Q:
I found y’all a couple of years ago when trying to clear up my pool water. I bought FerriTabs at that time. And y’all have provided valuable advice since then. This year we drained and refilled our pool. We have community water and seem to have problems constantly. Right now the pool water has a greenish yellow color and is murky in the deep end. I have shocked but it did no good. So, today I took a sample to our local pool place for analysis. And it seems we have a problem that we never encountered before. Phosphates. They said they are over 1000 ppm. They said this is normally caused by fertilizers? We don’t garden or fertilize our yard. None of our neighbors do. So I don’t have a clue. And they didn’t tell me how to rectify the problem.
Can you look at these results and tell me what I need to do? I am just about ready to call a bulldozer and have the thing filled in! UGH! Please help.
- TDS: 200
- Total Chlorine 1-PPM
- ALk 118
- Hardness 18
- Iron .3
- Phosphates 1000
A:
Two things on the report jump out to me. Yes, the first is phosphates, which can be introduced by blowing into the pool also, – you can treat with a product called phosFree, and you can get at a pool place or even order on amazon. You will want to shock the pool with liquid chlorine if possible – if you use non-chlorine based shock they won’t be as effective killing algae.
After you have that treated, I’d increase the calcium hardness up to 200ppm for vinyl or 400 for gunite pools.
If you still have colored water after that let me know what you do and what your chemical levels are and I’ll see what else I can come up with.
Follow up: