With all your good advice, I'm on my way to bringing my pool up to speed. Here's what I've done so far.

Last night before I added anything the numbers were as follows:

FC 0 CH 225 pH 8.0+

I added a bag of trichlor shock and about 2 lbs 8 oz of CYA to approach 20+ CYA en route to a goal of 30.

This morning I remeasured:

FC 3.5 CC 0.5 pH 7.6

I did nothing and remeasured this evening:

FC 0.5 pH: ~7.9 CH 200 TA 145

I'm shooting for the following goals:

FC 4 pH 7.2 CH 300? CYA 30 TA 80

Note my pH goal of 7.2 is to help lower the TA; once TA is reasonable I want a pH closer to 7.5.

Based off of these goals and the results of the pool calculator, tonight I added ~72 oz of 6% bleach and ~32 oz of muriatic acid. I've also turned on the waterfall to help aerate the water.

I assume the pool calculator doesn't really take into account the high pH of the bleach, so I have probably underestimated the amount of acid necessary.

Does all this sound reasonable?

Also, based on my other reading, aerating the water will help raise the pH, which is useful for me right now since it will allow me to repeatedly use the muriatic acid of a means of ratcheting down the TA without cumulatively lowering my pH.

Once I've done this, however, what's your advice on running my waterfall? I hadn't thought about its effects until now. My automatic cycle for the pool runs the pump with the waterfall about 7 hours every day. Of course I sometimes also turn on the waterfall because it looks cool :-) Does all of this running the waterfall create an additional acid demand on the pool?

Thanks,
Mike