Need help with my pool water (very cloudy)

Patriot

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What a gorgeous, clear, blue Beamhead! Nice work man. :)




EDIT: added......

The swimming pool in post #11 was recently repaired due to a 30 foot long, nearly invisible crack in the bottom. It was drained for the repair and then refilled without any start-up chems by the repair people. I stopped by and added the chlorine that I had with me last week but was bringing other start up chems this week. Well, the pool turned bright green, just slightly darker than the edges in my Benefactor avatar.:green: I couldn't see the bottom at 4 feet. The customer is out of town and so the pool turned without anyone knowing. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera, but you guys would have been impressed with the hue. :eek:

My brother stopped by with some liquid chlor and we put 2 gallons of that in, 5 lbs of granulated tri-chlor and 2 tablets just because it sounded like a good idea.:ironic: I'm going to stop by tomorrow morning to see how it's coming along but if all goes well we're expecting a 75% improvement in 24 hours. I'll bring my camera and share the results whether I succeed or fail. I sure hope this works. :sweat:
 
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tiktok 22

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LuxLuthor

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This is a winter-pool closing formulation, not a pH adjustment product.

I just use whatever pH increase/decrease is sold at the local Walmart or discount hardware store during the year.
 

Beamhead

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gone "Squatchin" :p
Bring your CA down to 60...tops. Cut back your tab input a little so that your running chlor level down to a 5-6 constant. When and if the yellows show up, add liquid chlor or cal-hypo to spike the chlor up. This will greatly increase the chlor without increasing CA. No form of yellow is going to live in a 10-15ppm chlorinated pool. When the strain is gone in a few days, let your level fall back to 5-6. With very difficult strains, add and liquid algaecide like Pool Doctor Algaedyne. It's a dark brown/rusty color and works miracles.

OK with a cold May and now June I have had my pool open, the high CA/CYA finally caught up with me causing my TA to skyrocket so I drained the pool by 50% and got both the CA/CYA and TA within limits and intend to use only stabilized tabs for constant sanitation and a non chlorine weekly shock and pool perfect algaecide regularly. The non chlorine weekly shock is potassium peroxymonosulfate and I have been told regular use will not be a problem, your thoughts would be appreciated.
If any algae blooms appear I will treat them with dichlor if needed.
I was told not to use cal hypo because it could increase the Langelier Index :confused:..............I really should have payed attention in chemistry class. :p ....I have no clue why the last bit of text is blue....... :tinfoil:
 
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HarryN

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langelier_Saturation_Index

In other words, it sounds like the water is getting mineral saturated. If you have the equipment, you can lower the Ca and Mg content with either a water softener or ion exchange membrane. It can also be rented.

Think of it this way, when you add all of those tablets, you are adding Cl, but also a mineral (Ca, Mg, etc). The Cl is oxidizing the sulfates (from everything, air, bacteria, etc) and it is building up.

You can either swap out some of the water (assuming the replacement water is already soft / low mineral) or get rid of that mineral hardness with a membrane filter. Swimming in low mineral content water is pretty nice and can be clear as heck.
 

noddy43

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There's alot of technical talk here in this thread and i am sure its very useful but in my layman terms of what i did with my pool was use a liquid Floc which is a aluminium sulfate solution that i think binds to the solids that make the pool cloudy, give it a bit of weight so it settles at the bottom of the pool and i vacuum straight to the sewage. You do lose a bit of water in the process so you have to refill a bit. Water is precious here in australia at the moment.
 

LuxLuthor

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Interesting this year when closing the pool, my pool guys used this "ProTeam Winterizing Kit" x 3 for my 20x40 pool with LoopLoc cover. They claim it dramatically improves the condition on opening. They charge $275 to close here.

I looked up their MSDS here and it's mostly a Borate buffer and Vitamin C.


Just wanted to report that their "ProTeam Winterizing Kit" didn't do squat. With all the rain we had going through the Loop Loc, this was by far the worst year opening I have ever had. It looked like a black, toxic swamp.

First adjusted the pH up to 7.2 which took 17 pounds of pH Increase. Then added 32 gallons of Liquid Shock (8 boxes of 4), 3 bottles of concentrated Algaecide. Nothing registered on Chlorine testing. Moved to rapid dissolving tabs in two floating skimmer baskets. 25 pounds later, it began to clear enough, and register 6ppm of Chlorine to see and vacuum bottom to waste. 12 more pounds of quick desolve and minor pH adjustments, 5-6 bottles of flocculent, and 2 weeks after opening, it is crystal clear.

I opened it myself with a friend, but spent at least $300 on chemicals to get it clean.
 

HarryN

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Hi Lux,

When you have a lot of organics (plants, algae) in the water, the Cl just goes into trying to burn it up long before it starts killing microbes.

It might be worth your time to try some type of air flotation setup to help reduce the TOD (total oxygen demand) prior to dumping in so much shock treatment.

For 2 - 3 x what you will spend on chemicals this year, you might get close enough to a small ozone system sufficient to take some of that load off.
 

danneva

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Cleaning swimming pool water is not necessary if your pool water is regularly tested and the filters are regularly cleaned. If properly maintained, your pool does not need to have the pool water cleaned. If the water becomes murky or cloudy, try to find out the reason why the water is dirty and prevent it from happening again.

Murky, cloudy or green water may be caused by: poor pool maintenance practices like improper vacuuming or brushing of the pool surface; lacking filtration time that should be done 8 to 12 hours every day; poor chemical maintenance practices including forgetting to shock your pool bi-weekly or weekly to eliminate the build-up of body oils and lotions that cannot be filtered and help kill the early outbreak of algae; early algae growth in your pool; poor water circulation; lack of exposure to sunlight that serves as an excellent natural oxidizer; frequent heavy rain pour; minimal use of the pool.

Determine the cause of your dirty pool water before using water clarifying products.

Proper sanitizing treatments are necessary to keep pool water clear. Chlorine is the most common form of sanitizer used in swimming pools. Chlorine kills out contaminates and keeps bacteria in check. A regular chlorine shock treatment boosts the chlorine levels of the pool temporarily to eliminate any cloudiness and murkiness in the pool water.
 
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KC2IXE

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Patriot,
Not a pool owner - but have helped out - You say that Liquid Cl is the purest form of Cl - I will say I know of ONE pool that actually uses Cl GAS (and you can imagine the fun of dealing with that). It's a huge pool - as in, you can bring out portable dividers, and split into 4 olympic sized pools, with a large enough platform both ways to run meets, but I understand it hasn't been done in decades

Then again, I'm quite sure they have their water chemistry down at that level
 

danneva

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sand is a very effective filter.

.

The oldest and most popular method of filtration is sand. Sand swimming pool filters share two things in common: 1. when in the filtration mode, water always flows from top to bottom; 2. They all have some sort of lateral or under drain with slots to hold back sand while allowing clean, filtered water to pass through.
 
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bobby32x

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My question is for patriot. I am a new home owner that came with a 32k gallon problem, I mean pool... I live in upstate NY and a few years ago, the property was flooded by tropical storm Irene, which dumped tons and tons of river water, silt and mud into the pool. The pool had a loop-loc cover on it at the time. The story I got from the locals said that the local fire department went around town pumping out and refilling all the pools (not sure on that). Anyway, I had opened my pool a little early because I was eager to get it going for my first time, when I turned my pump on and a god awful noise came from the pump. Upon investigating this, I quickly realized that the pump had been submerged in the flood waters and it was caked with mud and bee nests and what have you. I did a bunch of damage to the pump while trying to pull it apart (because it was old, rusty and brittle), so I decided a replacement pump couldn't hurt. I picked up an exact replacement for my 1hp Hayward superpump from AO Smith. After installing the pump and getting the pool circulating, the water went green instantly. I was also still having some slight issues with water flow coming from one of the returns. So my thought was to place the exhaust side of my shop vac to the return that wasn't working to see if I could free up whatever was stopping the water from coming out. While doing this, I was comically doused with mud from the outside of the cement pad that surrounds the pool. It literally shot the water straight out and up from the ground. After much digging, I found that the tee was capped off and a rubber stopper was placed in the jet to prevent leaking (shotty repair in my book) which confused me from the get go because the pool was closed with rubber stoppers in all the ports in the pool. Before I bought the house, there was no one living in it for 2 years. The previous owner pretty much left the house as is with heat for the winter. The pool sat closed for 2+ years. I know this story is jumping around a little but I think you should at least get a little back story and insight on what I have endured thus far. When I first pulled back the loop-loc, I could see the entire bottom. there was leaves and some debris on the bottom but, to me, a first time pool owner, it looked routine. Since the plumbing problem, I had to do a few handyman tweaks to stop that return from draining the pool of 1 foot per 12 hours. I maintain water levels now and only add water when I have been vacuuming to waste or doing a bunch of backwashing. I have added algaecide, I have added super chlorite (my local store version of chlorine) which is both used for regular maintenance and shocking purposes. I have tried to maintain a cya of 30 and a fc of 10 ppm for an extended time. I have killed off the bloom and then stirred up something yet again.

So, to this point in time, my best luck that I have had is this. I added 1 gallon of algaecide, 5 gallons of the super chlorite and I circulated this for 24 hours, I then put in a liter of flocculant (sink and swim) circulated this for 1 hour and shut the pump off. I let it sit for 12 hours before checking and the pool was crystal clear to the bottom, with a lot of debris on the bottom. I vacuumed this stuff to waste and ended up stirring up a lot of stuff in the process. I let the pool sit for another 12 hours and came back for another waste vacuuming session. After doing this, I realized that I had another problem.. The pool still looked dark in the deep end, which made me panic, so I put yet another gallon of algaecide in and I brought the shock levels back up to 10ppm. After the FC level was down to about 2 ppm, I had had enough. I went and bought goggles and went in to investigate (after checking all my levels TA, and so on) the bottom of the deep end and roughly 1 foot up the angled walls was not algae (in my opinion), it was stained from sitting for 2+ years with junk in the bottom. The shallow end has white scaling (again in my opinion) from a high ph and calcium saturation. The water here is street water, not well, and the hardness isn't typically high, but the pool had river water in it. Maybe it didnt get pumped out and refilled. I am not certain on this by any means.

Anyway, so I stopped into my local pool store and they suggested that this crust is nothing more than a form of hard algae and that to get rid of it, I had to hit it hard with chemicals. So, they talked me into dumping 10 gallons of chlorine into the pool to kill off this algae as well as any floating algae (even though I had the pool pretty clear). I waited 24 hours after adding and tested the water by diluting the water in half and the color for the FC was still quadruple off the chart in my opinion. I asked if this could damage the pool and they said confidently "no". Well here it is 4 days later and the "algae" at the bottom is not coming off without a fight. My only working attempt was to have the vacuum hose with no attachment on it, and to use the vacuum hose to scrap vigorously across the bottom to lift the layer of stuff on the bottom. Also, the pool store suggested that I sweep regularly which I was doing less and less of since the water cleared but since they suggested it, I started again and now the water is cloudy white to grayish.

This is a pic of the plumbing problem


This is a pic of the color stains from what I think is decomposed leaves
http://i1251.photobucket.com/albums/hh559/bobby32x/photo2.jpg

This is a pic of the scale/hard algae as suggested and what it looks like from my vacuum scrapping)
http://i1251.photobucket.com/albums/hh559/bobby32x/photo1.jpg

Do you have any speculations? Do you have any suggestions as to turn this around? I feel like I am being pool store duped...

Please down size images to 800X800 pixels max.
See CPP Rule 3 Images.

Bill
 
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LuxLuthor

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You may want to PM Patriot, as his last visit here was a while ago. My two cents...as a way to determine if that would respond to any disinfectant, you could intentionally pour some powdered shock so some of it lands noticeably on one of those brown areas, and see if the direct Clorine has any effect. If not, and it feels to your hand like a crusty material, I would guess there is some kind of light bonding/scaling attachment. Make sure you have a complete water sample checked for all the items. My local store does free water tests using a computerized system with individual test cartridges called ClearCare Expert that checks:
Free Cl
Total Cl
Combined Cl
pH
Total Alkalinity
Calcium Hardness
Cyanuric Acid
Copper
Iron
Manganese
Nitrates
Total Dissolved Solids
Phosphates
Saturation Index
Endure (?)


You may be stuck either manually scrubbing by hand with something like those green 3M dish sponge scratch pads. I know they make similar things for the bottom of rotating floor cleaners, so you may be able to tie one on the bottom of your vaccum bottom and use that. Otherwise you may want to just bite the bullet and get a new liner. They need to be replaced every 10-12 years anyway. Tough problem you got!


Patriot, when you see this thread....I found a new trick this year for clearing cloudy pool. A cheap alternative to Floc. Since I have a sand filter, the local pool store gave me a large plastic bag of DE. Because I don't have a bottom drain, I put the vacuum hose head down in the bottom, upside down, throw a scoop of DE into the skimmer, and then switch intake to the vacuum hose. The DE catches all the finer suspended particles quite nicely and backwashes out.
 

bstrickler

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If it's cloudy like this, get a gallon or two of bleach and dump it in the pool, and run the pump for a day. Should clear it right up within a few days. We just fixed our pool that was cloudy after a good rain (they said it was only a 10% chance! And it hailed for a few minutes on top of that!)

http://images.homefellas.com/article-home/swimming-pools/cloudy-water.jpg

I don't remember why the bleach fixes the cloudiness, but I remember somebody saying they do that any time it gets cloudy, and it clears it right up. I'm not complaining, as it's only like a $3 fix (compared to the prices of some other chemicals, that's cheap)!
 
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