Cloudy Pool Water

Our pool water started to turn a little cloudy over the weekend.  It wasn’t real obvious from the surface, but it was sure noticeable from under water.  Visibility was really limited.  We started by running the filter longer than normal – left it on for the whole 3 day weekend.  And we also shocked the water up to a chlorine level of around 9 ppm thinking that would clear the pool of whatever algae might be starting to grow.  After two days, though, the chlorine level is still over 5 and the pool water is looking cloudier than it has all weekend.

We ran a full battery of tests on it last night and the only thing that appears to have changed about the water since the last time we tested it (when it was clear) is the pH level.  It’s gone up to 7.8 (from 7.6).  Most pool resources (including our test kit) list 7.8 as being on the high end of being acceptable, so it doesn’t seem like that should be the problem, but nothing else has really changed and one of the symptoms of a high pH level is that the water will start to turn cloudy.

So, I stopped at Wal-Mart tonight on my way home and bought some pH Minus to start trying to reduce the pH of the pool water.  I put in about 18 oz, which is a little less than the recommended 4oz/5,000 gallons of pool water (for our 25,000 gallon pool), but I figure it should be ok since the pH isn’t really that high.  I added it to the water a couple of hours ago and then started sweeping the bottom of the pool.  It had only been a couple of days since we’d ran the pool robot, but the bottom was completely covered in a yellowy-brown dust that made the pool water turn an interesting shade of green by the time I’d swept it all up.  I’m hoping that between stirring the dust up again to give the filter a second shot at picking it up and adding the pH minus to the water tonight, things will start to look a bit clearer tomorrow.  Guess we’ll see how it goes …

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One thought on “Cloudy Pool Water

  1. Cloudy Pool says:

    You can clear that cloudy pool overnight by using floc!

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