Just wanted to introduce myself. Last year, after 12 years in the UK, we moved back to NJ (I'm British, my wife and the kids are American). One of the things on our home buying list was either a house with a pool, or one with a good location to build on. We ended up with a wonderful house, with a great pool - 3 times the size of the house for not much more than what we sold our house for in the UK because house prices are crazy there.
We bought the house in late September, so didn't do anything to the pool other than get it closed for the winter. After the pool was opened this year we floundered for a couple of weeks with a green (though not as green as some pictures I've seen on TFP) and dirty pool, where the pool store really weren't much help. I found TFP and things are much better. The 2 things I'm most excited about, apart from the savings on buying unnecessary chemicals, are: 1) the advice to put chemicals in a sock in the skimmer, so Polaris stops sucking up the chemicals before they have a chance to dissolve (particularly the CYA that it sucked up earlier in the season) and 2) the suggestion that the green stains on the bottom of the pool probably aren't algae and might actually be the metals in the algaecide that the pool store had me add! They had me mystified because algaecide and persistent scrubbing weren't making a difference, but metal stains make so much sense. I'm going out to pick up vitamin C tablets later today to test the theory and then maybe we won't have to resign ourselves to having a stained surface!
We bought the house in late September, so didn't do anything to the pool other than get it closed for the winter. After the pool was opened this year we floundered for a couple of weeks with a green (though not as green as some pictures I've seen on TFP) and dirty pool, where the pool store really weren't much help. I found TFP and things are much better. The 2 things I'm most excited about, apart from the savings on buying unnecessary chemicals, are: 1) the advice to put chemicals in a sock in the skimmer, so Polaris stops sucking up the chemicals before they have a chance to dissolve (particularly the CYA that it sucked up earlier in the season) and 2) the suggestion that the green stains on the bottom of the pool probably aren't algae and might actually be the metals in the algaecide that the pool store had me add! They had me mystified because algaecide and persistent scrubbing weren't making a difference, but metal stains make so much sense. I'm going out to pick up vitamin C tablets later today to test the theory and then maybe we won't have to resign ourselves to having a stained surface!
