frustrating cloudy water - pulling my hair out

[CarlD]

This morning, I reviewed the manual for the filter- it says to backwash daily when opening the pool until it is "sparkling clear"...I just backwashed this morning, and plan to backwash daily unless I get different advice from this forum.

Here are my test results from the PS233 testkit:
FC 12.5
CC 1
TC looks like slightly greater than 5 (the max of the readout)
pH 7.5
Alk 190 (was approx 120 before refill with my well water)
Cya 60

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Ok, first of all you are on the right track but not quite in the right race. You've caught on to most of our tricks for cleaning up a pool but not all of them.

First: check the Best Guess Table for CYA levels. You will see that with a CYA of 60, you should be keeping your FC at 20ppm until it clears. 12.5 is far too low to do the job.

Second: Your TC is 13.5. TC = FC + CC and if you see a difference between the FAS-DPD (powder) test in Ben's kit and the "quick" test he provides, go with the FAS-DPD measurement.

Third: You have a F/G pool so you can have a high T/A with no problem. i normally like 180 to be the max for non-concrete pools, but that's really a safety margin below 200ppm. For now, don't worry about it--you have bigger fish to fry. As long as Calcium is below 500ppm, it shouldn't be a problem (you didn't post calcium)

Fourth: Not sure why your pressure isn't rising in your sand filter. Are you sure the openers used proper filter sand? If not, it's cheap to replace and I STRONGLY suggest you do that. But there's a cheap trick you can use to raise back pressure and increase your filtering right now and it may help a lot. Poconos and I have, for a while now, been adding DE to our sand filters to increase filtering with excellent results. DE is fairly inexpensive--I get 10# for about $8 and am still on the first 5# of the box I bought last August. You add about a cup (through the skimmer), and wait 20 minutes and see how much your pressure rises. With most people you only want the pressure to go up 1# but you may want to boost it to where you think it should be. That should help enormously. The only catch is you have to do this every time you backwash. (Backwashing everyday won't hurt a properly maintained sand filter at all--if the waste water goes cloudy, it's doing some good).

Caveat: If you see the DE being blown back into your pool, then you MUST stop because something IS wrong with your filter and that has to be fixed. Either they used the wrong sand, damaged a lateral, or didn't use enough sand (When my pool went in, the idiots working for the installer were only going to put 150# of sand in a 200# sand filter--Luckily I caught it before they closed it up.). Too much DE should not be blown back through the return--it should cause pressure to rise so much you to need to backwash.

Fifth: You said "Liquid Shock". That's basically bleach, though it may be 10% or 12.5%. No problem there, but you should only be using that or bleach right now to chlorinate. To get from 12.5FC to 20FC you need 2 gallons of regular (5.25%) bleach or 6.5 quarts of Ultra bleach (6%). Check it 2x to 3x per day and add bleach to get keep it at 20ppm--don't let it drop.

Keep doing what you are doing in addition with daily brushing, 24/7 filtering and daily vacuuming to waste.

As I said, you are mostly where you need to be, but with a few things more. Keep us posted.