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There won't be much calcium left behind since it's softened water. I have some similarly light colored travertine on my patio that is just as hot as the current pool deck. When the air temp is 115, that IR heating from the ball of fire in the sky really adds up.

Here in the desert, it doesn't matter what "cool" surface you place on the pool deck, it's going to get uncomfortably hot to walk on. A quick dousing of the deck with a couple of buckets of water cool it down nicely. Since I was going to re-do my deck with travertine, I was thinking I should...

Yes, salt water can erode Travertine in weird ways. However, it's not necessarily that aggressive and some say the "pitting" that can occur looks like the normal tile texture. I'll probably just coat the deck with salt resistant sealer. My AC blew up in the 3+ days of 115 temps, so I might...

I have a 15 year old pool and the current acrylic surfacing of my concrete deck is starting to flake off. It's flaking off on the vertical coping edge (into the pool) , as well as some of the regular horizontal surfaces. Additionally. the caulking on the edge where the concrete deck intersects...

My temperature measurement is via a waterproof, solar powered otterbox. It sits on the pool deck with the thermistor cord dropped into the water. This way I can take temperature measurements all the time without having to keep the pump running for accurate readings. If I were to put the...

Current test strips say levels are somewhere around 4000ppm. My automation is a home grown, DIY system that can't communicate with the IC40. Maybe one day someone will decode the protocol and I can query the salt levels. Ah yes. While the softener is adding 2400 milligrams of salt per day (24...

I recently purchased a SWG for my pool. I bought enough salt at the store to bring the levels up to 3500ppm. I now just installed a water softener that is the source of the autofill for the pool. Now that it's 2 weeks since I installed the softener, the SWG (Intellichlor IC40) is showing the...

I'm looking for someone who has an IntelliChlor IC40 hooked up to an automation controller. If you have this setup, have you ever hooked up an RS485 sniffer to record the conversation between the SWG and the controller? If so, would you mind sending me some recorded data? I would be your...

I found the problem. Upon tearing down the filter for a 2nd time, I saw one of the grids had a 1" tear at the bottom where the circular tube is. Either it was coincidence, or some of the rocks of salt got pressed up against the hole and poked through. Note to self: inspecting 48sq ft of DE...

Last weekend I decided to convert from liquid chlorine to an IntelliChlor generator. While waiting for the device to arrive, I dumped 8 bags of Diamond Crystal water softner salt (99.5% pure) into the pool I shut off my pool cleaner, turned the pump on for 8 hours and went for a swim to get...

I ended up JB welding some aluminum strips on the bottom side of the skimmer lid to close all the openings where the buggers could get in. It makes the lid harder to open since the flex tab is now more rigid, but I have no more crickets!

I have an autofill built into my pool. Unfortunately, the crickets love to get in though the finger holes of the lid. I have tried the flood them out and suck all the water out (remove any eggs/etc), but they just keep coming back. I've tought about gluing some plastic scrubbers into the...

FYI - I'm documenting my automation progress over on my blog for anyone interested

It looks like the search button is now the built in vBulletin search instead of a Google search. I seem to get better results with Google than vBulletin. Are there plans to support a Google search button? I know I can do a search over on google.com with "<search term>...

I moved into a house this summer and found a jar of cynauric acid in the garage. I'm not sure how old it is, but I'm pretty sure it's not older than 13 years as that is when the pool was built. Does this stuff go bad? Note I'm in Phoenix, so the garage temps get to the 100s for several months...

These systems seem fairly legitimate. Arizona State did a study on several systems. The Template Assisted Crystallization (TAC/TIC) performed the best. They sell systems that can do 10-15 Gallons per minute. That ought to be more than enough to handle my house + pool. That study shows the...

I'm wanting to condition/soften the water going into my house, including the pool feed line. I was thinking about getting a water conditioner like the pelican or apex system. These systems don't remove calcium by ion replacement, but have some sort of catalyst that causes the calcium to...

During the brainstorming for my pool controller, I found a $13 dollar 8 channel relay board on [url=http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0057OC5WK/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i01?ie=UTF8&psc=1]amazon that can handle 240V 10A[url]. The cool part is if you supply 5V for Vcc, you can still switch the...

If I were to go the Raspberry PI route, I would skip the external arduino/atmel board/chip. The raspberry pi has lots of GPIO ports, so all your digital needs are there (start,high,heat, buttons). You still would want to make a PCB to break out the GPIO header to your own terminals. At this...

Where did you get your relay boards from? The purple makes me wonder if you did your own design and sent them to OSH park. I'm not sure I'm up to doing a speed controller for a motor. I'll take my chances decoding the Pentair protocol on a VS motor. I'd also rather but the Pentair IntelliFlo...

Thanks a lot for posting this info. I just bought a house with a pool and was thinking about doing my own automation system like this. My plans include liquid chlorine and acid injection, solar heater system and variable speed pump control. When I build mine, I'm going to use a Synapse...

Good point. Specs for VF pump say it's 23" long. My current configuration is actually 26" long. Too bad they didn't specify the intake port distance in reference to bottom of pump.

So I want to replace my pump. The outflow pipe is easy. Just saw gray pipe after union and get new fittings. I'd use a MIP/SLIP fitting so pump is removable without cutting PVC in the future. What should I do on the intake side? I don't see any spot I could cut between the valve and pump that...

I just bought a house with a pool in Phoenix, AZ. It's been maintained by a pool service with tablets until I moved in. I'm starting to convert it to the BBB method here but wanted to get a good estimate of the water capacity. I have the pool drawing attached and by my estimate, I think the pool...