How do you get green color out of swimming pool water at season startup?

Answer

This problem plagued me for 4 weeks until I finally found a knowledgeble person to help me. Use this technique and you can clean a heviliy algead pool in 3 days.

1st get your water chemistry balanced with a high PH and nominal chlorine level

2nd. turn off your filter.

3rd. Add Aluminum sulfide (alum) to your pool. This is a coagulant that can be purchsed at better pool supply stores. IMPORTANT: do not run the filter!

4th. wait at least 6 hours with the filiter off.

5th. add water to pool positioning the hose end in the skimmer recess and raise the level to the top of the skimmer port.

Your water should now be clear, but you have a lot of dead algae on the bottom of your pool. Don't be mislead into thinking your pool filter will clean it out -it will not. This junk must be vacuumed to waste.

6th. Plug the vacuum hose into the skimmer port (keep the filling hose tucked into the skimmer port next to the vacuum hose).

7th. set your filter to waste and begin vacuuming. Make an effort not to stir up the debris as you vacuum, this is hard but with practice you will get the hang of it.

8th. Vaccum as long as you can still see what you are doing (with severe silting it is inevitable that you will stir up dead algae and no longer see the pool bottom). Because your garden hose is tucked next to the vacuum port you should be able to safely vacuum until the water level is no more than 18 inches below the skimmer port.

9th. stop vacuuming and turn the filter off. It is o.k. if your water looks green again because of the stirred up algae. Leave the filter off!!! also leave the vacuum and garden hose in place and bring the water level back up.

10th. repeat the vacuum and fill process 3-4 times or as needed. you can add chlorine during this process, but do not run the filter as it will only stir up the water again. Use a brush to get isolated pockets of debris as needed.

11th. When the debris is off the pool bottom AND your water is clear you are now ready to shock and add PH increase to your pool and begin operating your filter at normal intervals.

This technique requires a good deal of new water and vacuum time, but it works great. I can't stress enouph about avoiding any method that involves the filter to clean dead algae. The dead algae particles are just too small to be trapped in the filter, be it DE or sand.

Hmm, I don't know if I'd go thru all those many steps.. But if you are cleaning a total swamp maybe you have to. Why won't you simply clean or backwash filter, adjust your pH, add about 4 gallons of chlorine 12% run the filter 24/7. Next day b/w filter, maintain high chlorine and by end of 2nd day you should be able to see the bottom of the pool if not sooner. As you make more progress with water clarity you may be able to cut the run time back considerably. From there it should be even simpler.

First answer by Kbattle39. Last edit by Keats. Contributor trust: 1236 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 201 [recommend question]