Thanks Richard. I don't fully understand the TA levels yet and so your comment about keeping it low is confusing and is different from what the shop was recommending - they said 80-120, knowing I had an SWG.
To be honest, I just started keeping my pool last week (new house came with pool) and so everything is new. I've not used algeacides yet. I did read about borates in a previous post and asked the lcal shop for them, but they said they didn't cary them and fobbed me off with some excuse.
When I said CA, I meant Cyanuric Acid - guess I don't have the abreviations correct yet. The first month I had the house/pool, it gobbled up chlorine within days and when we turned on the SWG, which was set to 80%, the chlorine has been high (see below) and I've had it set to 50% for 3 or 4 days and it's still high - maybe I can turn it down further. As far as CYA levels, FC levels, etc, I guess i Just have the one control on the SWG which is percentage output, so I'll see how it goes with some more time. Despite my good (?) chlorine levels, I do have some green algae, but its on the rock round the pool, not in the pool itself.
No vinyl pool - its cement based and I'm still trying to work out whether its plaster, gunite or painted cement, not sure how I can tell. Its certainly cement on the outer shell. The inside of the pool is a hard surface with a blue/black hard coating and someone called it plaster. so I don't know.
Anyway, this is turning into a long story, which I was originally trying to avoid. My plan was to ask specific questions. I'll go over your reply a couple of times and try to further my education/experience as time goes on.
Cheers,
Allan.
P.S. its a Goldline Aquat-rite, labelled as a Mineral Springs MS-10, and I managed to download the user manual a few days ago thanks to this forum. I spent several weeks trying to figure out if "minerals" was something other than salt.
P.P.S We just turned the SWG on and the salt level has fallen below 2600 a couple of times, which confused me as I read in this forum that salt doesn't go anywhere. I'm adding 3 more bags of salt right now to try to get it back up to 3200. Texas has had a lot of rain recently, so maybe that's got something to do with it. Only reason I mention this is that despite the salt being low, the chlorine levels are still high, so I'm confident I can turn this baby down lower. I'm also guessing the cell ain't been cleaned in some time so I plan to do that next weekend.