Chemicals Only

Plenty of Westbank pool owners genuinely enjoy the physical part of pool care. Skimming and brushing on a Saturday morning is easy work and it keeps you looking at your pool. What is not easy is chemistry — knowing whether the cloudiness is high pH or low chlorine, whether alkalinity is dragging your pH around, or why the chlorine you keep adding never seems to hold.

That is the gap this plan fills. You do the netting, brushing, basket emptying and backwashing. We show up weekly, run a professional test, and dose the water correctly with chemicals included. It costs a fraction of full service and eliminates the part of pool ownership that actually causes green water.

Free and total chlorine tell us whether your sanitizer is keeping up and whether combined chloramines are building — the reason a pool can smell strongly of chlorine while having almost none available. pH controls how effective that chlorine is, and in our area it drifts upward constantly from high-alkalinity fill water and aeration. Total alkalinity is the buffer that keeps pH from swinging, and it takes a beating every time it rains.

Calcium hardness matters for plaster and for salt cells; too low pulls calcium out of the shell, too high scales the cell and the heater. Cyanuric acid protects chlorine from the sun but climbs with every stabilized tablet, and once it passes roughly 100 ppm your chlorine is chemically hamstrung no matter how much you add — a problem we catch early and correct with a partial drain and refill rather than letting it ruin a season.

On salt pools we also verify salt level and cell output, clean scale off the plates on schedule, and adjust the generator percentage as water temperature climbs and falls. You get every reading by text so you can see how your pool trends instead of guessing.

Chemicals-only does not include skimming, brushing, vacuuming, basket cleanout or filter backwashing. It also cannot fix a pool that is already green — algae has to be physically removed and the filter has to be cleaned, which is green-to-clean work. And it does not substitute for a functioning pump; no amount of correct chemistry keeps a stagnant pool clear.

Most people who upgrade do it in late summer, when leaf and storm debris outruns their schedule, or in spring when pollen loads the filter weekly. You can move to full weekly service any week, and a one-time full clean can be added to any visit for a flat add-on.