I thought they knew the answers to water problems

[mbeauman]

Well, i added a bottle of bleach (Clorox no longer comes in gallon bottles and the Bleach calculator said to add .8 gallons which is about what is in a bottle) to my pool to bring it up to 15ppm but now my total chlorine is so high the regents test turns a pumpkin orange for total chlorine. I even tried adding just one drop of regents and it is still orange. I did try a test strip and yesterday it didn't seem to register and "Bleach=Chlorine?" said it might be getting bleached out. It wasn't because now the test strip shows Free Chlorine at over 10 which is the highest the test strip goes. So now do i just wait for the free chlorine level to come down? Any guess as to how long this will take? And will this get rid of the combined chlorine? How do i prevent this from happening?
All the other numbers seem in the right range except for the hardness at 400, how do i lower that?
Thanks for all the help
Marjie

[Bleach=Chlorine?]

You can try diluting your sample with 50% distilled water and then doubling the ppm reading you get. This is not very accurate but may help reinforce the CL reading. Also, if it is sunny today that should help burn off some chlorine. Lastly, I think the range on Ch is between 200-400 so you are still within acceptable zone. This will probably drop on it's own, just keep an eye on it.

[CarlD]

Only a couple of notes/ corrections to B=C's advice:

I'm assuming your pool is a vinyl above-ground with that gallonage. With a vinyl pool a Tot Alk of 180 is FINE--don't worry about it. A hardness of 400 is high, but don't worry about that either until it hits 500ppm.

I don't want to steal this phrase but I don't know who deserves credit - 'Shock is a verb not a noun'.

That's probably me, but I'm sure Ben and some of the other moderators and other long-term posters have said something similar.