Tale of my battles with cloudy water! I'm finally winning...

[ladybug_3777]

Ladybug,

This thread is very interesting. With your triple-dose of Cl, yoou added enough to get to 44.6ppm!!! Wow!

Interesting in that it worked (when less was not helping much) and apparently with no damage to your liner.

I have seen this a time or two before and have a couple of thoughts. The first is that when you shock and have a good dose of algae, you never get to shock level before the algae starts consuming Cl. Secondly, vinyl liners may be somewhat more resistant to bleaching than we think.

Post back if you see any bleaching of your liner and thanks for the posts.

A good test kit (Ben's) would be invaluable to your pool care.

I agree! I was worried that we'd over shock the thing and end up with a white liner too! The liner (thus far) looks as good as it did before. After getting a good look this weekend I'll come back and update if I see any problems. The good thing is I don't have to worry about it too much, we know in a year or two we have to have a new one put in. We are a family that never owned a pool but bought a house that came with one. So this is our first FULL summer taking care of it. (learning a lot!) When we bought the house the liner had some creases and wrinkles on the bottom in the shallow end (which i hate) so we figure its on its way out soon.

I think one of our biggest problems is we have what's called "forever green" a small protected forest area just beyond our back yard. Its PACKED with trees. I have to empty our skimmer out daily it gets so jammed with leaves and those annoying helicopter seeds. I think the trees alone contributed to our problem when the CL levels sat at 0 while we fixed our metal problem last week. The entire time we've had this cloudy problem we never saw even a hint of green (from algea). The water was a beautiful blue, just mixed with a gross milky white. (Pollen perhaps? Tree dirt? Is there such a thing as white algae? I don't know)

To get an idea here is a picture I have that shows the trees and pool in one shot together,




We do have a home kit that tests the chlorine and ph (with the liquid red/yellow bottles). I use it daily to semi-daily. My husband calls me a mad scientist b/c I pull it out so much haha! I'd LOVE to get Ben's super duper kit (I was looking at them online this morning) but at around $80 and a 2 week wait for shipping it probably won't make it into the "must have's" for this year.

Thanks for your input! I'll be sure to keep an eye on fading of the liner. If anything interesting happens I'll keep this thread updated.

Have a wonderful 4th of July weekend!