When do you need to shock your pool??

[Watermom]

Just use plain unscented bleach to shock and for your daily chlorination. In your pool, each quart will raise the cl by about 3 - 3.5 ppm. We need full set of water testing results to be able to give very specific advice. (Use a test kit that uses drops, not teststrips.) Have you put anything chemical-wise into the pool yet? If not, my advice for now is to add 2.5 quarts. Get us some numbers and we'll go from there.

[peachfuzz]

Just use plain unscented bleach to shock and for your daily chlorination. In your pool, each quart will raise the cl by about 3 - 3.5 ppm. We need full set of water testing results to be able to give very specific advice. (Use a test kit that uses drops, not teststrips.) Have you put anything chemical-wise into the pool yet? If not, my advice for now is to add 2.5 quarts. Get us some numbers and we'll go from there.

I have not put anything in at all.
I have the bleach and will try to add it tonight.
Thanks for the start-up help.

[peachfuzz]

Okay, here's what I did so far. Last night I added bleached and washed down the sides and bottem as best as I could. I used the pump for a few hours to clear out any fine particles. This morning I put in the borax and bleach as directed in the "kiddie-pool" section. Did a test and the numbers looked great. If memory serves me correctly the chlorine was 3.0 and ph was around 7.8. Then I added the algeacide.

The kids swam in it a lot today--I did a chlorine test tonight and it didn't even register. Do I add chlorine tonight? I know I should test before each use--but then do I use chlorine and borax or the shock, or .....I looked on the website and either I am missing it or just dense. (You don't have to answer.... )

Thanks again for the help. This pool stuff is totally new to me. I remember having a pool as a kid and swimming in the green water....yish!

[Watermom]

Add chlorine (bleach) tonight. Bring it back up to 5 or 6. Your ph is OK at 7.8. Don't add any more Borax. We still need a complete set of water testing readings so we can look at the whole picture.

[aylad]

Until you get some stabilizer in it (cyanuric acid), your bather load and the sun are going to deplete all of your chlorine on a daily basis. So follow Watermom's instructions to add the bleach at night, but you also need to go to WalMart/HD/Lowe's and get some stabilizer.

Janet

[peachfuzz]

Okay. I didn't buy any of the cyanuric acid, so will need to do that.
Thank you.

[peachfuzz]

This morning's numbers:

Chlorine is 1
pH 7.8
Brom. 1.7

I do have the cyanuric acid--I forgot that I bought it.

[aylad]

You don't have Bromine in your pool, so you can disregard that reading. Just read the Chlorine side. When you put the CYA into your pool, either add it though the skimmer, or put it in a tube sock in the skimmer or tied in front of a return. Either way you add it, follow the label directions to get up to about 20 ppm for your side pool, and don't backwash or re-test for it for at least a week. It takes a LONG time to dissolve. In the meantime, you're going to have to keep adding chlorine nightly so that the sun doesn't wipe out all of your Cl while you're waiting on your stabilizer to dissolve.

Janet

[gerri]

It sounds like what you have is shock, not stabalizer.

CYA is cyanuric acid, stabalizer.. at my pool place they called it water conditioner... it goes by different names on the bottle but what you are looking for is cyanuric acid. You may need to go to a pool place to get this one chemical for the pool. Look at the BBB pool thread, there you will find out what you do for your pool.