Hola,
After literal years of lurking, I've finally made an account. Very grateful to all of you regular posters and those responsible for the how-to's, and the site in general.
DISCLAIMER: Not a success story! Actually, this is a failure story. A little information is good. A lot can be dangerous.
We've been in this house for 8 years now. A few years ago, I took over doing the pool myself and made a fine mess of things. A combination of already silly high CYA and my lack of knowledge/willingness to drain to bring things into spec while fighting algae and the wife about going back to Wally world for another round of 10 gallons of bleach lead to a catastrophically unsustainable situation, and ultimately the hiring of a pool man a few years back, tabs in the skimmer, etc, and now here we are...100+ degrees out, spotted black algae, CYA even further off the charts (I haven't done the diluted and math out test to get actual CYA but I suspect somewhere in the 3-4 hundreds judging by yesterdays shallow invisible dot) and pool is probably not safe to swim in. Luckily for me, the lockdown and lost job has afforded me the time (minus the 10 month old scooting around) to tackle this again, but this time, the right way.
My wife, scarred by the past bleach runs/green cloud of a pool, is not excited about the idea of returning to bleach. When my industry comes back after the pandemic, I probably won't have enough time to baby-sit the pool daily, so my goal is to make things as easy/automatic as possible. This has brought me to the edge of deciding on a SWG system. There is a ton of good info on this site, so I will just start digging BUT if anybody has any first hand experience and little extra time to talk that would be fantastic. I have some copper pipes that I can see on the return side of the pool and knowing NOTHING about SWG has me wondering about that, among other things.
I also cringe at the thought (fact) that I need to re-plaster and seeing the "upgrades" the previous owners (house flippers) did to the house there is probably a sand blasting somewhere in there as well for the awesome paint job (it's not awesome). But I wonder if I should just bite the bullet and do it all at once or at least coordinated it well. Other fun tidbits; filter has no waste line, the drain looks like it must run into the skimmer line before hitting the pump, pump relief valves have leaks, single deep end skimmer has no weir door, only two outlets located in the deep end of the 34 ft. long kidney and I have pressure side cleaner apparatus envy. I need to do leak test at the skimmer and drain. Also I replaced the broken pool lights with a cut-out of the bottom of a bleach bottle. Fine, I used two bottles. Now you know everything
Thoughts, recommendations, advice would be appreciated and happily taken.
TL;DR Pool is a mess and needs a replaster, CYA is bonkers, might need to go salt. I'd like to get it as close to perfect as possible but I don't know exactly what perfect looks like. Looking for guidance, local to LA, CA if possible.
Thanks!
Goostav
After literal years of lurking, I've finally made an account. Very grateful to all of you regular posters and those responsible for the how-to's, and the site in general.
DISCLAIMER: Not a success story! Actually, this is a failure story. A little information is good. A lot can be dangerous.
We've been in this house for 8 years now. A few years ago, I took over doing the pool myself and made a fine mess of things. A combination of already silly high CYA and my lack of knowledge/willingness to drain to bring things into spec while fighting algae and the wife about going back to Wally world for another round of 10 gallons of bleach lead to a catastrophically unsustainable situation, and ultimately the hiring of a pool man a few years back, tabs in the skimmer, etc, and now here we are...100+ degrees out, spotted black algae, CYA even further off the charts (I haven't done the diluted and math out test to get actual CYA but I suspect somewhere in the 3-4 hundreds judging by yesterdays shallow invisible dot) and pool is probably not safe to swim in. Luckily for me, the lockdown and lost job has afforded me the time (minus the 10 month old scooting around) to tackle this again, but this time, the right way.
My wife, scarred by the past bleach runs/green cloud of a pool, is not excited about the idea of returning to bleach. When my industry comes back after the pandemic, I probably won't have enough time to baby-sit the pool daily, so my goal is to make things as easy/automatic as possible. This has brought me to the edge of deciding on a SWG system. There is a ton of good info on this site, so I will just start digging BUT if anybody has any first hand experience and little extra time to talk that would be fantastic. I have some copper pipes that I can see on the return side of the pool and knowing NOTHING about SWG has me wondering about that, among other things.
I also cringe at the thought (fact) that I need to re-plaster and seeing the "upgrades" the previous owners (house flippers) did to the house there is probably a sand blasting somewhere in there as well for the awesome paint job (it's not awesome). But I wonder if I should just bite the bullet and do it all at once or at least coordinated it well. Other fun tidbits; filter has no waste line, the drain looks like it must run into the skimmer line before hitting the pump, pump relief valves have leaks, single deep end skimmer has no weir door, only two outlets located in the deep end of the 34 ft. long kidney and I have pressure side cleaner apparatus envy. I need to do leak test at the skimmer and drain. Also I replaced the broken pool lights with a cut-out of the bottom of a bleach bottle. Fine, I used two bottles. Now you know everything
Thoughts, recommendations, advice would be appreciated and happily taken.
TL;DR Pool is a mess and needs a replaster, CYA is bonkers, might need to go salt. I'd like to get it as close to perfect as possible but I don't know exactly what perfect looks like. Looking for guidance, local to LA, CA if possible.
Thanks!
Goostav
