Pool Store Experiment Water Samples

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Par4monkey

Par4monkey

Active member
Jul 11, 2020
38
Pittsburgh, PA
Pool Size
15500
Surface
Vinyl
Chlorine
Liquid Chlorine
I have a very difficult time reading my CYA due to my poor vision. I thought I would take (2) water samples to (2) different places and take an average of the (2). Well, once the (2) varied so greatly, I stopped home and refilled the bottles and went to (2) additional pool stores. The picture is a breakdown of how different results can be when you take your pool water to the store to get tested. Just thought I’d share…FA94F55A-0140-4727-929B-93D1E2DFF330.jpeg
 
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That is what happened when I first started taking care of my own pool. Goes to show you can NOT depend on them! Did they try to sell you the stuff to "fix" your water? If so how much would it have cost ? My cost would have run from $57 to $123 even though I told them my water looked great!
 
kimkats said:
That is what happened when I first started taking care of my own pool. Goes to show you can NOT depend on them! Did they try to sell you the stuff to "fix" your water? If so how much would it have cost ? My cost would have run from $57 to $123 even though I told them my water looked great!
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They have in the past. Surprisingly they did not yesterday!
 
kimkats said:
That is what happened when I first started taking care of my own pool. Goes to show you can NOT depend on them! Did they try to sell you the stuff to "fix" your water? If so how much would it have cost ? My cost would have run from $57 to $123 even though I told them my water looked great!
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They have in the past but surprisingly, not yesterday!
 

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Par4monkey said:
Does it offer a different technique for reading CYA? I only have one test kit Taylor k-2006
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You use it in place of your pool water, do the test as usual & it will show u what 50 ppm cya (I believe) is supposed to look like in the tube. Then you can compare to your actual pool water results.
 
Thank you for ruining the experiment and satisfying this exact curiosity I've had for a long time. Really goes to show just how wildly inaccurate pool store testing is..

Even if 1 of these stores produced perfect results, it means every customer visiting the other 3 is being given bad advice based on bad testing and there's no way to know which is which without doing exactly this and your own testing.
 
What's even more bizarre is, if you take the same pool sample to the same store, but make sure you get a different person running the test the result will be different..

And what even even more more bizarre is, if you take the same pool sample to the same person at the same store, the test result will be different.

And what's even even even more more more bizarre is, they can pull all your results up on the computer from all the different stores and see that the results of the same sample by different and same people are all different.

Stick that in your calculator and average it.
 
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The only test that I've done that have been off and when I mean off (either tested lower or higher without adding anything) were Alkalinity CH and CYA. They were also not far off. TA was 10ppm higher, CH was 25ppm higher and CYA was 10ppm lower. When this happens I usually run another test to verify that I didn't make an error, maybe the bottle added an extra drop by mistake or I didn't wipe the bottle with a damp cloth or maybe I didn't shake the bottle enough for the CYA test. But regardless your test will never be that far off from your actual number compared to pool store testing.
 
cledee said:
The only test that I've done that have been off and when I mean off (either tested lower or higher without adding anything) were Alkalinity CH and CYA. They were also not far off. TA was 10ppm higher, CH was 25ppm higher and CYA was 10ppm lower. When this happens I usually run another test to verify that I didn't make an error, maybe the bottle added an extra drop by mistake or I didn't wipe the bottle with a damp cloth or maybe I didn't shake the bottle enough for the CYA test. But regardless your test will never be that far off from your actual number compared to pool store testing.
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I tried to test my TA with the CH reagents recently and COULD NOT UNDERSTAND what was going on until I grabbed new reagents and got the same, bad results.
Took a step back and thought - ok idiot, you're doing something wrong.
 
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Par4monkey said:
I have a very difficult time reading my CYA due to my poor vision. I thought I would take (2) water samples to (2) different places and take an average of the (2). Well, once the (2) varied so greatly, I stopped home and refilled the bottles and went to (2) additional pool stores. The picture is a breakdown of how different results can be when you take your pool water to the store to get tested. Just thought I’d share…View attachment 349977
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Can I use this for a pool group I moderate on Facebook?
 
I agree. My pool looks great. I get my water tested "professionally" once in a while as a sanity check. Sometimes I get a result that so off base that I have lost all confidence in their testing capabilities.
 

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