New To Site And Saltwater Pool- Need Assistance With Chemicals

[tennesseegirl]

We bought a house this summer with in ground saltwater pool (our first pool). It has been beautiful and clear all summer.... and we basically had turned it off for a few days with the plan to clean, balance chemicals and close it up. We took it in for water test and readings were (9/21)

Chlorine: .15

PH 7.7

Calcium 114

Alkalinity 76

CYA 27

Significantly low so we were told to add cacium plus and als0 alkalinity increaser.

We did as told from pool store and the next day our water was greenish in the deep end with green showing on walls of pool-- we brushed the wall, ran the generator and pump and on 9/24 I took a sample of water in:

chlorine .69

PH 7.8

Calcium 174

Alkalinity 75

CYA 20

She told me to shock the pool with turbo shock granules by Pool -- we did and she said that we needed to do an extra bag and if not clear in 6 hours put yet an additional bag in.... however with our blue liner it is a light turquoise but we didnt want to add any more bags in and now I am curous about the discussion on not using the granules....

Can you advise? we need all our chemicals balanced and then we need to determine what is necessary to close the pool. We have the generator for chlorine at 35-40% and there is a superchlorination option but I have nver turned it on....

we have an aqua rite clorine generator.

Thank you in advance-- After reading a couple of threads I feel comfortable that the info I receive here will not be a sales gimmick or cause me to damage my pool!

[DaFoz]

Well you posted this a while ago and nobody has replied yet, so I'll take a stab at it. Out of all the chemical readings you posted I think the one you forgot is the most important, the salinty reading (amount of salt in water). I noticed your chlorine is very low. If you have a salt generator and there is not enough salt in the water the generator will not make chlorine. I like to run all my residential pools at a 3.0-4.0 chlorine reading. To do this in a salt pool I make sure the salinty reading is somewhere between 3000-3500 ppm. and I set the generator for 60-70%. I hate vinal liners, I live in Florida and have about 100 pools on my weekly route, last summer the only 3 pools that turned green in less than a week were the 3 vinal liners on my route. After you get the salinty and chlorine levels right the green on the walls should go away. If the algae on the walls comes back the next thing I would test for is the amount of phosphates in the water. I don't know how it gets in the pools but when it does it needs to be taken care of fast. It's the #1 ingredient in fertilizer and it helps algae grow fast also.

[tennesseegirl]

Thank you for your reply. The salt readings were at 2800 for 9/21 and were at 3300 on 9/24. We try to keep the salt between 2700-3300 per manufacturers directions. OUr chlorine was significantly low but I suspect it was because we did not run the swg for a few days prior to some rain (not the smartest thing to do). I had read from several posts to use household bleach unscented instead of the shock granules i purchased to clear the algae-- the shock worked but at $5 a bag and then all the additional chemicals I was needed, Iwas wondering if this would work the same. Chlorine is fine now and within range. I took my water to be tested again and apparently I needed a ph decreaser and calcium which they tried to sell me. I purchased the decreaser and came to do more reserach. Went to a different pool store and she said I would need to raise my alkalinity before decreasing my ph since the ph decreaser would lower the alkalinity (we were on the low side of ok for alkalinity at that time). It was getting very frustrating to me because everything they told me to do then affected another reading and I would have to then purchase soemthing else and so on and so on. Now all is in balance.... except the calcium I was at 156 at least reading at pool and they said I need to be at 200 minumum but what I read online indicates a calcium level of 100 would be fine for vinyl pools. So now I am concerned that if I put more calcium in, then something else with become off balance... so now my question is do I need to raise the calcium level prior to closing the pool for the winter... and if so, will it affect any other levels? Additionally, the pool store informed me I would need to put 2 bag of the shock and a bottle of algaecide and run it for 24 hours before finally closing the pool up... is this accurate? also do I need my salt/salinity levels to be at a certain number before closing the pool?