New Pool w cloudy water and algae problem

[Watermom]

Welcome to the forum!

Your biggest problem is no chlorine in the pool -- thus algae! As was suggested above, if you can, just return all that expensive stuff you bought from the pool store and follow the methods prescribed here. Much cheaper and very effective. You should shock your pool up to about 12 and try and hold it there for a few days without letting it yo-yo up and down and that should kill the algae. Most of us on this forum use plain, unscented laundry bleach for our source of chlorine. In a pool this big, each 3 quart jug of bleach you add will raise your cl by about 1.3 ppm. (You need to get yourself a good drops based test kit so you can test yourself and not rely on the pool store. There is a great kit sold by Ben at the sister site to this forum www.poolsolutions.com that most of us use. At the very least, go to Walmart and pick up the 5-Way kit for about $15.) Test 3x a day and each time add enough bleach to bring the cl back up to 12. The 5-way kit won't test higher than 5 ppm, but you can dilute your water sample and make it go higher. Mix one part pool water with two parts distilled water. Test as usual, and then multiply your result by 3. Diluting does lose some accuracy, but until you buy a kit like Ben's, you can't test higher than 5 any other way. You can add the bleach slowly to the skimmer. Also, run your pump 24/7 while you are trying to clear the water.

Your ph is also too high. Buy some muriatic acid from Lowe's or Home Depot and add small amounts in front of a return jet. Wait several hours to let it circulate, then retest ph and redose until your ph is between 7.4-7.6. (Actually anywhere between 7.2-7.8 is OK.) With such a large volume, I'd dose it with 2 pints at a time.

You can also add some baking soda to raise your alk some. Add it slowly to the skimmer while the pump is running. Then, wait awhile, retest and redose til you get it between 80-125. It's probably going to take quite a bit (the calculator thinks around 19 lbs. of it), but just add 5 lbs. at a time. Better to sneak up on target numbers rather than try and hit it in one big dose.

After your algae is cleared up, you can address raising the cya level. But, don't worry about that for now.

Keep us posted how it is going. If you follow the advice on the forum, it should clear up easily. Read through a lot of the posts here on the forum and pay special notice to the "stickies" at the top of several of the forums. Also, read at the poolsolutions website. You will learn a lot.

By the way - in a vinyl pool, the calcium hardness reading is irrelevent unless you have a heater.