I never went in a pool store except to buy the pool and "learn how to maintain a pool". I joined TFP fairly quickly after the pool was built. I bought and had the AquaSmarte tab feeder installed. I was searching the interwebs on ways to not use the expensive, proprietary, replaceable trichlor cartridges and mineral pack. It let me here and the real learning began. My first few posts were pretty raw, but I learned to understand the process fairly quickly and saw the benefit. I haven't looked back.