Pools need periodic refreshing of the water. While TFP doesn’t recommend measuring or tracking TDS, the TDS does increase over time and, even if you exclude salt content, the TDS can get well over 5000ppm. The water will build up phosphates, nitrates, sulfates, silicates and other compounds. Suspended solids will increase as well. High TDS/TSS water is just not comfortable to bath in. So a pool is not a STATIC bucket of water but a dynamic system. It just has to be refreshed every so often and sadly it happens at inconvenient times.
(rant-on)
As for living in a drought … Tucson and the entire Sonoran valley has been in drought conditions (less than 10” of rainfall per year … there’s a reason why it’s called a desert …) for well over a decade. I pay exorbitant amounts of money for water and have utilized every single water saving technique possible. I even recently spent $4000 to have a plumber come and dig up the main line from the meter to my home to repair a leak (caused by the previous owners negligence) that amounted to less than 1CCF extra water per month (the “leak” was literally a droplet of water every 2-3 secs … just enough to make the blue low flow indicator on the meter to turn). Even with everything we do ( and I have zeroed out my irrigation for the past two years), the best I can do is get our water usage down to 2-3 CCF per person per month. And when my water bill exceeds the the 15CCF tier and I start paying $12/CCF or more, yeah, that monthly bill hurts. But even then I would still drain and refill my pool without any sort of regret or shame. As
@ajw22 said, these “droughts” and water restrictions are man-made and politicized. There is plenty of water out there, it just gets diverted and used for the wrong purposes. I get told to leave several deposits of urine in my toilets to “save the environment” and flush less but the golf course across the street can run their sprinklers 24/7/365 so their fairways can look pretty and be on “agricultural exemptions” so they just pay a fixed monthly fee … psshh, yeah, like that’s fair. Or we get threatened by the City with annual rate increases and extra fees because “we live outside the city limits and use more water than the city residents do..” Ummm, yeah genius politician, we do live outside the city BY CHOICE and we pay exactly the same rate for the same amounts of water that your city residents do. I wouldn’t use any less per person if I lived in the county or a high rise apartment building in downtown. So all their talk about “disasters” and “droughts” and “being environmentally conscious” is nothing more than attempt to squeeze more dollars out of people that live outside their taxing jurisdiction. The money they claim will help the environment never gets used for the purposes they state and just becomes another slush fund for them to play with. So when the so-called “experts” attempt to make silly arguments and throw shame around, I give them the same cock-eyed look I give my kids when they say stupid things and then I turn off my hearing aid so I don’t have to listen to their nonsense …
(/rant off)
Anyway, having a well is a blessing and curse. They generally cost very little to operate and the water is free but when they go dry or are contaminated in some way, they are costly to deal with. All you can do in your situation is reduce water loss as much as possible and try to find ways to capture water from rain to help out. And you absolutely need to stay away from solid chlorine sources (cal hypo or stabilized chlorine) as they will make your pool water situation worse. Either use liquid chlorine exclusively or invest in an SWG.
Are you allowed to drill deeper? Old wells run dry and sometimes you have to go further down. Around here the politics of well drilling is as bad as anything else since they try their best to make it impossible to drill.
