The brownish-orange color that you see is definitely your iron falling out of suspension. Now that you have sequestrant in the water, I would definitely start bringing the Cl up, a little at a time, to at least 3-5 ppm. If you start seeing the brown/orange color again, add more sequestrant. If you don't get some chlorine in the water soon, you are right that you will start an algae bloom, and you don't need that to complicate things!

You need to be very, very careful when adding that amount of acid to the pool. When you add the acid, it drops TA and pH, and then you aerate to raise pH--your aeration method sounds pretty good to me. When the pH gets back up to the 7.6-7.8 range, you can again add another dose of acid to bring the TA down a little further, then aerate to raise pH again. At no time do you want your pH below 7.0. That is acidic and can damage your pool. Lowering the TA is a gradual, ratcheting process (read the "lowering alk" sticky at the top of the "Dealing with Calcium and Alkalinity" forum). You can't do it all at once without trashing your pool.

Pool water without chlorine is not safe to swim in. You do need to get the chlorine in there, but again , you're going to have to do it slowly in order not to drop the metals back out. While you're at it, you need to get some stabilizer in the water--in your case I would put it in an old sock and hang it in front of a return. YOu'll need that to help keep the sun from eating up your chlorine, but remember that it takes several days for it to register in the water, so you'll need to make frequent chlorine additions until then. YOu want to target 20 ppm CYA in your pool, but only put in about half as much as the label recommends, because it's much easier to add more later than to overshoot it and have to drain/refill, especially with metals in the water that you're having to deal with.

Janet

Edit: I'm going to lock and delete the other thread. It is much, much easier for people trying to help you if you'll keep all your info for one problem in one thread!