No questions for anyone to answer, just sitting here appreciating the information I’ve gathered from this site from both reading and answers to questions. I’ve only been a pool owner for a year now and kinda wish every home contract with a pool that people sign would have a link to this site in it!
Our pool has been through a lot. We bought the house on last year, paid for an inspection on the pool, was told it’s been professionally maintained for years by a company down the street. Had no leaks but would need an new plaster job in a few years and the concrete deck needs to be replaced on half of it. Not so bad right?
I tried to hire the company that had been maintaining the pool to keep doing it, but they said they aren’t “taking new customers”. I’d never heard of someone not wanting more customers!
I had a pool builder/ inspection company (Might be the same company that built the pool 20 years ago) give me a quote on replacing the pool deck, they replied they didn’t have a contractor with those skills. Really?!
It seems no one wants to touch my pool, so I had to do everything myself. When I found the water level dropping a couple inches in a week, I kept suspecting a leak but kept reviewing my pool inspection that said there was no leaks. I hired someone to come anyway with special microphone and he found the skimmers were leaking quite badly within the first few minutes and was able to patch them with some epoxy. The concrete deck had shifted and pulled the skimmer inlet away from the pool body. Argh!
So I kept testing once a week and adding pucks to the skimmers to keep the chlorine about 1.5ppm as the little booklet in my test kit said...
Then I hired a place to close the pool for the winter. They did a good job and advised me that pucks in the skimmer wasn’t a great idea cause that concentrated chlorine (And something about pH) goes right through the plumbing and could damage things over time. So I had them install a chlorinator puck dispenser along with a new filter since the old filter was seeping water through the fiberglass. I thought I was done since all I had to do was load up that dispenser and let it do it’s thing. I learned that it did. It loaded up the pool with CYA and I could start to see black algae growing on some of the worn off plaster areas in the pool! So I kept dumping more algaecide and brushing. Some improvement but not enough.
Then I found this site learned what was going on with the CYA and found my level was somewhere above 150. Don’t really know the real level cause the test isn’t reliable above 100. But after draining what seemed like an endless amount of water to reduce the CYA and keeping enough chlorine in there (buying 4 gallons of LQ a week), my pool water was finally clear but I was thinking theres no way I can keep doing this. I don’t want to test and dose the water every day at $5/gallon!
Then ran into discussions of the salt water chlorine generators. I’ve now had this SWCG system running for 2 days now and have not had to add any chlorine in those two days. In fact I just turned it down 10%. I also found the pool math app that keeps track of all the levels and has allowed me to see trends on how all the different chemical needs balance with each other, which has taught me how to predict fairly well what will happen over the next week. So I can go out of town for a week and not have green water when I return.
Which all that means is that sometimes I can come out here in the morning with a cup of coffee, sit by the pool and not do anything to it and know that it’s fine. So thanks for all the advice and time it took to compile all those articles.
If someone can advise me on how to keep the bullfrogs from pooping on the pool steps, that would be helpful though.
Our pool has been through a lot. We bought the house on last year, paid for an inspection on the pool, was told it’s been professionally maintained for years by a company down the street. Had no leaks but would need an new plaster job in a few years and the concrete deck needs to be replaced on half of it. Not so bad right?
I tried to hire the company that had been maintaining the pool to keep doing it, but they said they aren’t “taking new customers”. I’d never heard of someone not wanting more customers!
I had a pool builder/ inspection company (Might be the same company that built the pool 20 years ago) give me a quote on replacing the pool deck, they replied they didn’t have a contractor with those skills. Really?!
It seems no one wants to touch my pool, so I had to do everything myself. When I found the water level dropping a couple inches in a week, I kept suspecting a leak but kept reviewing my pool inspection that said there was no leaks. I hired someone to come anyway with special microphone and he found the skimmers were leaking quite badly within the first few minutes and was able to patch them with some epoxy. The concrete deck had shifted and pulled the skimmer inlet away from the pool body. Argh!
So I kept testing once a week and adding pucks to the skimmers to keep the chlorine about 1.5ppm as the little booklet in my test kit said...
Then I hired a place to close the pool for the winter. They did a good job and advised me that pucks in the skimmer wasn’t a great idea cause that concentrated chlorine (And something about pH) goes right through the plumbing and could damage things over time. So I had them install a chlorinator puck dispenser along with a new filter since the old filter was seeping water through the fiberglass. I thought I was done since all I had to do was load up that dispenser and let it do it’s thing. I learned that it did. It loaded up the pool with CYA and I could start to see black algae growing on some of the worn off plaster areas in the pool! So I kept dumping more algaecide and brushing. Some improvement but not enough.
Then I found this site learned what was going on with the CYA and found my level was somewhere above 150. Don’t really know the real level cause the test isn’t reliable above 100. But after draining what seemed like an endless amount of water to reduce the CYA and keeping enough chlorine in there (buying 4 gallons of LQ a week), my pool water was finally clear but I was thinking theres no way I can keep doing this. I don’t want to test and dose the water every day at $5/gallon!
Then ran into discussions of the salt water chlorine generators. I’ve now had this SWCG system running for 2 days now and have not had to add any chlorine in those two days. In fact I just turned it down 10%. I also found the pool math app that keeps track of all the levels and has allowed me to see trends on how all the different chemical needs balance with each other, which has taught me how to predict fairly well what will happen over the next week. So I can go out of town for a week and not have green water when I return.
Which all that means is that sometimes I can come out here in the morning with a cup of coffee, sit by the pool and not do anything to it and know that it’s fine. So thanks for all the advice and time it took to compile all those articles.
If someone can advise me on how to keep the bullfrogs from pooping on the pool steps, that would be helpful though.
