Cloudy pool water is the swimmer’s disappointment and the pool owner’s nightmare. What can you do about it?

We don’t want to pretend it’s simple. There’s more than one reason your pool water might get cloudy. But there is some good news: much of the time your ozone generator can get you back in blue water.

Micro-Flocculent is Not a Dirty Word

There’s one really important thing to know about your pool ozonator and cloudy water: the ozonator can cause it – TEMPORARILY. Read on.

A huge benefit of ozone is that it is a micro-flocculent, meaning in ordinary English that it helps microscopic particles in your pool to clump together. Is this good? Actually, yes it is. It means your pool filter will be able to grab these clumps and eliminate them whereas it couldn’t stop the microscopic particles from passing right through, back into the water.

Unfortunately, the clumping sometimes turns the water cloudy for a short time until the filter takes care of the clumps. One mistake you might make is to add extra chlorine every time you see cloudy water, which just breaks up the clumps and you’re back to square one. The ozonator keeps chugging along making clumps and pretty soon you have cloudy water again.

Before you add chlorine, make sure you have a good idea why the pool is cloudy.

What’s Causing the Cloudy Water?

OK, here’s an obvious point. What you do to fix your cloudy water depends on what caused it. We’re going to assume you have a durable DEL ozone generator properly plugged into your circulation system, so there’s naturally powerful ozone sanitizer defending your pool. If you still have cloudy water, there’s two main causes:

1. There’s a build up of slimy organics because you don’t have enough chlorine.
2. There has been an influx of organics from a natural event, like a thunderstorm.

First step is to measure the chlorine. DEL recommends that you have at least .5 ppm as a background residual at all times. If the pool is heavily used – your teen is popular in the neighborhood – you will need a higher amount to handle the ‘hot’ organics left by many swimmers, 1 to 3 parts per million. Adjust accordingly.

If you do have the right amount of chlorine, give your ozonator a chance to work. The cloudy water could just be a symptom of your water getting cleaner as the ozone forces particulates into clumps. By waiting a couple days, you may find yourself with a nice blue pool and not a lot of chlorine in the water.