Pool care for Escondido,
built for inland water.

Heat changes the chemistry

Inland summers often cross into triple digits, and pool water follows. Warm water burns through chlorine faster and gives algae a shorter path to a foothold. It also shifts the water's balance. Temperature is one of the inputs in the Langelier Saturation Index, and it moves the result more than most people expect. Water that was balanced in March can be scale-forming by August without a single number leaving its normal range.

That's why we balance to a target rather than a range, and why the target moves with the season. The longer explanation is on our water balance and LSI page.

Hard water and evaporation

Fill water in San Diego County starts out hard. In summer an Escondido pool can lose inches of water a week to evaporation, and only the water leaves. The calcium stays behind, and every top-off from the hose adds more.

That builds week after week. After years of it, the water is oversaturated with calcium, and scaling stops being gradual and starts to escalate: a white line on the tile, rough patches on the plaster, scale inside the heater where nobody looks.

There are products that help combat this, and they have their place. But there's only so much they can do. At some point the calcium has to come out of the water.

The usual answer is to drain and refill, and nobody wants to do that. An empty pool is a pool at risk. Plaster can crack as it dries, and in rare cases groundwater can lift the whole shell out of the ground. We prefer reverse osmosis instead. A mobile RO unit filters the water you already have. The pool stays full, it's done in a day, and very little water is lost.

We track calcium hardness and cyanuric acid over time, so when we do tell you it's time, you'll see the numbers behind it.

What service looks like

Weekly visits, water tested a foot below the surface rather than skimmed off the top, walls and steps brushed by hand, equipment checked every time, and a written report after every visit so you know what we did and what we found. We text when we're on our way. The fuller picture of how we approach water chemistry is on our Beyond the Surface page and our FAQ page.

Escondido is a short drive up the 15 from our office in Rancho Bernardo. If you're here and looking for a pool service that treats the details as the whole job, not an afterthought, we'd be glad to talk it through with you.