Before & After

How I do it?

About a month ago I talked about how I maintain my in-ground pool. It is different than how most people maintain their pools but it is very effective.

Most pool owners take a water sample to their local pool store and buy whatever chemicals they are told. Many times they will be sold chemicals they don't need and in some cases, I've seen pool stores sell chemicals that fight each other just so they can make more money. For example, selling both pH up and pH down.

Knowing how the chemicals work in your pool is critical to maintaining a healthy pool and saving a lot of time and money.

When I opened our pool a few weeks ago, I knew I had my work cut out for me.

Most pool stores will sell you $500-$1,000 of chemicals to bring this pool back in line, or more likely recommend you drain the pool. Draining our pool would cost around $1,200 to have water trucked in to fill it.

This isn't the first time dealing with this, and it likely won't be the last time. I knew what I had to do and I got to work.

Step 1 - Test

The first thing I do before doing anything is to test the pool's current conditions. Although the water looks like shit, I need to know what my free chlorine, cya, alkalinity, hardness, and pH levels. At this point, I am mostly concerned with CYA to know how much chlorine I will need to move the needle.

Step 2 - Buy some Bleach, lots of it.

If you haven't read my prior post, I don't use pucks for chlorinating my pool. They contain a stabilizer (CYA) which is very slow to leave the pool. The more stabilizer in the pool, the more work the chlorine has to do. You do want some stabilizer otherwise the chlorine burns off quickly in the sun. It's kind of a balancing act, but the most important thing is to not add more stabilizer unless you need it. With pucks, you cannot control this.

What I do use is bleach, lots of it. Bleach typically comes in 4-6% variety, but liquid shock is basically 10-12% bleach. In the long run, liquid shock works best, especially if you can get 12% for below $3 a gallon. The price varies dramatically throughout the year (+/- 50%) and doesn't have a long shelf life before it loses efficiency. So I can't buy an entire years supply when it is on sale.

I tend to buy 16-20 gallons of 10% or 12% liquid shock when I am planning to open my pool. This will get me through the initial period and give me some for the first couple of weeks. Maintaining my pool takes a little over half a gallon a day. This is a lot but my pool is somewhere around 40,000 gallons.

Typically my mantra is test, test, and then test. This is the secret to a well-maintained pool, knowing exactly what everything is with an extremely low margin of error and understand how to move all those numbers. The margin of error is solved by having a professional test kit. I cover the test kit options in my previous post. Before doing anything, make sure you have a good professional test kit and not test strips.

After putting the caps back on the filter, adding the pressure gauge (I don't leave this out in the winter), and removing the caps from the jets, I start pouring in chlorine. I typically hit it with 3 gallons of 12% right off the bat. This should bring my free chlorine from 0 to near 10. During the summer my target is 4-7 free chlorine but at this point, I'm going to start running that high.

Depending on where your CYA (stabilizer) is will determine what your daily target for free chlorine is. When recovering the pool you will run almost 3x higher than normal.

Once I get some chlorine in the pool, I then run the filter non-stop until the pool is completely recovered.

Fix my CYA levels

I need to have my CYA levels at around 50 to maintain the balance of chlorine effectiveness and chlorine lifespan. Adding CYA is a low process, it is a powder that is slow to dissolve but you can't let it sit on the bottom of the pool as it will eat through the liner. The best process is to put what you need in a sock (typically 4 lbs or so for my pool) and let it hang in the filter. My goal is to get my CYA at my target so I can easily maintain my chlorine levels.

During the first few days, I will be going through chlorine very often.

Brush the walls and vacuum

I have a robot, so I don't have to do this but I won't throw him in until the water is much clearer and the chemicals are more stabilized. The more often you can do this the faster you will recover your pool.

Get the pH balanced

You want around 7.5 pH for a healthy pool, and your pH will likely be very low. There is pH up and pH down chemicals you can buy from the pool store, but to bring my pH up I will use Soda ash, I typically buy a 10lbs bucket each year from the pool store and will usually get me through the summer without a problem. Soda Ash will raise your pH without massively affecting your total alkalinity. I will also throw in some boxes of Borax. This will also bring up your pH but it will also bring up your alkalinity, but having borates in your pool does a lot to maintain your chlorine levels with less chlorine. It gives you some of the benefits of a salt water pool without using salt water.

Focus on the other levels

Now I want to get my alkalinity and hardness under control. Typically these maintain themselves very well in a properly maintained pool, and with a vinyl liner, the hardness isn't a concern unless it goes way out of control. I test the hardness once a month and never really need to do anything. Alkalinity I find is very important and want to target 80-100, I typically like the lower side as it makes maintaining pH a lot easier.

Brush and Vacuum

You need to keep doing this, as much as you can so your filter can do its job.

Backwash the filter

Ok, we got a lot of shit out of the pool, if you are using a DE filter like most are, that thing is going to be packed with garbage. Give that thing a backwash and clean it out, fill up the DE and continue as normal.

After you tested and cleaned, and maintained the levels, you should start seeing normalized readings. If done right, in less than a week (4-5 days in my case) you should have results like this: