Pool

I think we can finally call it – summer is over. Around here (northern Illinois), fall has already had a couple of false starts this year, but this time it looks like it’s here to stay. So, it must finally be time to close our swimming pool for the season. Closing our pool isn’t difficult,…

What We’ve Been Up To

Wow – I was thinking it had been a while since I’d posted anything to the blog and it was probably time for an update, but I had no idea it’s been almost a year.  Crazy.  I guess time just got away from me.  Anywho, needless to say, I’m way past due in sharing what…

It’s been really gross outside the last couple of days … hot, sticky, humid, just plain gross.  And we’ve been enjoying our swimming pool a lot … it’s a great way to cool off and feel refreshed!  The last few weeks have been so warm out that the pool water has been heating to bath-water…

This weekend, we installed our new Hayward Swimpure Chlorine Generator and converted our swimming pool to a salt water pool! Chad started the project yesterday morning by plumbing the cell and the flow meter in to the return line to the pool, just after the heater. While the glue for the joints in the PVC…

We officially opened the swimming pool today! After our unsuccessful attempt to start up the pool equipment last week, we wound up ordering a new pump and filter online. We didn’t have a lot of time to research the pros and cons of all of the different models, but, based on the positive comments we…

After doing a lot of reading over the last year or so on Trouble Free Pool and other sites, we decided to convert our swimming pool to a salt water pool and install a chlorine generator this Spring.  We’re hoping this change will make the pool easier to maintain and keep the chlorine level more…

After all the frustrations of dealing with a tarp cover for the pool last winter, we decided it was time to try something different.  This summer, we researched and ordered a new mesh safety cover for the pool.  We’ve only had it for a few weeks, but so far, it’s a big improvement over what…

The water in our pool started to turn a little cloudy over the weekend.  After running the first set of tests, the only difference we noticed about the water was that the pH level looked a little high.  So, on Tuesday, I added some pH Minus to try to bring it back to a more…

Cloudy Pool Water

Our pool water started to turn a little cloudy over the weekend.  It wasn’t real obvious from the surface, but it was sure noticeable from under water.  Visibility was really limited.  We started by running the filter longer than normal – left it on for the whole 3 day weekend.  And we also shocked the…

Floating Pool Light

Check out the cool new light we got for our pool last week! It’s a floating, rechargeable light called the “Glow Buoy”.  It’s pretty bright and it does an ok job in our 17′ x 34′ pool, although, we think it would be better if the pool was all one depth.  Considering that we have…

Our New Pool Robot …

… is just about the coolest thing ever! We’d been researching pool robots for a while and we finally broke down and bought one a couple of weeks ago. We wound up purchasing the Aquabot Turbo T “Bearbot” and it seems to do a pretty good job. It crawls the bottom and sides of the…

Flocculated Pool Water!

Our problematic cloudy pool water from a few days ago is a thing of the past! The flocculant that we added to the pool water a couple of days ago did an amazing job of combining all of the dust and dead algae in the water into larger particles that sunk to the bottom of…

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