Cloudy water - HELP

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sweetpea42

Cloudy water - HELP

Postby sweetpea42 » Wed 08 Aug, 2007 17:56

I have a 15X48 inch above ground pool. One day the water was getting quite cloudy so put in some thing that is supposed to clear the water. Now I have like a very super fine sedament on the bottom of the pool which will not vacuum up. Is there any way I can get rid of this? When I do try to vacuum it up the water just gets all coudy and it looks like there are little white things floating around all through the water. I have changed the filtre and have left it running for over 2 days with no luck.


all4him
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Postby all4him » Thu 09 Aug, 2007 07:02

What is your chlorine reading? If it is low you may need to shock it.
sweetpea2560
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Postby sweetpea2560 » Thu 09 Aug, 2007 09:25

I have shocked several times over the past week and it hasnt made a difference at all.
chem geek
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Postby chem geek » Thu 09 Aug, 2007 11:28

It sounds like you may have used a flocculant that consolidates suspended particles and has them fall to the floor. However, such particles can usually be vacuumed up and if they instead float in the water then filtration should clear them though with an above-ground pool without a floor drain this can take quite a while as circulation near the bottom of the pool is often quite poor.

You might try using a more powerful flocculant such as OMNI Liquid Floc Plus since that might create larger, heavier particles that don't disperse when you vacuum.

Of course, you need to solve the original problem of why the water got cloudy in the first place so you really should get yourself a good test kit, the Taylor K-2006 from Taylor here or from Leslie's here or the even better TF100 test kit from tftestkits here.

Cloudy water comes either from algae that is starting to form (water first turns "dull" then cloudy then green as a bloom develops) or from an over-saturation of calcium carbonate (i.e. saturation index is too high). Since vinyl pools don't need calcium carbonate saturation, cloudiness is usually from developing algae and that's usually because the Free Chlorine (FC) level is too low for the Cyanuric Acid (CYA) level. Typically, when Trichlor pucks/tabs are used, the CYA gets too high because for every 1 ppm FC added by the Trichlor, it also adds 0.6 ppm to CYA and the CYA never goes away except from dilution of the water (splash-out, backwash, drain/refill).

Richard

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