Hey Pool Owners. This morning I woke up to a beautiful brown pool. Yesterday it was perfectly clear and chemically balanced.
What happened was we had a huge storm last night and we actually had about 5 inches of rain in just a couple of hours.
Because of the sheer amount of rain, the deck couldn’t drain as quickly as it normally does and we had runoff from around the yard into the pool.
Now, begins the process of cleaning this up so I’ll document that as we go.Some people will ask,”Is there a chemical you can just put in to clear this up?
“There’s not really anything you can do, there’s Floc ‘N Vac which you could try, but I have a single cartridge system that’s not really an option for me, plus I don’t know if that’s the best route to go.
What we’re going to do is we’re going to just filter it out the old-fashioned way,just running the pump and filter 24/7 until it starts to clear up.
I’ll probably have to clean the cartridge several times a day and I’ll go over that later in the article,I’m also going to keep a close eye on the free chlorine level which I’ll also cover.
The first thing I’m going to do is get the pump started and lower the water level because as you can see it’s very high right now so we’ll go ahead and get the filter running and then we’ll document this process along the way.
As I mentioned you’re probably going to have to clean the filter several times during this process.To know when to clean that filter you’re going to want to know what the starting clean pressure should be.
I’ve gone ahead and cleaned the cartridge. It’s currently at 12 Psi and so once it gets up to about 22 Psi, so 10 Psi higher, 10 pounds higher, I’ll clean it.
It’s going to be different on every pool so your starting pressure might be15 or 20 Psi and then once it reaches 10 you clean it.
We’ll link in the description how to clean these different filters if you’re not familiar with it.
I would recommend vacuuming the bottom of the pool whether you do it manually or with a robotic or suction or pressure-side cleaner to help clean up the pool quicker.
If for some reason you have a lot of large debris in your pool I would go ahead and scoop that out manually instead of using a vacuum to get that stuff,but all the stuff in my pool was pretty small.
I just dropped the robotic cleaner in there so that’ll help clean up the pool quicker.Just a quick update, we are three hours into this process and I’m surprised at how much better it looks now versus just a few hours ago.
All that I’ve done is run the pump.I did clean the filter at the very beginning so it started fresh, but I haven’t had to clean it yet.
It’s only raised about 4 Psi.Then again I’ve been running the robotic cleaner, it’s still on its first cycle.Next, we’re going to adjust the chlorine level.
The chlorine isn’t what’s going to clear up the pool, that’s going to be the filter,but you don’t want to have a low chlorine level that could possibly lead to an analogy bloom and just delay the clearing up of your pool.
I want to make sure I’ve got a good chlorine level in there.I went ahead and used the Taylor test kit.Tested the free chlorine, it was zero.
I want to go ahead and boost that up to probably around 8 parts per million.I’m going to over my target chlorine level of normally around 4 just because it’s supposed to rain later and I don’t know how much the organic matter in there is going to eat up the chlorine.
I’m just going to go ahead and double what I would normally do.We have some tools that we can link down below to help you figure out exactly how much you need to add. For this example, my pool’s 10,000 gallons.
Chlorine level is currently zero, I’ve got this liquid chlorine and it’s 10% sodium hypochlorite.
We’ve got some calculators that you can use on our website.I plugged that in and it tells me I need basically half a gallon to get it up to 4 parts per million but I want to double that.I’m going to go ahead, add the full gallon to shock the pool.
Again there’s other variables that go into that like the cyanuric level.My cyanuric level’s currently 30, my normal target is around 4.
Again, not to get too bogged down in the details because this would be a much longer video,but again check out the sources we link below to figure out how much you need to add to get your chlorine level up.
We are six hours in now and the pool’s coming along pretty good.The only thing I’ve done is, again, I cleaned the cartridges before we started,it’s still only about 5 Psi higher than when we got it going this morning.
I’ve kept the robotic cleaner running this whole timeand I’ve cleaned out that filter once and hosed it out.
I’ve added a gallon of the liquid chlorine.That’s all we’ve done so far and it’s looking good,I’m hoping we can get it 100% back to normal today.
We are nine hours into this process and as you can see the pool is pretty clear.I’d say it’s about 90% as clear as it was yesterday before the storm so it’s done really well.
I’ll go ahead and run it overnight justto get the last bits of what’s left in here.Just a couple of quick notes,I tested the chlorine level about an hour ago.
It had already gone from 8 parts per million earlier this afternoon,down to 1 part per million so I went ahead and threw another gallon in.
When you’re doing this, I would check out the chlorine level a couple of times a day and just make sure you got enough in there.
Again, you don’t want algae bloom when you’re trying to clean up the pool. The filter I only had to clean that first initial time.
To give you some perspective,it’s a 10,000-gallon pool and a 200 square foot cartridge filter,so it can hold a good amount of stuff.
If your filter is oversized you might not have to clean that often,but if it’s undersized you’re going to have to clean it more.
It just really just depends on the situation.If you go a couple of days and it’s still just a little hazy you could put in a little bit of water clarifier and that’ll help, give you that finishing touch,
