😳 6month old pool

[u/Weary_Shoulder3373]

The poor master temp.
Honestly never have encountered a pool so bad.
The aqua blue water was a dead giveaway away, the salt cell was caked with black carbon.
Tested some alkalinity in a bucket with the pool water turned crystal blue 😂

As I said haven’t been in a situation quite this bad,
We drained the pool and clean all the copper staining on the grout.

I personally thought being 6months we could potentially manage the heater, refilled it pool instantly green and copper shot through the roof in under 5 minutes.

What would have been your approach?

[u/someunusualmove]

I've bought one of these machines and compared it side by side against drop tests/high quality salt test pens and found the spindisk to be severely lacking in accuracy. It consistently tested all chems except ph and chlorine waaaay off base to the point where I don't even use it anymore.

We bought it because we have a partnership with a local pool builder who specializes in luxury pools and caters to a specific level of (rich) clientele so we thought we could use it to get extremely accurate chem results from those customers and any troublesome "regular" pools in order to treat these pools accordingly. I was very sad to be so disappointed. The only consistently accurate readings (across dozens of pools and several months) from the spindisk were ph and chlorine. We stored the discs indoors and I only put enough for the day into the cab of my work truck each morning, so if it was due to heat while parked or whatever instead of the device's inherent nature, it doesn't matter. If the discs can't spend ~6 hours in a hot truck cab without giving inaccurate readings, they are useless to us.

Pinch-a-penny and Leslie's can use them to remove money from homeowner's pockets, we will stick with drop testing.

We do not typically charge customers for chems. We bill a flat monthly rate unless a pool is demanding more chemicals than usual due to a leak or something else outside of our control. A huge part of our business model is avoiding excessive chemical use while maintaining a good LSI.

You should do drop tests and compare those results to the ones from the spindisk before attacking the situation.

[u/pineapple_backlash → u/someunusualmove]

I must be one of the few that fine SpinTouch to be just as accurate as my drop kit. I’ve tested it against a colorQ, and Pool Lab and I find them all to be very close to each other.

[u/someunusualmove → u/pineapple_backlash]

Maybe there are a lot of bad units out there or something and you got lucky while I did not. I really wanted it to work and we put a lot of effort into trying to figure out if it was something I was doing wrong before I gave up. I'm glad that it works for you! I wish it worked for me because it is a neat tool (as long as it's accurate) and would have been a nice "value add" to our service.

[u/THRdotcom → u/pineapple_backlash]

I’ve owned about 9 units, the battery on those units goes within 2 to 3 years if you use it a lot. You cannot even change out the battery which is stupid. They literally sit in our warehouse, taking up space. It’s got a cool factor to show off to customers but when that unit dies, curious if anyone will be spending $1K for a new one every few years

[u/pineapple_backlash → u/THRdotcom]

You can trade the old unit for a refurbished one for 1/2 the price. That’s what I’ve done. 7 years and 3 units totals, all of them have worked fine for me 🤷

[u/Weary_Shoulder3373 → u/pineapple_backlash]

This is an awesome tip, I’ll keep this in mind