"Starting Up" the Pool & Changing Colors

So the pool filled up by Tuesday evening, so the PB sent his guy, Jeff, out to "start up" the pool on Wednesday morning. He brought out buckets and jugs of stuff and started flipping switches and priming pumps and adjusting valves and installing plastic things in the holes around the pool.

First he turned on the regular pool pump. This pumps water out through four outlets around the pool and also somewhere out of the spa, which makes water spill over. Apparently there's just a tiny bit of dish soap in the system that the PebbleTec guys used to clean up, so at first there's just a bit of foaming around the outlets.

While the foam is still around, I can see the two skimmers sucking water in, so that's working, too.
Can't put the Navigator vacuum cleaner in for a week - that's how long the PebbleTec guys want it to cure before having something running around the finish.

After starting the spa jet pump up, he installed the jet valves and they really put out power. The air valves are open in this picture, so you can really see it go.

And of course, I can still see some sparkly "Shimmering Sea" abalone shells in the deep end. Alas, nobody else is going to notice them but me.

With the jet pump going (right switch on the lanai), the spillover is going strong. It's nice having just a little bit of a waterfall and it makes a pleasant white noise in the backyard. Hadn't really thought about that in the planning, but it's very nice.

Jeff dumped in some granular stuff and chlorine tabs into the skimmer, and then walked around distributing a gallon jug of muratic acid in the water. And after about 30 minutes, I realized that the pool had really lost a lot of that green that was in it. Wow. It's really a gorgeous color now. This is around 10am.

Cool. It's really turning blue. Of course, I think the color right now clashes with the waterline tile, so I'm hoping it continues to turn.

And this is a few hours later, maybe around 3pm. More blue, but also the sun angle has changed quite a bit.

And this one is around 5:30pm. Very pretty blue this time of day, when we'll be most likely to be using it. Right about now we really want to jump in, but we've got to give the chemicals 24 hours to do their thing before it's safe.

Around 8pm or so, somewhere near the 3rd or 4th inning. Blue LED night lights are on, but need to wait until it's darker to really see the lighting effect.