Hello…..This is my first post here, and I'd like to start by thanking everyone here - the owners, moderators, experts, helpful non-experts, and those who ask the questions - for starting and maintaining this tremendously informative and useful website. I stumbled across your site some time ago while searching for a solution, lurked for a while, joined about a year ago, and finally had the embarrassing realization of just how much information I'd gleaned gratis from all of you which prompted me to support the site in a very small way. Even at that, I'm aware my donation is not even remotely comparable to the value I've received from TFP. The information here - and just as important, the way it's presented - has been truly invaluable to me.
I'll give you just a little background, and then get to my question. I'm in my 27th year of being a building contractor in the San Diego area, and have no pool of my own. Many of my longtime clients are older, and over the years, I've helped some of them with their pools and pool equipment. Over time, after coming here for some answer or another, I began to realize how little was being done by some of the pool guys in their 5-10 minute weekly (some of them bi-weekly in the winter) "servicing" of these pools, which appear to entail sporadic testing, and little more than refilling the tablet floater and giving the dog a treat, then every two years or so telling the owner that they needed to change out most of the water because "it has become too hard" or the CYA level was too high. The need for this was obvious even to me, as the service revolved around cal-hypo and trichlor pucks. One of the pool guys admitted to me that he had a hard time remembering to empty the pump basket, which I already knew from continually finding it full of leaves five minutes after he left. I found this quite annoying, being that the owner had just paid me a considerable amount of money to replace her old pump with a new Pentair Intelliflo.
To make a long story short, over the last year I've become the de facto "Pool Guy" for four of my clients. I've found this line of work satisfying - I actually enjoyed my high school and college chemistry - and am a firm believer in your practice of putting nothing in the pools that doesn't HAVE to be there. Meaning liquid bleach (sodium hypochlorite), occasionally a touch of baking soda, and in one pool, a borate treatment, for which I will be eternally grateful for the rationale and detailed instructions I found here. Everyone is happy with the water - both appearance and chemistry - in these pools now.
My problem is this: I realize that much of the TFPC advice here is targeted for pool owners giving close-to-daily attention to their pools, and servicing these pools was simple while I was there doing other work. However, I'm finding it difficult to keep my chlorine levels where I want them when I'm only going there once a week without using something like the pucks, which I do NOT want to do, and none of the pools has a chlorine generator. I've looked around here, so far not finding a solution. My limited 18 months of practical experience is telling me that it's nearly impossible to use the TFPC method with only once a week service. Am I missing something, or is this true? I've considered stopping by these places at least twice a week, but I'm not seeing that as practical business-wise. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
As a followup question, the pool that I did the borate treatment on was done with 20 Mule Team Borax from Walmart and muriatic acid. I'm now going to do a 30K gallon pool, and was wondering from Chem Geek or any of the others here if they see any problem with substituting granular boric acid from Duda Diesel and skipping the lugging of all of that MA. I've seen it on the pull-down menu on the Pool Math page, and it seems to be just about even cost-wise, while saving me considerable effort - which, at my age, is rarely a bad thing.
I apologize for the length of this post, and thank you in advance for your help.
Jim
I'll give you just a little background, and then get to my question. I'm in my 27th year of being a building contractor in the San Diego area, and have no pool of my own. Many of my longtime clients are older, and over the years, I've helped some of them with their pools and pool equipment. Over time, after coming here for some answer or another, I began to realize how little was being done by some of the pool guys in their 5-10 minute weekly (some of them bi-weekly in the winter) "servicing" of these pools, which appear to entail sporadic testing, and little more than refilling the tablet floater and giving the dog a treat, then every two years or so telling the owner that they needed to change out most of the water because "it has become too hard" or the CYA level was too high. The need for this was obvious even to me, as the service revolved around cal-hypo and trichlor pucks. One of the pool guys admitted to me that he had a hard time remembering to empty the pump basket, which I already knew from continually finding it full of leaves five minutes after he left. I found this quite annoying, being that the owner had just paid me a considerable amount of money to replace her old pump with a new Pentair Intelliflo.
To make a long story short, over the last year I've become the de facto "Pool Guy" for four of my clients. I've found this line of work satisfying - I actually enjoyed my high school and college chemistry - and am a firm believer in your practice of putting nothing in the pools that doesn't HAVE to be there. Meaning liquid bleach (sodium hypochlorite), occasionally a touch of baking soda, and in one pool, a borate treatment, for which I will be eternally grateful for the rationale and detailed instructions I found here. Everyone is happy with the water - both appearance and chemistry - in these pools now.
My problem is this: I realize that much of the TFPC advice here is targeted for pool owners giving close-to-daily attention to their pools, and servicing these pools was simple while I was there doing other work. However, I'm finding it difficult to keep my chlorine levels where I want them when I'm only going there once a week without using something like the pucks, which I do NOT want to do, and none of the pools has a chlorine generator. I've looked around here, so far not finding a solution. My limited 18 months of practical experience is telling me that it's nearly impossible to use the TFPC method with only once a week service. Am I missing something, or is this true? I've considered stopping by these places at least twice a week, but I'm not seeing that as practical business-wise. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
As a followup question, the pool that I did the borate treatment on was done with 20 Mule Team Borax from Walmart and muriatic acid. I'm now going to do a 30K gallon pool, and was wondering from Chem Geek or any of the others here if they see any problem with substituting granular boric acid from Duda Diesel and skipping the lugging of all of that MA. I've seen it on the pull-down menu on the Pool Math page, and it seems to be just about even cost-wise, while saving me considerable effort - which, at my age, is rarely a bad thing.
I apologize for the length of this post, and thank you in advance for your help.
Jim
and thank you for supporting our site 
