Let me add, the kids had red eyes after a lot of swimming yesterday. Could this have been caused by the high CYA?

The CYA isn't harmful to the dog or kids at that level, but the problem is when it gets that high chlorine becomes less effective. 100 is usually recognized as the upper limit. You're not that much over it and your pool may be OK if you don't add any more CYA as it'll dissipate over time. You'll want to keep your chlorine at high levels until the CYA comes back down (the higher the CYA, the more chlorine you need to keep the bad stuff at bay).

Red eyes is usually caused by out-of-range PH or by combined chloramine content. Are you doing a full range of checking? A lot of people do the total chlorine check, but everyone should also check free chlorine and combined chloramines at least once a week. CC should be zero, if it's more than zero then the pool may need to be shocked. CC tells you that the free chlorine is fighting something in the pool. When FC's combine with bad stuff in the pool they become CC's.

Phew, I'm relieved that I don't have to drain the pool. Yes, a few other parameters were out of whack so I have made adjustments, and that should resolve the red-eye problem. I think I need to move back to testing with drops instead of the strips; the strips seem unreliable.

Thanks for the advice.

So how could my pool store recommend a range of 30-200 ppm?

Definitely go with a drop based test, the strips are unreliable for sure (except for the salt strips). I use the TF 100 kit as recommended on the TroubleFreePool forums (link below).

There's a lot of great info on testing in this thread:

http://www.troublefreepool.com/viewtopic.php?t=2375

Apparently with an SWG you should be keeping your CYA in the 60-80 range, higher than a non-SWG pool. So you're not too far out of range.

There is a chart in this thread that shows an estimate of what FC levels you should shoot for with a given CYA level:

http://www.troublefreepool.com/viewtopic.php?t=2346

If you're still unsure about what you should do, you might post over there. There's a guy there that goes by "chemgeek" that really knows this stuff inside-out!

Here is a link that might be useful: http://www.tftestkits.com/

Irritated eyes are caused by chloramines. you can add a potassium shock or jack the chlorine up to 10x the combined chlorine. This is called breakpoint chlorination. Take a combined chlorine test and subtract the free chlorine test and then add enough chlorine to satisfy 10x the level which is the difference of the two.

Thanks for the advice! I will get TF 100 kit. I have put the SWGs (I have 2) in boost mode. There is a lot of pollen falling now, and I think that was causing my chloramide problem.

My pool store tests with strips and a digital reader. Will that give false results?

Yeah, stores are notorious for giving bad test results. It's not intentional, it's largely dependent on whether the person doing the testing really knows what they are doing (or cares). The TF100 will give you consistent results that you can depend on a lot more than pool store results. One of the guys on TroubleFreePool as an experiment took water samples from his pool around to various stores and had them tested. The results varied significantly!

We test TC, PH and TA every 2 days and then run the full gamut once a week (except for CYA which we test every 2 weeks because it doesn't swing much like the others can). The TF100 comes with a daily kit inside the bigger kit so you can test TC and PH more often.