Stabilizer is a sunscreen, not a chemical you top off
Cyanuric acid shields chlorine from UV. Without it, an unshaded Texas pool can lose most of its free chlorine in a single afternoon. With too much of it, chlorine is bound so tightly that it stops killing anything at a useful rate.
The trap is that CYA does not evaporate. It only leaves through splash-out, backwashing, or draining. Every trichlor tab and every bag of dichlor shock adds more.
The numbers that matter
Free chlorine needs to be maintained as a percentage of CYA, not as a fixed number. At 30 ppm CYA, a few ppm of chlorine is plenty. At 100 ppm CYA, that same chlorine reading is effectively doing nothing.
Once CYA climbs past a workable range, adding more chlorine is throwing money into the water.
Drain to clean is a repair, not an upsell
The only way to reduce CYA is to replace water. A partial or full drain and refill resets the stabilizer level so chlorine can work again.
Draining a pool in Texas soil and heat has to be done carefully and at the right time to avoid popping the shell or damaging plaster. We plan it around your water table, weather, and surface type rather than just pulling the plug.
