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Thanks Jim. Any ideas where I might be able to find information on how to winterize?

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...

Wow, you guys really ran with this one. I was just wondering how others accommodated commercial requirements on a pool that wasn't built with the intention of being commercial.

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 didn't hear anything. What can I check to troubleshoot this pump?

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...

Thats what I was afraid of.

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...

The pool is an inground vinyl liner pool with a SWG. Roughly 28,000 gallons. Typically in my area, pools have water trucked in from old underground limestone mines. The water is usually pretty good with the exception of high Total Alkalinity. I try to keep the chemistry more or less in...

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...

Thanks JoyfulNoise. I'm not a fan of any system that won't allow me to test and verify sanitizer levels, so I try to hedge my bets when I have to deal with nature 2. Does chlorine have any negative effects on the Nature 2?

I'm talking about the Nature 2 system for spas. I'm not sure if they are chemically the same as the systems for pools.

Yes, by adding an oxidizer you are trying to burn off all the nasties in your tub. MPS and Chlorine both serve that purpose. If there are a lot of nasties in the tub to burn off, you will need to add more. You raised the FC to 16 and added some MPS. If you used up half of the chlorine you...

The frog packs have two parts, one is a mineral cartridge, the other is grannular bromine. So in essence its overpriced bromine in a fancy yellow cartridge. What they don't tell you about bromine, is that it stays in the tub after it gets used up. If you add an oxidizer, you can reactivate...

You raised the FC to 16 and ended up with 8. Where did the other 8ppm FC go? It probably reacted with all the nitrogen rich bather waste in the tub and created more Chloramines. Chloramines will show up as CC. If you ran the tub with the top open, you drove out a bunch of the Chloramines...

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...

Also keep in mind that the instructions are just an approximation, kind of a one size fits all approach. We don't know how much iron there actually is in a stain, therefore we can't calculate exactly how much ascorbic acid will be necessary to completely remove the stain, but leave no extra to...

There is a Liquid Chlorine system in place. It was installed to chlorinate the pool for the first month before the SWG could be used, and as a backup if the SWG ever fell short. Would a system set up for liquid chlorine be able to tolerate muriatic acid? Its just a peristaltic pump and some...

I'm not sure what my options would be at this point. The customer is pretty hands off with the pool, which is why I'm there twice a week. He has employees taking daily measurements, and brushing and vacuuming as necessary, but they are not capable or interested in adjusting the chemistry...

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...

The chlorine is reacting with the ascorbic acid. Until the ascorbic acid is used up, the reaction will continue to consume your free chlorine.

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 spoke to my cousin, who happens to also be a pool guy, and he used to take care of this pool for a while before the customer came to the company I work for. Anyway, he remembers the main drain plumbing being old galvanized pipe. So it might be more involved than just plugging it. As far...

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...

The pool is plumbed with an Intelliflo variable speed pump to run the skimmers, and I think a main drain. The water is pumped through a cartridge filter, then the heater, then back to the pool from a series of return jets. Pretty standard so far. The waterfall is fed by a separate pump...

Awesome! Thank you so much.

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...