Your pool is green. Maybe you just bought the house, maybe the pump died in July, maybe vacation ran long. However it happened, you're now staring at a small pond and getting quotes that range from suspiciously cheap to alarming.
Here's a realistic walkthrough of what recovery actually involves, so you can judge those quotes — including ours.
First: how green is green?
Recovery difficulty tracks water color pretty reliably:
- Teal / light green, floor visible — early bloom. Usually clears in 3–5 days with aggressive treatment.
- Green, floor barely visible — established bloom. Expect 5–8 days and multiple visits.
- Dark green / black-green, can't see the shallow-end steps — mature swamp, often with mosquito larvae and months of debris. One to two weeks, sometimes more, and the filter will need serious attention.
Debris matters as much as color. A green pool full of leaves takes longer than clean green water, because organic debris keeps feeding the problem while consuming your chlorine.
Why "just shock it" keeps failing
Most DIY recoveries fail the same way: one big jug of shock, water turns cloudy-gray ("it's working!"), two days later it's green again. Three reasons:
- Underdosing. Killing an established bloom takes far more chlorine than owners expect, dosed relative to the pool's actual volume and its cyanuric acid level. High CYA — which most chronically green pools have — means standard shock doses barely register. (This is the CYA trap in action.)
- The dead algae never leaves. Killed algae turns the water cloudy and settles as gray-brown dust. If it isn't vacuumed out and filtered out — repeatedly — it becomes food for the next bloom. Killing the algae is half the job; removing the corpse is the other half.
- The filter stays dirty. All that dead algae ends up in the filter. Finish a recovery without deep-cleaning the cartridge and you've built a algae-seeding reservoir into your circulation system.
A real recovery is a sequence — kill, clear, remove, rebalance, filter-clean — spread over multiple visits. That's why it's priced as a project, not a service call.
What a professional recovery looks like
Ours (green-to-clean pool recovery) runs like this, and any good company's will look similar:
Visit 1 — assess and hit it. Test everything, including CYA. Remove gross debris. Brush every surface to break up the biofilm. Dose shock calculated for the actual volume and stabilizer level.
Visits 2–4 — the unglamorous middle. This is vacuum-wait-filter-repeat territory. The water goes from green to gray-cloudy to hazy-blue to clear. Each visit removes another layer of dead algae and rebalances chemistry as the load drops. Expect the pool to look worse on day two than day one — cloudy gray means dead algae, which means progress.
Final visit — rebalance and reset. Full water balance, deep filter clean, and an honest conversation about what caused it (dead pump? CYA at 180? no service for a year?) so it doesn't repeat.
Should you just drain it instead?
Usually no, and in Florida specifically: be very careful. Our water table is high enough that an empty pool can literally float — hydrostatic pressure pops pool shells out of the ground, and that's a catastrophic, not-covered-by-anything failure. Draining has legitimate uses (extreme CYA, years-long neglect), but it should be a deliberate decision made by someone who knows what they're doing, never a shortcut because chemicals seem slow.
What it costs
In our area, professional recovery typically runs $250–$500 flat plus chemicals depending on severity — quoted after seeing the pool, before starting. Get flat quotes, not hourly ones, and be suspicious of anyone who quotes a swamp sight-unseen.
One more number: a recovery costs roughly 6–10 weeks of weekly service. Which is why the last step of every recovery we do is a gentle version of the obvious question — want us to make sure this never happens again?
Keep reading: how often should you clean a pool in Florida? is the cadence that prevents round two — and if the pool turned while you were away for the season, our snowbird pool care guide makes sure it never happens again.