Green Swimming Pool blues

Well I had some trouble for a while with my swimming pool, Whenever it rains I have a lovely green pond ... It takes me days and lot's of shock-it to get the water sort of blue again. As the pool is surrounded with trees I had a lot of trouble with leaves etc. in the Kreepy as well....

This went on for a while until I could not maintain either the pool or my sanity anymore and I embarked on mission : blue pool

1. Firstly I had the problem of suction: THe Kreepy did not climb the walls anymore and all the garbage got dtuck in the diaphragma of the kreepy
   The solution to this was saturated / old filter sand and can be determined in one of 2 ways : If you start the pool motor on Filter and it pushes a lot of brown water into the pool you know it is time to replace the filter sand, secondly you can open the filter and inspect the sand if it is clogy and sticky it is time to replace the filter sand.
   This is a daunting task and 1 hint: If you do it yourself after unsrewing the lid, re-insert the screws into the filter and close the breather that way you don't struggle to get sand out of screw holes or air filters afterwards
   
2. As my kreepy was so old and the physical casing (believe me I allready replaced all lose and moving parts) was falling apart it was time to buy a new kreepy,
   I bought exactly the same make/model thus giving me "spare parts" if something brakes on the new kreepy
3. Green / Milky water
   I took a water sample to a pool shop and had them test the water for all the other stuff you can't test yourself easily (My pH or rather the pool's pH was perfect) but the water was saturated and some other balances were off : I got 2 bags of burn-out, clear tablets and chlorine:
   * Here I got a valuable tip from the pool shop, allways do these mayor filterings etc. without teh kreepy running just on filter and the weir.
   Method:
   dissolved 2 packs of burn-out into 5l water and slowly released it into the weir and filter for 1 hour.
   added 2 clear tablets into weir and run filter for 4 hours
   backwash,rinse,filter
   added 1 cup of chlorine, a tumbler and filter
   The Next day I had a crystal clear pool :-)
   
4. TOD4C : Time Of Day for Kreepy to run : Apparantly the best time is to run teh kreepy continious for 12 hours during daylight in the summer that way the chlorine production is helped along and some crucial chemical balances restored via the sun.