new to pool stuff

[Watermom]

You're welcome. i hope you went ahead and added more bleach this morning. With a 6.5ppm chlorine drop overnight and a CC reading of 1ppm, you are still in the fight. Continue to keep the chlorine at shock level, testing and adding bleach several times each day and especially important to do so in the evenings. And, continue to do the overnight test as described above. You need to continue to do this until you lose no more than 1ppm of chlorine overnight, have no more than a 0.5ppm CC and the water is clear. Once all three of these conditions are met, then keep the chlorine high for one additional day and then you can let it drift down.

You do need to lower the pH with some muriatic acid as I mentioned before. However, having said that, please make sure you test the pH when the chlorine isn't so high. Testing it at shock levels will usually give a falsely high pH reading. *IF* your pH reading above was done when the pH was at shock level, don't trust it and don't add any muriatic acid until the pH test is run again with lower chlorine levels.

Once you get this cleared up, what are your plans for adding CYA? Do you want to buy some and add it separately or do you want to use some dichlor for awhile which will add chlorine and CYA at the same time? Once you get the CYA to 50, you'll want to stop the dichlor however.

[Red Gate Zoo]

What exactly is shock level? I used up all my bleach last night so I'll need to run out & get more. I'll test again before I add the bleach to see if my chlorine & pH is still too high to add muriatic acid. I think I would like to add CYA separately.