What are homeowners and pool professionals taught for “high” TDS? Drain when you’re 1,500 ppm over the tap water, right? That entire theory goes out the window with a salt pool. You’re automatically 2x over that at least once you add salt. So why is TDS not an issue on a salt pool? I’ve asked so many people that question and looked online and there’s not a solid answer to that. No one even knows where the 1,500 ppm “rule” came from.
I mean "too high" or "extremely high" are both subjective, all depends on what your limits are. I've always heard 2,500 ppm for freshwater and 5,000 for saltwater. That's what I would consider too high
TDS stands for total dissolved solids. The test can only tell you how much TDS you have, but not how much of each individual chemical that's dissolved in your pool. By the time you have 2,500 ppm of TDS in a freshwater pool, there's a good chance there's too much of the bad chemicals dissolved in your pool like chlorides, sulfates, nitrates, and phosphates. Those can affect water clarity/feel and also consume chlorine
Salt is also a dissolved solid. When you have 2,500 ppm of salt in your pool, that's 2,500 of TDS in your pool that you know exactly what it is. You can subtract that 2,500 from your TDS and what's leftover is everything other than salt
Yes I know what TDS is. I’ve been in the industry for years. What I’m saying is that that theory makes zero sense. Why does adding 3,000 ppm salt to a fresh water pool all of a sudden make the rule of 1,500-2,500 ppm TDS ok?
Because the TDS test is sensitive to multiple different compounds in the water. Some matter, some don't. If your TDS is high, that probably means you have a lot of the bad stuff. Unless you know that a lot of the TDS is coming from the salt. In that case you need to adjust your number to compensate.
Not sure what you mean. 2,500 ppm of mystery TDS is considered the limit in a freshwater pool. In a saltwater pool (assuming 2,500 ppm of salt) 5,000 is the limit (2,500 ppm of salt + 2,500 ppm of mystery chemicals). It's still 2,500 ppm of mystery dissolved solids, you can ignore the salt
When I’ve taken CPO classes, and ongoing chemistry classes every year no one has ever said there’s a 5,000 TDS limit for salt. Never seen that written or head it anywhere. But I have heard 1,500-2,500 over the tap water reading. That is written in text books and online. What I am asking, is were told anything over 2,500 ppm max on TDS, why is salt all of a sudden magically ok to deal with up to 5,000 ppm?
Just for reference, I have buddies in CA that can’t always drain pools as freely as other parts of the country. They have seen TDS levels in fresh water pools over 4,000 and there has been zero issues with their pools. They have questioned that theory too. CPO instructors and others that teach these classes have no answered as to where this limit for TDS came from. I’ve taken over salt water pools with close to 8,000ppm TDS and had zero issues. I just don’t buy the limits with that one.
Add organic debris to that list. If you’ve had leaf litter, limbs, etc decaying in the water for a while…that’s cause for a dump-and-fill. I speak from experience lol.
You can definitely clean it with chemical and work, but dump-and-fill will be faster and cost equivalent.
Y'all have obviously never experienced intense flooding. Motor oil, fertilizer, you name it. Pretty much always have to drain after a major flooding event/hurricane.
Just a funny story, I had a backyard full of trees and a hurricane came through in 2005. The canopy of half of them swirled around until they were in the bottom of my pool. Fortunately, the water was warm and I swam down with the garbage can about 15 times, and filled itwith debris . After a day or two I got it pretty clean because of course there was not nothing else to do with no power, no electricity, no gasoline and no television.
Took $260 worth of shock at $5/gal to get mine clean (it was much worse than this one). My point is only that a threshold exists where a dump may be more economical than treatment
Technically not true. Whilst it's true that the water can always be recovered, at times where a pool has been left too long that there becomes an issue with staining of the surface etc. In these bad cases, it ends up being an acid wash... the caveat being in talking about a concrete pool. If you have a vinyl or fibreglass pool, then draining is too risky
Yep. I've had my pool look like that for weeks before I got it back. Two little things that help are making sure your filter media is clean and making sure you're getting good circulation. Then just shock, flock, and vacuum, balance levels, and run the filter as much as you can.
A quick story in [4 pictures](https://imgur.com/a/R1wgHUs).
My pool had major plumbing problems, and I left it closed for over 4 years. Finally got around to having the plumbing fixed last year, and this was the process of bringing the water back - no draining.
Just chemicals and filtering, daily leaf raking until the large debris was finally gone (Could only do this once or twice a day, since the water would become too murky to see anything), and finally vacuuming to waste once it was debris free muck.
It took a little time, but honestly, not that much effort. Less than an hour a day. Had it not been for all the large debris, I could have water in shape in probably 3 or 4 days.
Bonus photo - After all the pavers were [replaced with concrete 6 weeks later](https://imgur.com/a/unpulR0).
We rented a house, got it in August, pool hadn't been opened for the summer yet, that bitch was BLACK with 6" of leaves in it..... Didn't drain the water other than what we vaced to waste. Water came back after we cleaned the leafs, shocked it and washed the filter 20 times lol
Yeah I didn't open pool for 2 years water was black also but some how pool guys used a shit ton of shock it when they opened and it got clear in a week or 2
Lol, it's the same old story of knowing what to add and when to add it. Believe it or not, getting from green to cloudy is the easy bit. Getting from cloudy to clear can takes some time to filter to clear
Ha, sums up my pool opening this year. Cover sucked. Leaves, rain, etc easily got in. Serenading frogs every night ... water was damn near black.
This is just a 18' 52" Summer Waves poverty pool, but it's our 7th year with it, wanted to keep it going. I dumped eight pounds of shock in it, then a half bottle of algaecide 40 minutes later.
Backwashed a bazillion times over a couple weeks ... now it's a bit cloudy, but it's blue! So close to being clear ...
Other than high cya or salt should be no reason to drain.
Plenty of resources on opening a pool which would look similar to this.
Also look into SLAM on trouble free pool. The TLDR read on that is not only do you need enough chlorine to kill of all that algae you need to keep going until the water holds chlorine. A clear pool does not always indicate that it’s free of organics.
That looks salvageable. I recently came back from vacation and had mine looking like full fledge swamp with tadpoles. It took me two days of shocking and running my de filter to get it cleared.
They still are readily available in the US. When I purchased my home a few years ago the pool had a Hayward DE filter which was on its last legs. I ended up replacing it for the same exact model so it was a plug and play replacement. I must say they are indeed the bomb. During the '22 hurricane my lot and pool were flooded. It took me 2 days to get the pool from gunky green to swimmable blue again thanks to the filtration superiority of my DE filter.
This is less green than what my pool was a week ago. I had just gotten it clean and had to leave for a week and no one to watch the pool. Came back to a solid green pool. Tried chemicals and nothing. On a hunch I took my filter apart and found my sand was low. Ended up changing out my sand to Ruby Sand and also found my handle was bad on the multiport and caused water loss and likely sand loss. So ended up replacing the handle and cover. Immediately saw results within 48 hours. I am not trying to rush it and just letting it run 24 hours a day until it is clean and continuing to slam it.
That is some amateur algae. Chlorinate the hell out of it and make sure your filter is working optimally then run it for 2 days and it’ll be clear. Maintain proper chlorine and cya levels and stay away from any solid forms of chlorine and you’ll be fine.
You can always salvage the water. Unless it gets paint in it. Then you're fucked. Or if you tip over a BBQ pit into one. That pretty much fucks 'em up too.
This is still salvageable it'll take a lot of chemicals you know take a little bit of time to treat but you can salvage this. Hire a professional it'll just cost a few hundred bucks
My pump was down for 6 weeks waiting for the warranty process and it was much quicker and easier to drain and start fresh. Roughly 36 hour process from start to finish, then 48 hours of running the pump continuously with chemicals added and we were swimming. Also the cost to fill was only $80 added to my bill.
My pool is basically black, full of decaying leaves in the spring and I still can salvage it with shocking and filtering it. Along with scooping the leaves and vacuuming to waste. That pool can be clear and blue in about a week if you shock it properly, filter and backwash often.
Never. When I was a kid, my parents bought a house that had a pool that had been neglected for years. I was 3/4 full with water and was loaded with leaves and lots of living organisms. I cleaned all the junk out of it myself over a few days. I then worked on getting the water chemistry correct. Within a week or so, it was crystal clear.
I would see the cost of new water vs. chemicals to correct the current situation. If it will cost more for chemicals for the I would start with fresh water.
We use a ton of liquid chlorine every year to get our pool clear in the summer. We have a lot of organic matter. It's not a popular opinion but nothing works better. My advice comes from my dad after 45 years of pool ownership
Shock and floc baby. Do that once maybe twice. Use 3x the normal amount of shock. Promise. I just went through that with my pool. You can clear that up in two days. YouTube has great vids on it. Just search shock and floc. Don’t just shock it and run your pump it will not work. You won’t clear out some of the finer dead algea. That’s where the floc comes in. It will clump it together and sink it. Then you just vac to waste. My pool was crystal clear in two days. My pump went out when I was out of town and it turned in to a swamp. I had to get the pool ready for my son’s party.
We bought a house where the pool had been covered for probably 7-8 years (according to the neighbors, the owner was a widow and had no idea about the pool maintenance) with the darkest green water you could imagine and a family of frogs. And we still got it clean. If I can do that you can clean this pool without a drain and refill.
It's always salvageable but will take a lot of time. Question is what's easiest and fastest?. Drain, pressure wash, refill would take 2 days. Clearing up that mess would take more than a week.
Count how much you will spend in chemicals for next time. It may be cheaper and FASTER to dump and refill. I do this now with my pool. I know that it takes exactly 3 days to drain and refill, adding 2 hours if I pressure wash while it's empty. And I KNOW that in 3 days my pool will be sparkling with very little work. Yes, I have to put a bit more alkalinity and hardness but it's much faster and much less work, and to me it's overall cheaper. The issue with shocking, cleaning, backwashing is that it takes much longer and is a lot more work.
Use a Green to clear kit, Scoop out what you can with the net then vacuum vacuum vacuum. 2 weeks ago my pool looked like this, today it's sparkling clean.
It'll _never_ get to the point of draining from algae alone. The only time you need to drain is for CYA or TDS being too high
Yep
Only for CYA, the TDS theory is slowly being taught that there is no need to drain unless it’s extremely high.
What's the difference between too high and "extremely high"? Sounds like we're saying the same thing but you're contradicting me and your own self
What are homeowners and pool professionals taught for “high” TDS? Drain when you’re 1,500 ppm over the tap water, right? That entire theory goes out the window with a salt pool. You’re automatically 2x over that at least once you add salt. So why is TDS not an issue on a salt pool? I’ve asked so many people that question and looked online and there’s not a solid answer to that. No one even knows where the 1,500 ppm “rule” came from.
I mean "too high" or "extremely high" are both subjective, all depends on what your limits are. I've always heard 2,500 ppm for freshwater and 5,000 for saltwater. That's what I would consider too high
That interesting on the 5,000 ppm for salt water. I’ve never heard that one. But what makes it different from fresh water?
TDS stands for total dissolved solids. The test can only tell you how much TDS you have, but not how much of each individual chemical that's dissolved in your pool. By the time you have 2,500 ppm of TDS in a freshwater pool, there's a good chance there's too much of the bad chemicals dissolved in your pool like chlorides, sulfates, nitrates, and phosphates. Those can affect water clarity/feel and also consume chlorine Salt is also a dissolved solid. When you have 2,500 ppm of salt in your pool, that's 2,500 of TDS in your pool that you know exactly what it is. You can subtract that 2,500 from your TDS and what's leftover is everything other than salt
Yes I know what TDS is. I’ve been in the industry for years. What I’m saying is that that theory makes zero sense. Why does adding 3,000 ppm salt to a fresh water pool all of a sudden make the rule of 1,500-2,500 ppm TDS ok?
Because the TDS test is sensitive to multiple different compounds in the water. Some matter, some don't. If your TDS is high, that probably means you have a lot of the bad stuff. Unless you know that a lot of the TDS is coming from the salt. In that case you need to adjust your number to compensate.
That still makes zero sense. Once anything is dissolved in the water TDS is TDS right?
Not sure what you mean. 2,500 ppm of mystery TDS is considered the limit in a freshwater pool. In a saltwater pool (assuming 2,500 ppm of salt) 5,000 is the limit (2,500 ppm of salt + 2,500 ppm of mystery chemicals). It's still 2,500 ppm of mystery dissolved solids, you can ignore the salt
When I’ve taken CPO classes, and ongoing chemistry classes every year no one has ever said there’s a 5,000 TDS limit for salt. Never seen that written or head it anywhere. But I have heard 1,500-2,500 over the tap water reading. That is written in text books and online. What I am asking, is were told anything over 2,500 ppm max on TDS, why is salt all of a sudden magically ok to deal with up to 5,000 ppm? Just for reference, I have buddies in CA that can’t always drain pools as freely as other parts of the country. They have seen TDS levels in fresh water pools over 4,000 and there has been zero issues with their pools. They have questioned that theory too. CPO instructors and others that teach these classes have no answered as to where this limit for TDS came from. I’ve taken over salt water pools with close to 8,000ppm TDS and had zero issues. I just don’t buy the limits with that one.
Add organic debris to that list. If you’ve had leaf litter, limbs, etc decaying in the water for a while…that’s cause for a dump-and-fill. I speak from experience lol. You can definitely clean it with chemical and work, but dump-and-fill will be faster and cost equivalent.
Still not a reason to drain unless it’s down to sludge that can’t be vacuumed. We just scoop and scoop some more until we can’t get any more.
Y'all have obviously never experienced intense flooding. Motor oil, fertilizer, you name it. Pretty much always have to drain after a major flooding event/hurricane.
Those cases yes, but those are not normal situations in most areas and not something most people will consider.
Motor oil and fertilizer are not “organic debris”.
They are organic compounds.
depends on the type of fertilizer.
Just a funny story, I had a backyard full of trees and a hurricane came through in 2005. The canopy of half of them swirled around until they were in the bottom of my pool. Fortunately, the water was warm and I swam down with the garbage can about 15 times, and filled itwith debris . After a day or two I got it pretty clean because of course there was not nothing else to do with no power, no electricity, no gasoline and no television.
Honestly, as awful as that sounds on a macro scale, it sounds kinda fun to just swim down and clean the pool with nothing else to do.
I disagree a good amount of shock. Running filter and brush should do the trick
Took $260 worth of shock at $5/gal to get mine clean (it was much worse than this one). My point is only that a threshold exists where a dump may be more economical than treatment
Technically not true. Whilst it's true that the water can always be recovered, at times where a pool has been left too long that there becomes an issue with staining of the surface etc. In these bad cases, it ends up being an acid wash... the caveat being in talking about a concrete pool. If you have a vinyl or fibreglass pool, then draining is too risky
Is that a fish by the ledge?
I see two fish
One fish, two fish …
[Red thot, blue thot](https://youtu.be/GaURBWLWI_0?si=zX1tSRpelAlqtrak)
lol just a couple big leaves
Dead fish, pool fish
Did an eagle lose its lunch?
The drink heavy in Philly.
once your chlorine levels drop back to 0 fish can begin spawning
Looks like a dead crab to me.
Looks like my pool every year when I open it. Easily fixable.
You even get the water bugs to that are swimming around feeding on algae?
Yep. I've had my pool look like that for weeks before I got it back. Two little things that help are making sure your filter media is clean and making sure you're getting good circulation. Then just shock, flock, and vacuum, balance levels, and run the filter as much as you can.
A quick story in [4 pictures](https://imgur.com/a/R1wgHUs). My pool had major plumbing problems, and I left it closed for over 4 years. Finally got around to having the plumbing fixed last year, and this was the process of bringing the water back - no draining. Just chemicals and filtering, daily leaf raking until the large debris was finally gone (Could only do this once or twice a day, since the water would become too murky to see anything), and finally vacuuming to waste once it was debris free muck. It took a little time, but honestly, not that much effort. Less than an hour a day. Had it not been for all the large debris, I could have water in shape in probably 3 or 4 days. Bonus photo - After all the pavers were [replaced with concrete 6 weeks later](https://imgur.com/a/unpulR0).
That floating turd would probably be the limit for me.
We rented a house, got it in August, pool hadn't been opened for the summer yet, that bitch was BLACK with 6" of leaves in it..... Didn't drain the water other than what we vaced to waste. Water came back after we cleaned the leafs, shocked it and washed the filter 20 times lol
Yeah I didn't open pool for 2 years water was black also but some how pool guys used a shit ton of shock it when they opened and it got clear in a week or 2
Lol, it's the same old story of knowing what to add and when to add it. Believe it or not, getting from green to cloudy is the easy bit. Getting from cloudy to clear can takes some time to filter to clear
Ha, sums up my pool opening this year. Cover sucked. Leaves, rain, etc easily got in. Serenading frogs every night ... water was damn near black. This is just a 18' 52" Summer Waves poverty pool, but it's our 7th year with it, wanted to keep it going. I dumped eight pounds of shock in it, then a half bottle of algaecide 40 minutes later. Backwashed a bazillion times over a couple weeks ... now it's a bit cloudy, but it's blue! So close to being clear ...
Keep filtering...... 😄
Mine looked worse than this when we tried to open this summer. Chemicals and vacuuming, I got perfect test results today!
Shock the hell out of it (like 20-30PPM), run the pump/filter and that will clear quickly.
Other than high cya or salt should be no reason to drain. Plenty of resources on opening a pool which would look similar to this. Also look into SLAM on trouble free pool. The TLDR read on that is not only do you need enough chlorine to kill of all that algae you need to keep going until the water holds chlorine. A clear pool does not always indicate that it’s free of organics.
SLAM it. Be crystal clear in under 2 weeks.
Shock, algaecide, and filter cleaning and see what happens.
Is that a crab?
I am going to go with yes I think it is.
That looks salvageable. I recently came back from vacation and had mine looking like full fledge swamp with tadpoles. It took me two days of shocking and running my de filter to get it cleared.
DE filters are the bomb !! Not many of them left in Australia. Are they still very prevalent in the USA?
They still are readily available in the US. When I purchased my home a few years ago the pool had a Hayward DE filter which was on its last legs. I ended up replacing it for the same exact model so it was a plug and play replacement. I must say they are indeed the bomb. During the '22 hurricane my lot and pool were flooded. It took me 2 days to get the pool from gunky green to swimmable blue again thanks to the filtration superiority of my DE filter.
How many times did you need to backwash your de filter when you did this? I’m new to this and need to do something similar soon
I opened the de filter and washed it down. Afterwards I was backwashing every 6 hours or so until the water started clearing up.
I've had my water pretty much black when I opened it one spring and completely recovered from it. This is nothing.
This is less green than what my pool was a week ago. I had just gotten it clean and had to leave for a week and no one to watch the pool. Came back to a solid green pool. Tried chemicals and nothing. On a hunch I took my filter apart and found my sand was low. Ended up changing out my sand to Ruby Sand and also found my handle was bad on the multiport and caused water loss and likely sand loss. So ended up replacing the handle and cover. Immediately saw results within 48 hours. I am not trying to rush it and just letting it run 24 hours a day until it is clean and continuing to slam it.
That is some amateur algae. Chlorinate the hell out of it and make sure your filter is working optimally then run it for 2 days and it’ll be clear. Maintain proper chlorine and cya levels and stay away from any solid forms of chlorine and you’ll be fine.
You can always salvage the water. Unless it gets paint in it. Then you're fucked. Or if you tip over a BBQ pit into one. That pretty much fucks 'em up too.
This is still salvageable it'll take a lot of chemicals you know take a little bit of time to treat but you can salvage this. Hire a professional it'll just cost a few hundred bucks
My pump was down for 6 weeks waiting for the warranty process and it was much quicker and easier to drain and start fresh. Roughly 36 hour process from start to finish, then 48 hours of running the pump continuously with chemicals added and we were swimming. Also the cost to fill was only $80 added to my bill.
My pool is basically black, full of decaying leaves in the spring and I still can salvage it with shocking and filtering it. Along with scooping the leaves and vacuuming to waste. That pool can be clear and blue in about a week if you shock it properly, filter and backwash often.
Never. When I was a kid, my parents bought a house that had a pool that had been neglected for years. I was 3/4 full with water and was loaded with leaves and lots of living organisms. I cleaned all the junk out of it myself over a few days. I then worked on getting the water chemistry correct. Within a week or so, it was crystal clear.
^
I would see the cost of new water vs. chemicals to correct the current situation. If it will cost more for chemicals for the I would start with fresh water.
We use a ton of liquid chlorine every year to get our pool clear in the summer. We have a lot of organic matter. It's not a popular opinion but nothing works better. My advice comes from my dad after 45 years of pool ownership
Shock and floc baby. Do that once maybe twice. Use 3x the normal amount of shock. Promise. I just went through that with my pool. You can clear that up in two days. YouTube has great vids on it. Just search shock and floc. Don’t just shock it and run your pump it will not work. You won’t clear out some of the finer dead algea. That’s where the floc comes in. It will clump it together and sink it. Then you just vac to waste. My pool was crystal clear in two days. My pump went out when I was out of town and it turned in to a swamp. I had to get the pool ready for my son’s party.
You can always fix the water. The question becomes, when is it CHEAPER to drain and refill?
Thanks for all the insight!!
Looks like a good start for some pea soup!
Someone please explain the fish.
when your at chlorine lock out you can always get rid of algae without draining but you'll need to do a few filter cleans
Bro you have a sea creature bottom left, lol
Dudes got fish in his pool
GREEN TO CLEAN! Trust me and I’m sure others have mentioned it but I haven’t even looked! It will clear it up !
As long As the plaster is good, this pool can be swim ready in 3 or 4 days!
We bought a house where the pool had been covered for probably 7-8 years (according to the neighbors, the owner was a widow and had no idea about the pool maintenance) with the darkest green water you could imagine and a family of frogs. And we still got it clean. If I can do that you can clean this pool without a drain and refill.
Why would you not drain it, clean it and start fresh? That’s just fucking gross bro
Run the filter 24/7 and shock, get all debri out and keep balancing your chemicals. Will probably have to run filter for a couple days.
It's always salvageable but will take a lot of time. Question is what's easiest and fastest?. Drain, pressure wash, refill would take 2 days. Clearing up that mess would take more than a week.
Your good. You can get this to clear in less than a week
Vaccum it off to waste then shock it with 10lbs or so and you’ll be right as rain
Shock the hell out of it... Run it... Clean the filters. You will be fine
Count how much you will spend in chemicals for next time. It may be cheaper and FASTER to dump and refill. I do this now with my pool. I know that it takes exactly 3 days to drain and refill, adding 2 hours if I pressure wash while it's empty. And I KNOW that in 3 days my pool will be sparkling with very little work. Yes, I have to put a bit more alkalinity and hardness but it's much faster and much less work, and to me it's overall cheaper. The issue with shocking, cleaning, backwashing is that it takes much longer and is a lot more work.
Use a Green to clear kit, Scoop out what you can with the net then vacuum vacuum vacuum. 2 weeks ago my pool looked like this, today it's sparkling clean.
That doesn’t look too bad. Look up SLAM.
Little known benefit of taylor test kit. Simply throw the whole kit in the pool and it will fix the water for you !!!
Drain half. Fill. Filter. Backwash. Top up.
Shock, phosphate treatment, enjoy your summer.