One day your pool water is crystal clear. The next morning, you wake up to find it cloudy. What gives?
Cloudy or milky pool water can develop very quickly, sometimes in a matter of hours. There are a variety of causes for it as well as a number of ways to restore your pool water to clarity. Eagle Pools can help you return your pool water to its original condition.
Cloudy Water Causes
There are seven main causes of cloudy pool water:
- Improper chlorine levels
- Imbalanced pH and alkalinity
- Very high calcium hardness (CH) levels
- Faulty or clogged filters
- Early stages of algae bloom
- Ammonia buildup
- Debris
Your cloudy pool water could be caused by one of these things or a combination of two or more of them. Properly maintaining your pool can help prevent your pool water from becoming milky in the first place. But once it occurs, you need to be something of a pool detective to figure out why it happened.
Restoring Clarity
The most common cause of cloudy water is low free chlorine levels. So that’s an excellent place to start. Too much chloramine, or combined chlorine, will turn the water cloudy. You may notice a strong chlorine smell as well.
You can measure your free and combined chlorine then get the value of the combined chlorine by subtracting the value of FC from Total Chlorine. If the FC is too low, shocking your pool should eliminate cloudy water. It also will kill bacteria before it allows algae or ammonia to build up in your pool.
If that’s not it, check your filters, test the chemical balance, and look for environmental factors such as debris buildup or mineral deposits. Or you can simply call Eagle Pools and we can restore your pool’s clarity for you. Then we can put your pool on a regular maintenance and cleaning schedule to prevent it from ever happening again.
