I am too lazy to go out and count, but I would guess I have 8 pop-ups. There is also a lot of ugly plumbing in the flowerbed outside the patio. Two strange things that look like mushrooms with multiple stalks. I assume there are two pipes leading to those things and a bunch of pipes going from the mushrooms to the pop-ups. Countless locations for leaks to occur, most of it under a thick concrete slab. It's hard to imagine less-intelligent engineering.
The people who built this house were from Virginia, not Florida, so I guess they got all excited when they ordered the pool. They must have had no personal experience with owning one. They pimped it out with silly jacuzzi jets no one would ever actually use. They put a ridiculous bench in the deep (actually slightly less shallow) end with extra jets. They chose a DE filter, which seems unbelievably dumb. The pool has a tiny waterfall and a planter full of dirt, which should never be near a pool. And they got pop-ups.
Most of the pop-ups don't come up. When they do, they have no noticeable effect. And it's all to make it easier to clean a tiny 35-foot pool only 6 feet deep, completely screened in.
I think pop-ups are a scam intended to get people to add $5000 and a lot of future trouble to the construction of a pool. More money up front. More money on the back end when they start leaking. I hate to think what it would cost to cut up my patio to fix things.
I may be biased because I have seen so many pool ripoffs in the past. I remember a huckster sold my dad a useless machine called a Geni-Chlor. Free chlorine, forever! It never worked. They used to come and dump bags of salt in the pool to make it work, but my dad still bought huge cans of HTH powder. Then there were the worthless cleaning whips that did nothing but look ugly, wear out, and get in the way. It was like swimming with giant enema nozzles. Then there has been the endless parade of cheaply made Jandy and Pentair garbage that breaks when you look at it funny.
It's amazing how easy it is for suppliers in other industries to make good products and how hard it is for pool equipment manufacturers to make anything but overpriced junk. Someone should start building pools using pipes, pumps, and valves taken from industry instead. They would last forever. The Jandy and Pentair stuff is like something a person with no engineering degree would make in his garage. Fragile plastic valves with three O-rings and wacky grease fittings that won't take a grease gun? Come on. Sand filters are the only well-built pool components I am aware of.
I don't like vacuuming the pool, but I have to do that even with the pop-ups, so as it is now, I have to vacuum AND chase leaks.
I'm not concerned about chemicals mixing. I have never seen a situation in which one end of a pool was chlorinated and the other was not. I'm not concerned about heat, because this pool has no heater.
Anyway, I thought I would come here and see if anyone--anyone who is not selling pop-ups--would say they were worth keeping.
I bypassed the pop-ups today, so we'll see if the pool level drops. If not, I'll leave them bypassed, and then when the surface has to be redone, I'll look into plugging them. I very much doubt anyone I sell this house to will say, "Wow! No pop-ups! I'm cutting my offer by ten thousand dollars!"
