All right, my friends. Pull up a chair, grab a beer, and let me tell you the tale. The tale of the Great Algae War of 2024.
I shared already the state of the pool from last month. Here it is again:
ca. March 19th.
Now, this is no ordinary mess. To give you some idea, not only was the pool completely full of algae -- we're talking long strands from the surface to the floor, here, but I scooped up a goddamned pinworm off the surface. Yeah, you know those fucking intestinal parasites? Yeah. One of those. It was dead. No idea where it came from.
March 28th. I'm just about to go on vacation. One more glimpse.
Ew.
I dumped 10 pounds of shock in there and got the pump going. Also skimmed as much as I could off the surface. Went on vacation, came back home.
April 2nd. Back home. OK, that's an improvement. We're sorta bluish green instead of deep forest green.
Dumped 10 more pounds of shock in.
Tuesday. OK, now the color is correct, but you can't see deeper than the second step. I've used up about 12 chlorine tabs, too. But now it's clean enough that I can start running the vacuum; there's no huge deposits floating on the surface, and the green is gone.
Pardon the mess. We're having work done on our house and our yard is being used to store shit that was in what used to be our garage.
Yesterday. Here's the deep end of the pool. By this point I've disassembled and cleaned out the filter completely three times. You can see the bottom of the deep end, but it's still murky.
And finally: Today. You can read the labeling on the Poolvergnugen all the way down at the bottom of the pool.
All that's left is -- I'm going to dissassemble the filter one last time, dump in about five pounds of Sodium Carbonate (all that chlorine got my pH down to about 6.5), then put the Solar Blanket over it so it can start warming up. Now the solar blanket ain't clean, so I'll need to keep my eye on chlorine levels more or less daily over the next week. But other than that, we're done here!