Spring opening, nightmare.......well, sort of

[likesspace]

Well I tried typing this a second ago but all of a sudden my message disappeared. Hmm....
Okay, anyway I had a problem this year when I opened the pool.
About a month ago the cover slipped and dumped a years worth of oak leaves into the water so when I took the cover off, last Sunday I had this thick, green & black mess that you could barely see into.
What I could see was a dark "shadow" that covered probably 95% of the pool floor and I knew this shadow was a thick covering of rotting leaves.
The first thing I did was to take a long leaf net and dip out as many of the leaves as I could. When this job was done, I had a lawn cart pretty much completely full and two shoulders that could stand to be replaced with newer models.
I then hooked up the pump and filter and dosed the mess with a couple of gallons of 12% bleach. I then fired the filter up and hoped for the best.
I have a DE filter and it began to clog almost immediately. I could only go about 15 minutes before having to bump it so I knew this wasn't going to work. I ended up putting a sump pump into the pool and running it for 4 days straight while keeping my chlorine levels up.
Well the good news is that yesterday (Saturday) my water was crystal clear and the numbers all look good. I had to do a lot of vacumming and also added about 6 gallons of the 12% over the course of a week. I also did a lot of brushing but in the end it was all worth it.
One of my co-workers told me that he had a similar situation a few years back and that it cost him about $800.00 in chemicals to get it straightened out. Because I don't use pool store chemicals and buy my bleach wholesale I've spent about $13.00 for the bleach and another $13.00 for shock.
Thanks to this site for all of the information I've gathered. Working in the water industry I knew that bleach and baking soda could be used in a pool but I've found tons of other useful information that has helped a lot.
Hopefully this post will help someone else that opens to a similar problem.
Dave

[likesspace]

Oh, one other thing.....
This was actually a good thing when all is said and done. My CYA levels have been running nearly 200 for the past two years because of my previous use of pucks. I kept avoiding draining the pool to get this level down because water is not cheap in my town.
Well I did a CYA test yesteday and now my level is 32. I guess the pond atmosphere took care of the high levels for me.
One question....
Is 32 a good reading on CYA or should I raise it a little?
Thanks in advance,
Dave

[CarlD]

32? Usually the closest you can get is 30 or 40 with a guess at 35 for CYA.

Still I think it's a perfectly good number--until summer gets REALLY hot and sunny, then I aim for 50.