18k Gallon pool maintenance Q

On a separate note - do you find SWG significantly easier or lower cost vs chlorine?

I believe our system can be converted from Chlorine to SWG for $1k or so but haven't looked into this

liquid chlorine is the best and most economical way unless you want to fool with a swg. look up trouble free pool and follow their methods.

get a good test kit from tf test kits.

first and foremost test your cya. the tablets may have your water with high cya. you will have to drain and replace in steps to get that down. then attack calcium hardness.

then you can worry about ta

you shouldnt need any chemical besides liquid chlorine and hydrochloric acid.

I usually spend about maybe 30-40 minutes a week fooling with the pool and maybe 2-3 jugs of bleach.

If you don’t have trees over the pool or a lot of exposed rock/concrete, then maintenance is extremely easy. Keep 1-2 tabs floating and a couple ounces of cal hypo or sodium hypo every evening is all you need unless it gets out of hand. No need to shock much unless miss routine or storm fills pool with junk.

The Walmart 6 strips are fine. I use cal hypo because it’s cheap on marketplace. Download LSI calculator all to determine balance. Acceptable ranges are complete crap without balance calculator.

Only big warning is don’t let cya get too high nearly everyone screws this up at some point. Cya is in tabs and dichlor shock. Use moderately or as needed to keep stabilizer levels around 50.

I spend average $20/mo and I have tons of trees over the pool and it fills with tree material constantly. Would be 4x more if bought from store though. I have about 20k gallon plus spa.

I also keep alkalinity on low end and PH stays at 7 year round with no acid. My calcium is obviously super high but it’s balanced.

No trees near enough to drop junk in the pool.

For anyone who has converted to Salt.... any regrets?

Seems like storing & dumping salt would be easier and cheaper than bleach / chlorine. Perhaps I should give it a few months of DIY before making a decision.

I don't know anyone with salt who regrets it but to be fair the sample size is small

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For anyone who has converted to Salt

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None. My pool is 18k gallons, I was using liquid chlorine and while it was pretty straightforward it's still daily maintenance with liquid chlorine.

Every day you need to test/add chlorine, and that's after you have all of your other levels dialed in. Miss a day or 2 and you've got a green pool in summer.

Bought a 65k gallon SWG and once you get everything dialed in, it's stupid easy. I test maybe once a month for salinity, chlorine levels, CYA, etc. log everything in the trouble free pool app. My filter runs 12 hours a day at 50% capacity on the SWG.

Best money I have ever spent, will be adding a heater to the mix next.

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Current vendor comes weekly and adds chemicals as needed - NO brushing, vacuming or empting skimmers etc. Chlorine pool w/ VSP. Paying $170/mo and they're typically here about 5 mins per week.

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$170 per month for just that?!

Around BR cleaning and chemicals weekly with a company will run you around $300 a month. It’s absurd, so much easier to just learn to do it yourself

A good test kit and download the Pool Math app. So easy a caveman can do it.