My Pool Looks Like An EASTER EGG!!! -- NOT a good thing!

[waterbear]

. The reason it says not to add the chlorine till after the metal out is to allow time for the metal out to adhere to the metal in the water, so that it can be filtered out before the chlorine makes it come out of solution and fall onto the pool surface.

Chemisty 101 here--sorry
Metal removers react with the metals and keep them in solution. The filter does NOT filter them out. Sometimes, if you are lucky, you can get the metal to precipitate out and stain your filter medium instead of your pool but there is no sure fire way of doing this. The seqestering agents just keep the metal in solution and in a form that it will not likely "fall out" of solution and form stains nor react with strong oxidizers (chlorine) and produce colored water. There is no easy way to remove the metal from the water short of draining and refilling with pure water. You CAN remove the stain by dissolving it back into the water and then help deactivate it's reactivity with the chlorine by sequestering it.
Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) oxalic acid, HCl (muriatic acid) all act as reducing agents on the metal stains which are usually in a higher oxidation state and convert them to a lower oxidation state which is water soluable. A seqestering agent will then react with the metal ion and help keep it from going back to that more oxidized state as quickly but the metal is STILL in the water.

Popcorngirl,
The fact that you had a copper ionizer and then coverted to chlorine and had some localized black spotting and streaks makes me very suspect that those might have been copper stains. The pool store told you the problem was copper, did they test for it?
Even if you did a complete water change there still might have been enough copper in the system to redisolve and then restain with a high oxidizer level of shocking.
You also seemed to have a secondary iron stain problem although it could also have been tannin stains from leaves. Once again testing would determine which.
The third problem is the algae (I assume it was green water....once again copper in the water can cause it to turn green...only testing for copper will tell you which it is)
You then added more copper with the Black Algaetrine along with a bunch of ammonia compounds (and some quats) which would eat up all your free chlorine and make an incredable chlorine demand in your pool. They would also decolor any algae in your pool as the algae ate the chloramines (nitrogen compounds are favorite algae food!)

At this point I sort of lost track of what is going on and am confused.
I am sure that if you did not have algae before you might now but I doubt it since you dosed the pool with copper and quats. You then put in metal out which effectively deactivated the copper as an algacide and I have NO IDEA what the hydrogen peroxide might have done but I assume it would have a similar action as monopersulfate and possibly oxidize some of the metal that the metal out had bound up and caused it to either color the water or stain again.

I have to admit that at this point I am lost but definately do NOT put a puck in your skimmer with a cartridge filter!

One final thing, you stated that when you brushed the brown stain with a metal brush it sent out clouds of brown stuff in the water. Could be mustard algae (more tan than brown) could be rust (iron oxide) that is coming loose because of the stain treatments and all the other stuff you put in the water or that didn't really stain but just precipitated out of the water, could be something else. If you can brush it and vacumn it to your filter and then clean the filter I would do that and get as much out of the water that you can, whatever it is!

One more final final thing,
You said that you are using HTH super shock (which is cal hypo). I noticed you wondered or were suprised as to why you CH was 360ppm, this could be a reason) and pucks. Are the pucks HTH and are they by any chance the 'dual action' ones? If they are they contain --guess what--COPPER!