Since we moved into the house last fall, we’ve had plans to pull out the hedge directly in front of the house.  It blocked the view of the front door from the street and made the driveway pretty tight so it was hard to drive around without scratching the car with the bushes.  Here’s a picture of how it looked this spring right when everything started looking green.  It’s filled in a lot more since this picture was taken.

Today, we went out to clean up the flower bed a little and spread some mulch and decided we’d try pulling some of the bushes to see how it went.  We wound up pulling all of the non-evergreen bushes on either end of the hedge using a chain hooked to our lawn mower.  Once all of those were gone, there wasn’t really much point in keeping the 8′ tall row of ever greens in the middle, so Chad took a chain saw to them.  We hauled them out branch by branch and then cut the stumps off at ground level.  We still need to put down some fresh mulch where the bushes were and clean up all of the leaves from last fall that were stuck between the bushes when we started pulling them, but even without that, we think it’s an improvement.  Here’s the “after” photo:

The water in our pool started to turn a little cloudy over the weekend.  After running the first set of tests, the only difference we noticed about the water was that the pH level looked a little high.  So, on Tuesday, I added some pH Minus to try to bring it back to a more acceptable range, which appears to have worked (it’s now a much more normal 7.4).  After that adjustment, all elements of the pool chemistry were within the acceptable range, but the water didn’t look any better … in fact it started getting worse.  As of yesterday, the pool had turned a nice shade of green and was so cloudy I couldn’t see the bottom drain.

Even though the chlorine level has remained higher than we normally keep it all week, I still shocked the pool two nights ago to try to kill whatever was growing in the water, but it hasn’t seemed to make a difference.  Because the chemistry of the pool water seems to be fine, we’re now thinking the cause of the problem is the our sand filter becoming “channeled” so that the water passes through it without actually being filtered.  To fix this, I backwashed until the site-glass turned clear and then started the rinse cycle, planning to let it run for a while, but only about a minute in, the small corregated pipe we’re using as a backwash hose came detatched from the filter (and wouldn’t stay attached again with all of the water pressure once it had come loose) so I had to turn it off and just start filtering again.  Even with only a minute or so of rinsing, though, it seems like the filter is starting to work a little better … the drain was at least visible by the time I got home from work tonight.

We bought a bigger diameter corrugated pipe tonight to use for backwashing so we can get that back up and running this weekend.  Hopefully after a full cycle of backwashing and rinsing, we’ll notice an even bigger improvement in the filter performance and our pool water will go back to being crystal clear.

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 …