Pulled my cover last week and tested the water before adding anything, and my CYA came back at 110 ppm. I didn't add any stabilizer over the winter, so I'm guessing this built up from using trichlor pucks in my floater last summer without really tracking it. At this point I'm looking at a partial drain to bring it down before I even think about algae prevention, but I'm curious if anyone has found a faster way to deal with this at the start of the season. My chlorine demand is going to be a mess until I get that number under control.
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First opening of the season and my CYA is already off the charts
- Thread starter NC_Nick
- Start date
Same thing happened to me last spring when I opened up for the first time after a full season of just tossing pucks in and not really paying attention to what that was doing over time. I didn't even know CYA accumulated like that until I started reading more, so when I tested and got a number around 90 I had no idea what I was looking at or why it mattered.
The partial drain route is basically what everyone pointed me toward and it did work, just takes planning because you need to know roughly how much water to pull out and replace based on where you're starting. I didn't have a good feel for the math so I ended up doing it in two rounds, pulling down maybe a third, refilling, testing again, then deciding how much more to drain. Probably could have been more efficient about it but it got me from 90 down to around 40 which is where I wanted to be. One thing I'd ask, and maybe someone with more experience can weigh in, is whether there's a meaningful difference between draining from the deep end versus letting the pump pull from the main drain during the process, or if that just doesn't matter much. I've seen it mentioned a couple times but never got a clear answer on it.
The partial drain route is basically what everyone pointed me toward and it did work, just takes planning because you need to know roughly how much water to pull out and replace based on where you're starting. I didn't have a good feel for the math so I ended up doing it in two rounds, pulling down maybe a third, refilling, testing again, then deciding how much more to drain. Probably could have been more efficient about it but it got me from 90 down to around 40 which is where I wanted to be. One thing I'd ask, and maybe someone with more experience can weigh in, is whether there's a meaningful difference between draining from the deep end versus letting the pump pull from the main drain during the process, or if that just doesn't matter much. I've seen it mentioned a couple times but never got a clear answer on it.
Reading through this thread is honestly a little alarming because I'm in almost the exact same situation. Opened my pool about four days ago and my CYA came back somewhere around 100, and I had no idea the pucks I was using all last summer were stacking it up like that. I thought stabilizer was something you added once at the start of the season and that was it.
My question for either of you is how much water did you end up draining to get down to a reasonable range. I've seen people mention draining a third of the pool and others saying you might need to go half, but I'm not sure how to calculate what actually makes sense for my starting number. I'm in Florida so refilling isn't cheap and I want to do it right the first time rather than drain twice.
My question for either of you is how much water did you end up draining to get down to a reasonable range. I've seen people mention draining a third of the pool and others saying you might need to go half, but I'm not sure how to calculate what actually makes sense for my starting number. I'm in Florida so refilling isn't cheap and I want to do it right the first time rather than drain twice.
Not a pool guy myself but this same CYA creep happens in hot tubs too when people use dichlor for too long without switching to a separate sanitizer. I ended up draining mine completely after one winter of not paying attention to it, which at tub volume is pretty painless compared to what you three are dealing with.
Rob, I was in the same boat not knowing that CYA basically has nowhere to go once it's in the water, short of draining some out. When I finally did my partial drain last year I aimed for replacing about a third of the volume and it brought me from 90 down to around 60, which was manageable enough to actually work with. The aquadoc opening kit I picked up at the start of this season came with some decent instructions that laid out target ranges pretty clearly, which is how I finally got my head around what all these numbers actually mean together.
poolmom_sarah
New member
Same thing happened to me two seasons ago, CYA was somewhere around 95 when I opened and I had been blaming everything else for why my chlorine kept disappearing. Once I did a partial drain and got it down to around 50 I could actually hold a reading for more than a day, which was a pretty obvious sign of what had been going on the whole time before that.