how to maintain while gone?

[aylad]

The pucks I was referring to are basically the same as the sticks you were using before--you can leave one in the skimmer if you want, with the pump running--but I really think you can do fine with just shocking with bleach.

Janet

[poolhelp101]

thanks. i wanted to make sure. it was struggle there for a while to get my pool cleared up and i don't want to go thru that again by me making mistakes. thanks. this forum and you guys are the best!

[jereece]

Why not just use bleach bottles with a couple holes in it to allow the bleach to slowly leach out? That's what I do and it works great.

[poolhelp101]

please give me more details as to how you do that?

[jereece]

please give me more details as to how you do that?

I normally use about a gallon of bleach per day. So I took 7 one gallon containers of bleach and tied them on a rope spacing them about 3 feet apart. I then took a small to medium size nail (~1/8 inch diameter) and punched one hole on the top and one to two holes on the bottom of each jug. I then strung the line of bottles across my pool. My pump runs on a timer about 8 hours a day. Bleach is heavier than water, so it will slowly leach out of the bottles.

When I get home 7 days later, my pool has about 2ppm free chlorine. This is fine for me because I normally keep CYA at about 20 - 30. I tested the contents of each bottle. Some were fully equalized with the pool but a few of them still had a higher concentration of chlorine than the pool. After doing some dilutions however, it was clear that most of the bleach had leached out.

If one were to plot the leaching on a graph, I am sure you would get a spike and then a slow decrease in rate as the concentration in the bottles get weaker. But the bottom line is that I was successful in maintaining my pool chlorine using bleach over a 7 day vacation.

Here are links to a couple images

http://www.jreece.com/bleach1.jpg
http://www.jreece.com/bleach2.jpg