidding aside, the specs.
It's a in ground pool (Buster Crab type/design) approximate 12'x30' with a shallow end of ~3' and deep end of ~10-15'. The approximate volume from the pool store reading is 23,000 gallons.
The filter is a Pentair sand filter (don't have exact model), which is newly installed this year. Pump and heater (no specs either) are recent and looks like in working order. Two skimmer/return lines are close to water surface level.

My question;
Can any of you recommend tactics/tricks to get organic and black soot off the bottom of a 10-15 foot deep pool? The organic is mainly made of leaves, acorns, little twigs, accumulation of dirt, algae..."black gue" .

So my dilemma.
I've followed most of the recommendations (as I started to read and learn/understand) to get the water to be semi clear, but my problem is I still have a lot of organic black muck in the deep end that all the raking and filtering of a week is still not getting all the stuff off of the bottom. I rake the bottom with leaf net basket to get the larger material, or use the water jet/vortex leaf bagger but I end up stirring up and suspending the smaller fine particles, where I would have to wait a half day for it to settle again. I don't want to use the water pump/vacuum suction through the skimmer for concern of the pump being full of junk and possibly dying a pre-mature death. I'm thinking of either pulling out the shop vac or renting a work site pump to quickly clean up the floor of the deep end but wanted to see if this forum had any recommendations.

The background
Since the filter needed to be replaced, I took the recommendation of the pool store guy to drain the water level to a foot off the bottom of the shallow end and got to work in removing as much of the debris and gunk that I could. The shallow end was close to spotless, but the deep end still had a lot of muck. When pool guys were ready to install the filter, they ask the pool to be filled back up with water and be ready to run, which I reluctantly filled back with city tap water, leaving the deep end still full of leaves and black muck. I started the regiment of shocking the pool with liquid Chlorine (30% concentration, recommend by pool store) and liquid bleach (8.5% concentration, BBB rules). For the most part the water started to clear up, I can clearly see the shallow end floor, but the deep end it's a little more hazy but I can see the outline of the black muck. For the past week and a half I have kept the chlorine level high and only adjusted the pH to the recommend 7.2-7.8 range using muric acid and add a gallon of stabilizer to slow down the Chlorine loss.

After going with the helpful (not) pool store/service recommendation for a few weeks, I wanted to educated myself and found your forum and website. I've been reading a lot and have learn the basic tactics/philosophy of this forum. Through it all I've found the recommendations to be insightful and very straightforward to follow. So a big thank you for sharing all this knowledge and experience.

[Watermom]

If water is cheap in your area, you can vacuum to waste as you get the debris out of the pool and then add water. I'm sorry that I don't have any better suggestions for you but maybe someone else will come along who will.

At any rate, welcome to the Pool Forum!

[CarlD]

You should have a filter in your pump, and there are vacuum heads that fit into your skimmer and you can use THAT basket as well. Put a "Skimmer Sock" in there and no gunk will get into the pump at all.