First mistake - added too much CYA

[Lenny]

duraleigh,

Thanks for the post because I've wondered about this.

CYA ties up a certain amount of chlorine, right? It protects that chlorine from the sun but also prevents that chlorine from serving as a sanatizer. The way I've pictured it, the chlorine that's available for sanitization is the chlorine that's not being tied up, in any way, by CYA. If that's the case than the chlorine that's available to sanatize would be unprotected from the sun. It can't be that simple because, if that where the case, there'd be no reason to have CYA in the first place. Somehow, it seems that a certain amount of CYA is beneficial even to the Chlorine that's not tied up to the point where it can't effectively sanatize.

Does that make sense? I'm thinking of this on a very basic level (sort of like a molecule of CYA binds to a molecule of Chlorine). There must be a good explanation for why a certain amount of CYA is beneficial to the chlroine overall. Can anyone explain this?

I've wondered why a high CYA level (50 or 100 or whatever) is really that big of a deal as long as you adjust your chlorine levels as Dave described in his post.

[CarlD]

CYA doesn't consume chlorine, but it does slow down it doing it's breakdown--a 2-edged sword.

There's NOTHING wrong with running higher CYA if you use the correct Free Chlorine level. It's just fine and won't consume more chlorine once you reach the ideal level. You just need a FAS-DPD test kit for FC--Ben's kit has it and there are some others out there, too.