Overwhelmed in Bucks County, PA. Hi! : )

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Also, there are a bunch of very slimy dead frogs in the pool amongst other things. Honestly the thought of saving the water is kind of gross. But I guess if we want perfectly clean water, we'd be emptying the pool out every year right?

Should we try and drain the pool ourselves? Or bad idea?

Is it not kind of nasty to keep such gross water and will it be ok for the baby to go in a pool with so many chemicals in it? :?: :?:

Sorry if these are dumb questions! :oops:
 
No point in doing bleach until the pumps are working. You could net out as much garbage from the pool as possible while waiting to get a determination on the pumps.

As for the water, once stuff is dead and filtered out, and stable numbers then it will be little different than your faucet.

Perhaps you should change your handle to froglady?
 
Lol, no kidding - I really should.

So basically we're pretty much stuffed because we can't do anything without the pumps working.... and none of them do.

So pay the $150/ hour service fee to see if we can get them running, or..... what?
 
The big canister looking thing with the gauge on top, thats the filter.
The thing with the clearish plastic lid right next to it is the main pump.
All those little black things with handles are 3-way valves. They determine which way the water travels.
The big cube looking thing on the left in the picture (beside the filter) is the heater.

That's enough for now.
 
Forgive my earlier out of synch post - I'd missed a whole page.
Your water looks nowhere near as bad as mine did and I am sitting poolside right now after a dip while son and pals float around. You do not need to drain it in order to get to crystal, safe, clear water, but you do need to get the pumps working. Like others, I dont believe they're not working, but you need someone to determine how the various valves connect and possibly prime the main pump, pwer it all up, etc. There's also NO point draining until/unless you can get the pumps working, because if you add clean water to a non pumping, therefore non filtering pool you'll have green lagoon again anyway.

So you still need the opening service -- someone to de-winterize and check and prime pumps first. If you "tell" them to do that and don't ask/assume there's anything wrong, you May find you can then get started.
 
Hobokenkitchen said:
My husband and I just moved from Center City Philadelphia to New Hope, PA.
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You folks must be on information overload by now ! I'm a (semi) retired pool guy. I will gladly give you advice and direction FOR FREE ! My father built his first pool in 1955. I have also owned several pool companies doing service on comercial and residetial pools up and down the east coast. I have also worked for the largest national pool construction company in their PA. office. I'm in the New Hope area about twice a week. Besides my regular job I still maintain pools for a few select customers that over the years have become good friends. If you want my advice shoot me an email and I'll give you a contact number. [email protected] Good luck, Dave

PS. You have the best pumps on the market today, do not replace them with cheap junk. A humming motor usually just needs new bearings, at a cost of $ 260.00 at a local motor repair shop several miles down RT 202.
 
DaveMac, I emailed you.....

The pool guy just called me after I asked him if we could check the pumps prior to deciding whether to empty the pool or not.

He said he would have to do a full opening of the pool to test the pumps because there's no water to go through them (???)

He thinks it's putting the cart before the horse to do the pumps first and says that he opes he can free up the pump, but if he can't it would take less than a week to get the new pump so the new water would not have time to get bad again?

He says we're overthinking it and I understand it must be frustrating to him to have us questioning his judgement.

My head is spinning - we are having just a terrible time with contractors inside the house and this confusion outside the house. I need to retrain as a GC/ Pool person so I am not so darn naive about everything! We just have no idea what is right and what isn't. :hammer:
 
Your husband can help better with the following...Breath...Breath...Breath...etc.

You are at the point that you just need to stop, make a decision and live with it. In the long run it will not be a decision that, in reality, will be that big a deal either way you go.

If pool guy is right, you have someone you can trust for future reference. If he is wrong, then you will have spent a little more money this one time and will have the knowledge you gleen from him during the open process. (assuming you follow him with a notebook or camera).

Once you are poolside later in the year or next year with the little, this will all be a distant memory anyway.

Hope to see pics of the setup when you get past the little hurdle.
 
He doesn't need to do a full opening to test the pumps. Pull a few plugs and maybe raise the water level a little. Then prime the pumps and see if they run. You could even run them a few seconds with just a water hose stuck in the pump basket. That would tell you whether they would run or not.
 
I'm sorry but I fail to understand his reasoning. The "opening" is to remove the cover, (already done) take out the drain plugs, run the equipment. In other words' he'd have to run the equipment to run the equipment ;)
Looks to me like his reasoning is something along the lines of "pay Me to drain the pool and do an acid wash."

So, if you want the pool open, dont want or have time to do it yourself, it will be faster/easier/more expensive to do it his way. Perhaps with imminent parenthood, this is actually the better plan.

What the pool guy CAN'T do is open and recover the water the way we would tell YOU to do it, because and hourly pool guy can not be there night and day to test th water, maintain shock level using bleach, backwashing filter whenever it needs it in the beginning, etc. He can only really do it "his way" -- a sustained number of hours to work on it in one shot and working with clean water.

A bbb approach requires short bouts of attention and observation, so perhaps less time overall, but over a longer time period. Make sense?

So if you're willing to take it on once you deliver, just tell him pure and simple to open the pool and that he can repair the pumps and leave the water to you to clean up. Ask him to put in some jack's magic and
polyquat 60 but not to add any "shock" or anything else.

Alternately, if you can live with the expense, have him do the drain and acid wash and call it done. You can study up on bbb later when you're home with the baby, and we'll help ya then ;)
 

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Btw, I was told at several points by our pool service company, who were also the original builders of our pool, that I was "putting the cart before the horse" when I'd say things like "I want to add 30 ppm of cya."

But doing it the bbb way, you do need to add the cya if I reads at zero, so that you can "hold" the bleach and have it stay longer at shock values. pool guy assumed, erroneously, that I was going to shock with his uber expensive stabilized Crud that adds too much cya, then chlorinate using the pucks that add a boatload of cya.

So it wasn't that he was stupid er se r necessarily overly defensive -- he just didn't understand that I was going to use a specific and cost effective technique that would replace him.

So it's the same with your guy, likely. He's ASSUMING there's no othe way to clear that pool. Well for HIM, there isn't. But for YOU, there is.

So, tip of the day -- whenever a pool guy says you're putting the car before the horse, it *may* be a sign you're headed the right direction ;) (if the goal is cost-effective pool mastery -- nothing wrong with doing it "their way" in isolated instances if the convenience is worth the cost o you!
 
Hobokenkitchen said:
Yeah, basically as soon as I ask if there's a less expensive alternative to emptying and refilling the pool, that's the end of it - never hear from anyone again. But $2500 + however much it costs to repair/ replace 4 pumps sounds really tough to swallow right now.
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I'm also in New Hope and over the winter bought a house (moved 3 miles from one side of Solebury to the other) with a pool for the first time. We found ourselves in the same place as you; our pool hadn't been opened in 2-3 years and we didn't know anything about it, or pools in general.

After reading this site for a while and asking folks for local pool store recommendations we ended up going to Elite Pools in Doylestown. We paid them to open our pool. That included removing the cover and getting everything started. The previous owner had taken everything apart and we didn't know whether we had all the parts or not. It turned out we had everything we needed. Other than having a swamp, we got off lucky. It took me a couple of weeks of work, but we were swimming on Memorial Day.

We started this season working with the great folks at Elite Pools. Dan, the service manager, is a great guy and easy to work with. I've had them out twice now and been to the store about once a week. They are always willing to answer questions, especially knowing you're a newbie. When the guys came out to open the pool they stayed until all of my questions were answered. You know like "what's that?, what's it for?", etc. Between working with them and reading this site (and of course the learning by doing), I feel like I've gotten to a point where I feel comfortable knowing what I'm doing (or at least what I need to do) in just about a month and a half.

I'd highly suggest giving the folks at Elite Pools a call, at least to get you over the hump of feeling comfortable getting started. That pool that you have is a great assets and it would be shame not to be able to enjoy it.
 
As Bama stated above, you can easily test your pumps by simply running water through the basket. You don't need to open the pool at all. If you have a main drain, you certainly don't need to open the pool to run the pumps. It's quite an easy process working with your pool if you simply listen to the people on this forum. I never had any experience with pools until I built my pool last year. I fired my PB prior to opening my pool and have been rolling ever since. As everyone states, stick with your best direction, learn from it and find that after a few months of using the pool, all the past is just that. Using the BBB method (I have an SWG also), I spend no more than 15 minutes per day maintaining my pool and many days get neglected, but I've had nothing but a crystal clear pool since Day 1. Trust what everyone tells you on this forum. They're quite knowledgable and most are in the business of maintaining and building pools.
 
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