Faded liner

[waste]

Doggie, how are you?, I've seen a few of your posts today, but no direct contact - welcome to the forum As I understand it, and the more I learn here, the more sense it makes, chlorine can cause liner fading and failure, but low pH is the real killer. I'll assume that you don't have a heater (if you did the trichlor would have taken it as the first victim instaed of your liner). What tends to happen with the trichlor feeders is that, though you think the water is good, it's slowly adding cya and reducing the pH - without testing, or if you use a bad tester, you end up with chlorine that can't do it's job and an acid bath (the pH of pucks is ~2.5). Unfortunately I see the results a few times a year (when i have to go out and replace the heat exchanger on an 'unattended' trichlor pool).
You've done the BEST thing for your pool by comming here to learn the 'proper' way to care for it. If you follow the advice given here, you should encounter no problems with the new liner (and it'll last it's expected # of years, if not more).
As long as you don't have a SWCG, keeping the cya ~30 should do you fine, if you have lots-O-sun, you may want to bump it up a little more to retain the desired level of cl, and just stick to Ben's Best Guess chart for your chlorine needs.

[doggie]

Waste, you are right on there. I didn't bother to mention, that I've been buying PH increaser in FIFTY POUND BAGS!! So I really have had to work at it, but I've kept the PH up. And as you can imagine, my ALK is sky high as a result. Basically the pool is in need of help, but I'm simply waiting for the new liner, and a fresh fill in order to do it right this time. Let me add tho, that since I turned off the puck feeder I haven't had to add PH up one time! And the water is crystal clear!

Also, we do in fact have a heater, which works just fine. Maybe that's my small particle of luck in this whole messy situation.


Thanks for the welcome. I agree that finding this place was the BEST thing that I could have done.

[DavidD]

chlorine can cause liner fading and failure, but low pH is the real killer.

Right on Waste! Every pool I've seen with faded liners had high CYA but they also have, or had, very low PH. A friend’s pool has a 2' radius white patch that they assumed was from the bleach he used during a Mustard algae battle. I told him that it was more likely from leaving pucks in the skimmer while the pump was off. The high chlorine/low PH water would then settle down through the skimmer and up through the drain.

Dave