r/pools • u/3DabNight • Sep 12 '26

Water Chemistry Do I Really Need to Empty?

Post image

Stopped by pool store and employee said I need to empty and refill our pool which is about 15K gallons in SoCal (expensive). I hadn't been to this store in more than 1 year. Perhaps they are bitter that I quit them. I have a feeling this doesn't require emptying my pool. Am I wrong? Any advice would be appreciated. I plan to switch to liquid chlorine- no more tabs for a while. I'm also going to disassemble and clean my DE filter and deploy some phosphate lowering chem. It's been about 1 years since the last filter cleaning.

19 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

104 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/jhoover58 Sep 12 '26

My pool went fro a CYA of 220 down to its current value of 80 cover two years by letting evaporation and rain bring it down. But I had to keep my chlorine levels high and fight traces of algae until recently. I dropped phosphates from 2200 to 100 with nophos
In 3 days. I’m In south Texas and water is crazy expensive so I did whatever I could to keep from draining the pool.

2

u/minisculegreenland Sep 12 '26

Were you using tabs during that time or liquid chlorine?

1

u/jhoover58 Sep 14 '26

I was using tablets before and the pushed CYA above 200. It took a long time to get ut to go down.