Pick your pool size — get doses in kitchen units, sized for small water, plus the honest skip-list.
Your small-pool routine
| Daily-ish dose (to ~3 ppm) | — |
| One-time stabilizer (to ~30 ppm) | — |
| Run the filter pump | — |
| — |
Measure — small water punishes glugs. Test strips 2–3× a week keep this honest.
Small water, different rules
An 18,000-gallon inground shrugs off an extra cup of chlorine; a 1,000-gallon Easy Set swings wildly on tablespoons. Everything about big-pool advice needs dividing by ten: doses, patience, and product sizes — a bucket of pucks outlives the pool. The upside: mistakes are a $3 refill instead of a $300 chemical rescue.
The honest skip-list
Skip: puck floaters (CYA overload in weeks), algaecide (chlorine covers it at this scale), clarifiers (the cartridge filter plus patience does it), pH chemicals at first (test — small pools often ride fine on fill water). Buy: bleach, strips, and one small bag of stabilizer. Total under $25 for the season.
Graduating to bigger water
If the backyard pool habit sticks and next summer's pool is bigger, the same chemistry scales up — the full chlorine calculator,stabilizer dosing, and the report card are the grown-up versions of this page, and your volume carries between all of them automatically.
Frequently asked questions
What chemicals does an Intex pool need?
Just three for most: liquid chlorine (small doses), a little stabilizer if the pool sits in sun for weeks, and test strips. Skip the pucks-in-floater habit for pools under ~5,000 gallons — they overshoot CYA fast in small water.
How much chlorine for a 10 ft Intex pool?
A 10 ft Easy Set holds roughly 1,000 gallons: about 2 fl oz of 6% bleach raises chlorine ~2 ppm. Small water means kitchen-measuring-cup doses — 'a glug' is an overdose.
Why does my Intex pool turn green so fast?
Small volume + warm water + no stabilizer = chlorine vanishes in an afternoon of sun. A tiny CYA dose (target ~30 ppm) makes chlorine last days instead of hours. The other culprit: the cartridge pump running an hour a day when it needs several.
Can I just drain and refill instead of using chemicals?
For the smallest pools, honestly yes sometimes — 500 gallons costs ~$3 of water. But a green refill returns in days without chlorine, so even the drain-and-refill crowd wants the minimal kit: bleach, strips, and this calculator.