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Saturday update
Got a start on winterizing the pool today, with occasional breaks to shoo Andrew off the pool cover. I drained the water down below the tile line and added chlorine and algaecide. The water was nice and clean even after a month of neglect. Wonder if the algaecide I added last month helped. Anyways, tomorrow…
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Not a bad year for the pool
We had a pretty good 2007 swimming season. We opened up on Memorial Day weekend and were swimming soon thereafter. And we set a new record for latest day in the pool — October 9. As a matter of fact, the pool got pretty regular use in late September and the first week of October…
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2006 Pool Season: Short but Sweet
That about sums it up. Tomorrow we’re putting the winter cover on the pool and officially sticking a fork in the 2006 swimming season. For all intents and purposes, it was really over before the Labor Day holiday, although we did sneak one post-Labor Day swim in, during a warm spell where I was able…
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Early end to swim season?
Several days of persistent cloudy, cool and rainy weather have conspired to drop the pool temperature to a nice, chilly 76 degrees. And, the forecast for the next week or so doesn’t look too promising. So it looks like we may be in for our earliest end to the swim season since we moved into…
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More pool fun
The inevitable happened yesterday.. I accidentally ran the vac booster pump for an hour or so with the intake plumbing shut off. Fortunately, it looks like it survived.. thermal cutoff switches are your buddy. Several years ago, a similar mishap happened to the main circulation pump, and it’s still alive and kicking. The damage this…
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Hump Day Ramblings
I accidentally shut down my X server yesterday before I left work, so I took the opportunity to install the custom nVidia driver on my X desktop. And I must say, the proprietary driver is much nicer than the nv driver that comes with X.org. Someone at nVidia has put a lot of work into…
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Troubleshooting cloudy pool water
For the past several years of pool ownership, I’ve always had off-and-on problems with cloudy water. I’m generally pretty good at keeping up with the water chemistry, so I’ve always been a bit curious as to why the water clouds up so regularly. The pattern is the same every year: it starts out crystal clear,…
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The paradox of pool solar covers
We have a solar cover for our pool. It’s essentially a big, plastic sheet of bubble-wrap that sits on the pool surface. To remove it, we crank it onto a big reel — it’s pretty much a necessity to have a reel for these things, particularly with a large pool like ours. After 5 seasons…
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Finally got in the pool
Better late than never, we took our first swim of the season today. It’s nice to finally be using the pool, because it makes the hassle of maintaining it seem more worthwhile. It’s not quite worth all the effort and expense IMHO, but still, it is nice to be able to hop in the pool…
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Pool’s open… don’t everybody jump in at once
Yesterday we finally uncovered the big concrete hole in the backyard. The water looks pretty good, but due to my neglect over the spring, I’ve got a bigger problem with surface-clinging algae than in past years. There was the usual green stuff on the bottom which easily vacuumed out, but the steps and the diagonal…