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I came across a pool built by a pool builder who's work I had not seen before. This pool builder uses a skimmer design that I don't understand. This is a gunite pool that was just completed. The skimmers are taller than what I'm used to seeing with typical Hayward or Pentair skimmers. The...

I work with a lot of Gunite pools with tile borders, and I've started to notice that the pools built by a certain pool builder tend to have almost no issues with tiles popping off over the winter. There are other builders, where just about every pool has missing tiles after a few seasons. I...

In the last few years, the pool maintenance business has seen a shift where many pool owners are renting their properties out on AirBnB. This creates an interesting set of challenges in terms of regular maintenance simply because the level of use and abuse can vary greatly from week to week...

Today I was told by a pool builder to try a phosphate treatment to get rid of White Water Mold. My gut reaction is that this is like every other situation where pool pros blame phosphates for everything, but it got me thinking. Does White Water Mold thrive in the presence of Phosphates like...

I have a customer with a Pentair Variable Speed pump that suddenly isn't working. The display shows the RPMs ramping up as if its priming, but nothing happens at the motor. Has anyone seen anything like this before?

I have a customer with an Ecomatic SWG that was working find a few weeks ago, but has stopped initializing. There is power to the head unit, and the two green lights are on, but it never counts up. When I turn the knob, it displays the output setting for a little while, but then the display...

Hello, I have a new customer with a Mineral Springs SWG, and the "Low Minerals" light is on. The average salt reading is 1500 ppm, and the instantaneous measurement is around 1700 ppm. I've tested the salt in the pool several times and it consistently tests at 3200 ppm. I inspected the cell...

I have a customer who has issues with iron staining in his pool. He never had a problem until last year. That is when he hired me. He thinks it is because his previous pool guy added water from his well to top off the pool. Last season, I fought with the staining all season. I could...

I was told today that Nature 2 and Bromine are not compatible, and that if used together, the bromine will create a film on the beads inside the Nature 2 rendering them useless. Can anyone shine some light on what would be going on there? Why doesn't chlorine do something similar? Since...

One of my pools has an issue with constant rising pH. It is a plaster pool with a SWG, built this season. I maintain this pool twice per week, Monday and Friday. It is a commercial pool so it cannot use CYA and must run at 100% to maintain FC between 3 and 5. I add about 1/2 gallon of...

Yesterday I spent 2 hours diving to the bottom of an above ground pool patching hole after hole. After all was said and done, I used up two whole patch kits making about 20 patches that covered about 100 tiny holes. I started wondering if there was a better way since after the first few...

I have a customer with a pool that is losing water through the Main Drains at the bottom. I haven't seen for myself, but apparently the plumbing at the drains is in bad shape. Normally, the options are fairly straight forward, either plug off the drains, or dig up the line and replace it...

I take care of a pool built with a vanishing edge the length of the pool, and there are numerous issues as a result of the design. I'm trying to help this customer figure out how to keep the pool from turning cloudy every other week. The water from the catch basin is pumped directly into the...

Normally when I close an inground pool, I blow the lines and plug them. If the line is properly blown, there is no water to freeze. I have a customer that wants me to add Antifreeze to their lines. I have no problem with giving them what they ask for, but I just don't see what value this...

I've been thinking about Lithium Hypochlorite, and I'm wondering why it doesn't have any of the negative side effects we see from Calcium Hypochlorite. I realize there is a difference between Lithium and Calcium, but shouldn't there be a risk of forming Lithium Carbonate once the water becomes...

I've read over and over again that there is often a lag time when adding CYA to a pool. It is usually attributed to the slow rate at which it dissolves, especially when it is poured into the skimmer. I've never been a big fan of this idea. It just doesnt' seem to make much sense to me. In...

Today I was told about a pool that one of my coworkers takes care of. Every week the pool is low on salt. The pool has an automatic filler, so we have been working under the assumption that it is probably losing water, and the autofill keeps it topped off. Today the pool was low on salt...

Today I was sent to a pool that had turned cloudy when one of our techs added pH increaser (Sodium Carbonate). The pool is an 18x36 rectangle (about 24,000 gal.), vinyl liner, with a SWG. My initial assumption was that the Calcium Hardness was probably too high, and when the pH came up, the...

I have been dealing with a fair amount of difficult pools this season, many of which require significant amounts of chlorine to reach shock levels due to high Cyanuric Acid levels. Just about every time I straighten out one of these pools, my boss questions the high FC levels out of fear that...

This season, I've seen a few plaster pools that accumulated significant scaling over the winter. So it started me wondering how this can be prevented. Once the pool is winterized, nobody is checking and adjusting the chemistry until spring. So there is typically 5-6 months where the water...

I just saw a YouTube video about Leslie's Stain Erasers, and I was wondering if anyone has used them? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_Ao5mIbVz8

I've noticed in a few of my pools that after adding CYA, or shocking with trichlor, a week later, the CYA still tests low. One of my coworkers (the only other one paying any attention to CYA) has also noticed the same thing. In one case it was a brand new pool in which we added 12 lb of CYA...

The company I work for has a pool in which someone added ph minus directly to the pool a few days after the plaster was done. There is a big white stain in the middle of this pool. We have been brushing the stain in addition to the normal brush down, but I'm wondering if there is anything else...

So I came across a few pools that had high (at least on the high side) pH, but relatively low TA (40). If I'm not mistaken, the pH will only rise if the TA is high enough to shift the equilibrium in that direction. At lower TA, the pH should either remain stable, or fall when an acid is...

I've been noticing that in many of the hot tubs I regularly maintain, that for some reason, I'm not seeing Bromide being converted back to Bromine like I did in the past. In some tubs that had too much Bromine added in the past, I would see the water turn yellow when I added MPS. In most...

A customer claims that their heater needed to be replaced because the heat exchanger went bad. The installer claimed that it was due to improper chemistry. I personally handle this pool, and the chemistry has been maintained within the acceptable ranges since I started caring for this pool...

Over the years, I have heard all kinds of things about swimming pool chemistry that I would classify as mythology. Many of these things are rooted in some sort of misunderstood truth. One thing that I suspect walks the line between fact and myth is that increased temperature would result in...

I have posted several times about a pool with serious iron staining, and how I have been trying to remove the stains with products like the CuLater. It just so happens that the tenant renting this house for the summer is a chemist who knows a fair amount about water treatment. So needless to...

I've been thinking about just how the process of killing algae through superchlorination works lately. We raise the concetration of chlorine so that we can shorten the amount of time necessary to kill algae. The goal is to kill algae at a rate faster than it reproduces. So is the "Shock"...

A while back, chemgeek provided some information regarding the rate at which chlorine is lost due to sunlight exposure at different concentrations of CYA. I took that information, and I came up with a series of charts that roughly predict how much FC levels will drop after each additional day...