Excessive

I am sunburned, uncomfortable, have a headache and am unbelievably tired. Overall feeling okay.

The story of the pool goes back to last year - August 2021 - Bekki and I went on a trip to Niagara wine region and while we were gone, a pool toy got clogged in the skimmer intake, and stopped the water from filtering. As a result, the water started turning green, and was obviously not doing well. I left it to Bekki to try to fix it, and I think I remember there was a bit of a rush as we were having the Nelson BBQ soon. We dumped some random chemicals in and nothing helped. We tried for weeks, but nothing fixed it.

We tried really hard to get a company to come and just fix it for us, but we could not get anyone to come and do it. Either no one was available, or no one wanted to. We gave up, our pool was ruined, and we had a company come and just put a tarp over it for us, already filled with some fall leaves and green as green water.

It was disappointing to say the least, as while I may not be a strong swimmer, or even be the most excited to hop into the pool, and really like offering the pool to friends, having people over for social things and a lot of the times the pool can be the center of that, and so I was upset that the pool had been ruined, but I decided I was going to take ownership of the issue. 

We "opened" the pool quite early. We generally do it in May or early June, but this time we did it in late April I believe. We took the tarpe off, dropping even more leaves and shitty brown water into the pool. From there, it only made sense the first step was to get all debris out of the pool water before I could fix the pool. It was full of leaves, and gunk. I assume the gunk was dead algae and decomposed leaves. We have a automated robotic cleaner with a super good filter on it, so I ran it, all day, and every twenty minutes I would have an alarm to tell me to go out, I'd pull it out o fthe water, take it to the hose, empty the leaves and gunk, and spray it all out until it was totally clean, and then bring it back, reset it and put it back in the water. I did this for probably two weeks. One day, I pulled out Pauly (our cleaner) and there was minimal objects in it, and it was amazing. It was at this time that Bekki and I were going on another trip to the Niagara wine reigon, so before leaving I put about 7 chlorine pucks into the chlorine injector, and set it to high, and we left.

When we came back from the trip, I went out and the water was no longer green! It was cloudy as hell, you couldn't see more than 6 inches down into it, but it wasn't green. Now the time came to learn about the chemistry of pools. I ordered testing strips, and then a bunch of chemicals. I could write about all I learned but I'm really tired, so I'll just skip that part. Testing the water, I saw there was zero chlorine, the water had no alkalinity, no CYA for stablizing the chlorine, and it was extremely soft (lacking calcium). Also, the ph level was so low that the water was essentially acid (it was around a 6.0 ph where it's supposed to be around 7.4 or so.

Over the course of about two more weeks, I: used a turbo shock treatment at least 4 times, put in over 50lb of alkaline into the water, 50lb of calcium into the water, 1.6kb of ph+ increaser, and about 20lb of granulated chlorine. There was just one magical day when I went out there, and I could finally see to the bottom of the water. I also ordered a vacuum head and hose to vacuum all the grime and chemical byproduct (and dirt) that sinks to the bottom. With using the test strips three or four times a day, and getting the water officially tested at both Rona and a specialty pool store in Newbury, the pool was officially perfectly fixed yesterday. We opened a bottle of sparkling wine (Westcott) and I was the first one in the pool, joined by the rest of the family. It was great, but I got badly sun burned haha. I hadn't been out in the sun for two years. Last year I just didn't go out. It's funny, because last year I lost 50lb from January to May, and yet I didn't go swimming a single time when I probably looked my best, and now I've put weight back on and I'm going in the pool. 

I woke up this morning and checked the pool out of habit, only to hear and see the pump was failing to get enough water, shooting air out the jets. The water was down below the skimmer and we had lost at least a foot of water. A crack in the steps had reopened and leaked out over the entire night. It messed up our morning routine, had to run around and try to fix it before we lost more water.

Anyway, we swam again today, had friends over to swim, and it was fun. It was a lot of learning, but I understand it now and it should not happen again.

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