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One can spend a small fortune on chemical products for maintaining a pool. One of the greatest "Gotcha!"s of owning a pool is the trip to one's local pool store with a water sample. Invariably the person doing the testing gives you a computer print out with a long list of products that they claim will keep your pool water in pristine condition. And of course, the list tells you to buy the brand name that the store carries. In the photo at the right one can see some common household products. There are more comments about them in the next frame.
On this page, I display the chemical products that I have used with notes on how well they functioned.
Click on any picture to enlarge or obtain more information.
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Designed by Bill Johnson |
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Pool Chemistry at My Grocery Store? |
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The grocery store chemical group |
Yes!! As mentioned above in the introduction, there are several common house hold chemical products that fall into this category. One has to look beyond the product label to the fine print that declares the product's chemical make up and its concentration. An excellent web site, poolsolutions.com addresses these issues. This site has great tips pages. In particular notice the tip "Pool Chemicals you can buy at your grocery store."
It pays to read product labels including safety precautions carefully. For example, as anyone who has passed a high school chemistry course knows, sodium hypochlorite is common house hold bleach, no matter what label is put on the bottle.
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However, it pays to shop smart. Early in the 2004 pool season I went to the store to buy chlorine shock. The grocery store had the store brand of pool shock on sale for $12 for a four gallon case. The concentration of the shock was 12.5% sodium hypochlorite and the concentration of the bleach was 6.25% of the same. It worked out that two gallons of bleach was more expensive than a gallon of shock. The moral of this story is that not only does one have to pay attention to unit pricing, but also to the concentration of the product.
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The Good |
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My favorite products |
This group of products made pool maintenance so easy to keep pristine water that my efforts bordered on neglect. Once I had the water adjusted to the Kleen Pool specifications, all that was required was to monitor the alkaline level and shock the pool a couple times a month. The 2003 and 2004 pool seasons in Rochester, NY were similar in that both seasons were cooler and wetter than normal. In 2003 I spent a lot of my spare time cleaning the pool and battling algae. In 2004 I spent most of my spare time swimming. The main difference was the addition of Kleen Pool.
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BioGuard Smart Sticks |
I tried BioGuard Smart Sticks during the 2003 pool season. They worked very well. They are designed to be placed in the skimmer basket and after ten hours of running the pump, a film develops that controls the release of chlorine as they dissolve when water flows over them. I used them for the entire season and did not notice any deterioration of the skimmer basket as I did with the trichlor pucks. They cost a little more, but the added expense was a lot less than buying a chlorinator device to hold the trichlor pucks.
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The Bad and The Ugly |
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| Products and Ideas that Failed |
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As I noted in the frame above, no matter how I dispensed chlorine using the trichlor pucks, I had problems. Click here to see the ugly results of using this product in floating dispensers.
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Miscellaneous Products |
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Miscellaneous Chemical products |
This group of products was mostly used at startup. I am not sure what function water hardener has in a pool with a vinyl liner, but it is on the list of products to get when I open the pool each season.
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