hey guys n gals!
I've been in the industry for 4 years and have a service company in Louisiana that I lose my mind over every pool season. Since branching out on my own, I've had 95% of my pools on point. Why not 100% you say? Well the other 5% is a certain area in my region with terrible water (the municipality uses some chemicals chocked full of phosphates twice a month to clean the pipes). When I first started doing pool work, I had an old school guy tell me flat out phosphates are bs! Since then, I've talked to several up and comers and the new school train of thought is quite the opposite. With the subject being a bit of a debate, I started testing for phosphates in this problem area of my route. At first I only tested the pools that were experiencing problems so every time I tested, it showed 500+ ppb. Not knowing what else to try, I started using phosfree...and it worked great. When I saw how well it worked, I thought that old timer that advised me to the contrary, was just stuck in his ways and resistant to try anything other than chlorine. My success with phosfree in that problem area prompted me to then start testing phosphates in all my pools. So as I'm getting phosphate readings from my other pools I start to notice that some of my better looking pools had 1000+ ppb phosphates and had zero problems! It didn't make sense! I couldn't wrap my head around why phosphates were such a problem in some pools but not a problem at all with others. I eventually chalked it up to a false positive of some sort. Then I read the BBB thread and realized that I had been misinformed. Id always been told that stabilizer only needed to be kept up with for salt pools. In tab pools it wasn't really a concern because the stabilizer was already in the tabs. I even had one guy that's been in the business for 30 plus years tell me that stable locking a pool is a myth...and as long as I keep my free chlorine where it needs to be, I'll never have problems.
Now that I know where I was going wrong, oh boy do I feel like an idiot! Once I looked at your chlorine/cya chart, I knew I had the answer to all the questions and head scratchers I've experienced over the past 4 years. Maybe now I can keep some of my sanity each spring!
Anyway that's my story. I'm quite possibly the dumbest pool guy ever...but hey my wife didn't marry me for my smarts! All kidding aside, Id just like to say THANKS!!! To TFP and its contributors: You are the bomb diggity! And you can expect to hear back from me soon...as I will be looking to you for advice on implementing BBB into weekly pool care.
I've been in the industry for 4 years and have a service company in Louisiana that I lose my mind over every pool season. Since branching out on my own, I've had 95% of my pools on point. Why not 100% you say? Well the other 5% is a certain area in my region with terrible water (the municipality uses some chemicals chocked full of phosphates twice a month to clean the pipes). When I first started doing pool work, I had an old school guy tell me flat out phosphates are bs! Since then, I've talked to several up and comers and the new school train of thought is quite the opposite. With the subject being a bit of a debate, I started testing for phosphates in this problem area of my route. At first I only tested the pools that were experiencing problems so every time I tested, it showed 500+ ppb. Not knowing what else to try, I started using phosfree...and it worked great. When I saw how well it worked, I thought that old timer that advised me to the contrary, was just stuck in his ways and resistant to try anything other than chlorine. My success with phosfree in that problem area prompted me to then start testing phosphates in all my pools. So as I'm getting phosphate readings from my other pools I start to notice that some of my better looking pools had 1000+ ppb phosphates and had zero problems! It didn't make sense! I couldn't wrap my head around why phosphates were such a problem in some pools but not a problem at all with others. I eventually chalked it up to a false positive of some sort. Then I read the BBB thread and realized that I had been misinformed. Id always been told that stabilizer only needed to be kept up with for salt pools. In tab pools it wasn't really a concern because the stabilizer was already in the tabs. I even had one guy that's been in the business for 30 plus years tell me that stable locking a pool is a myth...and as long as I keep my free chlorine where it needs to be, I'll never have problems.
Now that I know where I was going wrong, oh boy do I feel like an idiot! Once I looked at your chlorine/cya chart, I knew I had the answer to all the questions and head scratchers I've experienced over the past 4 years. Maybe now I can keep some of my sanity each spring!
Anyway that's my story. I'm quite possibly the dumbest pool guy ever...but hey my wife didn't marry me for my smarts! All kidding aside, Id just like to say THANKS!!! To TFP and its contributors: You are the bomb diggity! And you can expect to hear back from me soon...as I will be looking to you for advice on implementing BBB into weekly pool care.