Pool Chemistry and Maintenance From a Backyard Pool Owner
Nadia Caldwell Nadia Caldwell · July 4, 2026
Saltwater chlorine generators beat liquid chlorine in consistency and cost per season — until black algae shows up. Then your salt cell becomes almost irrelevant, because no amount of electrochemical chlorine production can overcome what a waxy-capped cyanobacterium does to your plaster. That’s when you discover that fighting black algae isn’t a chemistry problem at … Read more
Nadia Caldwell · July 3, 2026
Dose 20 ppm of calcium hypochlorite shock at a CYA level of 50 ppm, and your free chlorine will oxidize contaminants efficiently. Miss either variable, and you’re wasting money on a treatment that won’t work as intended. That’s the essence of what I want to cover in this guide — the specific numbers, the reasoning … Read more
Nadia Caldwell · July 3, 2026
A pool store clerk once told a customer standing in front of me: “Just crack open that cover and dump a bucket of shock in there—your chlorine will handle the rest.” That advice fails the moment you test for it. The water stays green, the customer comes back furious, and nobody bothers to explain why … Read more
Nadia Caldwell · July 2, 2026
A free chlorine reading of 3 ppm at 102°F in a hot tub sounds acceptable until you test the combined chlorine — and watch it spike to 1.5 ppm or higher. That gap between the two numbers is telling you something critical: your sanitizer is degrading faster than your water chemistry can handle it, and … Read more
Nadia Caldwell · July 2, 2026
“Solar covers don’t actually warm pools much—maybe a degree or two if you’re lucky.” That claim is flat-out wrong, and I can prove it with field data I collected myself. During controlled tests across three residential pools in the Las Vegas area, I documented temperature swings of 8–12°F over 48 hours using nothing but a … Read more
Nadia Caldwell · July 1, 2026
October, 7 a.m., at a Scottsdale community pool. Three sycamores towered over the deck, their branches shedding leaves with industrial efficiency. I’d cleared the skimmer basket before sunrise. By 9:30, the pump was cavitating hard. Four service calls later — noon hadn’t even arrived — homeowners were already lighting up my phone. You’ve been there … Read more
Nadia Caldwell · July 1, 2026
Two competing pieces of advice circulate constantly around pool decks and online forums, and they directly contradict each other. One says “pH drops naturally over time, so you shouldn’t add acid unless it gets above 8.0.” The other insists “high alkalinity causes everything, lower it first and pH will follow.” One of these is wrong … Read more
Nadia Caldwell · July 1, 2026
Back in spring, I’d notice the identical scene unfolding at a neighbour’s place: a brilliantly clear pool surface completely blanketed under a thick coating of yellow pine pollen, with the homeowner gripping a skimmer net with the expression of someone who’d personally declared war on the local tree canopy. Across more than ten years of … Read more
Nadia Caldwell · June 30, 2026
A call came through one Tuesday morning from a property manager in Tempe: “The water looks fine, but the bottom feels gritty. My guy says we don’t need to vacuum because the filter’s running 24/7.” I drove out that afternoon. The pool floor was carpeted in a half-inch layer of silt, algae spores, and decomposed … Read more
Nadia Caldwell · June 30, 2026
What happens when a single safety measure fails? That’s the question that stopped haunting me the moment I learned to think in systems instead of checkboxes. Years back, a Scottsdale HOA woke up to a four-year-old on the pool deck at dawn—the child had found a weak gate latch, slipped through before anyone could stop … Read more