Recent content by ssabin

I'm planning my deck now and shopping for plastics. I've noticed that some posts above seem to lump composites and plastics together regarding mold, and that is simply not correct. Vinyl decking has no food for mildew to thrive on, and water cannot be absorbed into the material. If any mold...

I would recommend asking for bids on two options: the sub-panel option ( perhaps 60A would be better, especially of your pump requires a dedicated 20A circuit rather than a 15A circuit), as well as simply running (2) circuits (15A or 20A, but you may NEED 20A for your pump depending on its motor...

I have the Taylor k-2006 kit and I have been quite pleased with it. I have, however, been refilling the consumables from TFKITS and I just received my order for phenol red refills. Well, I recall reading somewhere that the TFKITS reagents are all Taylor compatible, didn't think to check the...

I think frustrated is right - patience is key. And since you have the same size pool as I, we both know how much surface their is to clean. Do you have a bottom drain? If you have successfully won an algae battle, the dead algae remnants will still remain as a white dusty substance in your...

I bet you never knew that when you installed the step weights, you got an algae indicator for free, did you? Glad you now know what's happening. Steps are sometimes problematic because the water flow underneath them is usually poor. If that's the case with your pool, you could try...

Do you have enough voltage at the pump? This could be a problem if your wiring is too small for the electrical load AND the run of wire is long. I actually doubt this is your problem, but thought I'd throw that out there.

Hmmm. CH is not the problem. I would guess the next likely cause of the cloudiness is the formation of algae, or other dissolved "stuff". I had cloudiness upon opening this year (since I opened late), and getting the FC up to shock levels for 2 days continuously took care of it. It wouldn't...

Like Frustrated said, too high a CH can cause cloudiness problems with high pH. It seems like every chemistry parameter has a downside to it getting out of whack, even with a vinyl pool. The only things that I think are relatively unimportant for a vinyl pool are CH (if not too high) and TA...

Do you know your CH level? If that or other dissolved minerals are present in high quantities, the higher pH can allow them to precipitate out and cause cloudiness. If that is indeed what is happening, then you can try vacuuming the white "dust" from the bottom of the pool before lowering your...

Well, the mouse traps aren't working. The first night, however, some sort of critter got under th pail because the pail was knocked over and the trap was about 15 yards away. Probably a raccoon. So now I may move to the tunnel spears.

Ahh yes, the old peanut butter and mouse trap trick - I used that this winter to clean out about 7 mice in the attic, but for some reason I didn't consider that for the moles. I guess I suspected you had to get into the corridors to get them. I think I'll give that a try. Nothing like the...

We have had moles in our backyard for a few years now, thanks to me neighbor's impressively large garden. They didn't bother the pool area last year when the pool was new, but this year there are several pockets where the liner dips into a small depression near the outside wall. One of these...

I can see why you'd be confused. Althoutgh I may come off sounding otherwise, I don't proclaim to be a code expert. Rather, once I investigate something related to codes, I try to remember as much as I can - someone always asks, "hey, when you were doing your...". With that said, my guess is...

I always assumed that using high speed was for vacuuming and other maintenance periods only. Are you saying that you need to run on high a certain amount of time per day, plus on low the remainder of the day? Wow - I didn't know that warmer water caused that much of an issue for the filtration...

I too am struggling with this as I plan my deck around my 27' AG pool. The deck will only go around a third of the pool. I would think with 2x6 decking that you should probably bring the deck inward to the water's edge horizontally, or at least nearly so. And it's likely that if you build the...