gonefishing:

Here's the blow by blow account:

http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=895

The prep work I mentioned above falls outside the 5 days or so I mentioned - it took about 4 days when I first started pouring in chlorine to clear up and an extra day for the chlorine to hold overnight - I then started swimming at this point ...

The prep work took a while longer - part of that was I decided to drain my vinyl pool - I went down to 16 inches above the bottom in the shallow end. This is really not recommended, but I did it anyway. I went real slow with a sump pump and garden hose - it took a couple of days - and I constantly monitored the liner for wrinkles, etc. I then refilled immediately after getting to the low point. This entire process, including getting as much of the leaves and crap from bottom, took a few days - longer than the actual conversion process itself. My bacquacil level went from 50 ppm to 15 ppm - I'm sure that had a big effect on my conversion time. I constatnly cleaned the crap out of my cartridage filter and I also used a skimmer sock which had to be constatnly monitored and cleaned.

I know it was at least a week, if not longer from when I pulled my winter cover off until I started pouring in chlorine. I was hesitant to draining the pool, as well as starting the conversion process - I'm sure this cost me some time.

I've added a 3 pound bottle and half of a 4 pound bottle of cya so far - I'm having trouble measuring it - I'm calculating a cya level of between 40 and 50. I'm still working on this process ...