Oh boy... I'm almost ashamed to admit how badly I was "pool stored" the first couple frustrating years of owning a pool. When we bought our house, it had a pool, and I was more or less ambivalent about it. I'd never had a pool before so this was my first experience with maintaining one. During the house-buying process, I talked to the previous owner and he warned me away from the pool store, but gave me advice just as bad as the pool stores do. He assured me that in 3 years of owning the house, the only thing he'd ever needed to put in the pool was trichlor pucks. He said to just keep them in the floater at all times, and your water will be crystal clear. Well, that worked for a little while and things seemed okay, until the algae showed up, and no matter how much chlorine I threw at it, it
would not die. Of course, I know now this was because of my CYA being through the roof from the trichlor. I ended up draining and refilling the pool that year, but I still felt clueless about how to keep it from happening again.
So what did I do? Well, naturally, I sought pool experts at the pool store! I didn't know much about pool stores either, but I had heard of Leslie's so I went there. They gave me a little plastic bottle (which I still have and use to fill my tubes to test on my own) and sent me home to get a sample of my pool water. I visited a couple times, each time leaving with hundreds of dollars of snake oil, magical remedies, and mystery chemicals which never did anything. It makes me sick now to think of how much money I wasted on clarifiers, flocculents, algaecides, phosphate removers, and other mysterious concoctions. At one point during a visit, I had two employees get into a heated argument about the dangers of copper algaecides in front of me.
Eventually, I had a visit that convinced me they neither knew anything about pool chemistry, nor had my best interest in mind. I brought in a water sample and the guy working there poured it into a machine, which I assumed must be industry-standard high-tech wizardry. And then... he started lecturing me.
"Did you add acid to lower your pH?"
Me: "Well, yeah, it was too high"
"NEVER add acid to your pool! It ruins the water!
Me: "But the-"
"Acid is like putting drugs in your pool! It's like heroin! Does that scare you? It should! I'm trying to scare you!"
Me, thinking: "Uhh what on earth?"
"And look at your Total Dissolved Solids! 500! Do you shock your pool?"
Me: "Yeah once a week or so"
"You don't need to shock the pool. All the other idiots working at Leslie's tell you to do it but it ruins your water."
I asked about alkalinity and pH and he told me to never worry about those - just keep the chlorine in range and alkalinity and pH would "follow". (This is, of course, nonsense!) At this point, I should have turned around left the store, but I assumed he had to know
something that I didn't. He also told me the water in his pool was 20 years old, never drained, and he never used any chemicals in it besides chlorine. He insisted I should only use Leslie's brand of dichlor because it's "99% pure", pointing out the active ingredients (failing to mention that a lot of that 99% is CYA - probably because he didn't know). "The liquid stuff? Pffft, it's only 10%! You're paying for 90% water!" he told me.
When I left, I had a very bad feeling about the money I was spending at this place, so I started searching online and found TFP. I made my first post about this visit to Leslie's and it was
@Dirk who gave me the very best of advice:
STOP GOING TO LESLIE'S. (I'm shouting!) You're instincts about them are 100% accurate. I'm not even going to address their advice. It's pointless.
Further in my first thread,
@Mr Bruce added to the conversation too, further convincing me that these TFP guys might know what's up:
That is some hall-of-fame level ridiculousness right there. I literally laughed out and I'm not an easy laugh.
I know pool stores are terrible, but that takes the cake. I hope you get a test kit and stay around. You'll be glad you did.
Sometimes, I think about bringing some water to Leslie's just for the free entertainment value. I haven't bought anything from them in years. They are scam artists on the level of the used car salesman at the local lemon lot.