going out of town

[mspool]

what do yall' do when you leave town for more than just a few days. any suggestions would be much appreciated.

[duraleigh]

what do yall' do when you leave town for more than just a few days. any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Well, Disney or the beach is great this time of year but we really like the mountains.

Sorry, MS, I knew what you meant all along....I just couldn't resist.

By far, the easiest is to get a neighbor to turn your pump on and off and add bleach as you specify. Others use puck floaters to provide chlorine but I'm sure they have a pump timer.

Generally, dose up your pool with Cl as much as you can if you can't get someone to watch it and then figure out some way to circulate your water....either a neighbor or an intermatic timer.

[jereece]

I tried something different last year while I was on vacation for 7 days and it seemed to work.

I normally use about a gallon of bleach per day. So I took 7 one gallon containers of bleach and tied them on a rope spacing them about 3 feet apart. I then took a small to medium size nail and punched one hole on the top and 2 holes on the bottom of each jug. I probably could have been more precise if I had used a drill, but it was a crude test so I just used a nail. I then strung the line of bottles across my pool. My pump was on a timer that I bought at Home Depot for $15. Bleach is heavier than water, so it will slowly leach out of the bottles.

When I came home 7 days later, my pool had about 2ppm free chlorine. This was fine for me because I normally keep CYA at about 20 - 25. I tested the contents of each bottle. Some were fully equalized with the pool but a few of them still had a higher concentration of chlorine than the pool. After doing some dilutions however, it was clear that most of the bleach had leached out.

If one were to plot the leaching on a graph, I am sure you would get a spike and then a slow decrease in rate as the concentration in the bottles get weaker. In light of that, it may have been smarter to have 2 holes in the bottom of some bottles and only one in the bottom of the other.

But the bottom line is that I was successful in maintaining my pool chlorine using bleach over a 7 day vacation. So I guess it was a success.

Jim