Common questions,
honest answers.

Most guidance says 1 to 3 parts per million of free chlorine. That's a starting point, not the full picture. How well that chlorine actually works depends on two other things: pH and cyanuric acid.

pH decides how much of your chlorine is actually working. Chlorine exists in water as two forms, hypochlorous acid and hypochlorite ion, and only the first one kills effectively. At a pH of 7.5 you're close to an even split between the two. Push pH higher, which it naturally drifts toward if left alone, and more of your chlorine shifts into the weaker form. A pool reading 3 ppm at pH 8.0 is doing noticeably less sanitizing than the same 3 ppm at pH 7.4, even though the test shows an identical number.

Cyanuric acid decides how long that chlorine survives. Without it, direct sun can strip a pool's chlorine to nothing in under 2 hours. But CYA has its own tradeoff: free chlorine needs to stay at roughly 7.5% of the CYA level to reliably keep algae from taking hold. At a typical 50 ppm of stabilizer, that's a floor of 3.75 ppm free chlorine.

That floor, and the Model Aquatic Health Code's ceiling of 10 ppm (the level the CDC's guidance treats as a hazard while people are swimming), leaves a narrow window to work in. In summer, a pool can lose 1.5 to 2 ppm a day to sun and use, so dosing near the top of that window on service day can mean you're back near the floor, sometimes below it, by day three or four. In practice the window's often tighter still, since we won't dose all the way to 10 ppm if you might swim that same day.

That's the real case for backup between visits: an algaecide, a jug of chlorine left behind with instructions (though that turns pool care into a partnership, since you're still thinking about your pool between visits), a tab floater (cheap, but it raises CYA over time and eventually forces a drain or RO treatment), a saltwater system (steadier, with its own upkeep), or a chemical feed system for the most hands-off option.

There's also a newer layer above all of that: ozone and UV systems, which oxidize contaminants directly rather than leaning on chlorine alone, and the latest systems combine the two. Run ozone gas through a UV light field and the reaction produces hydroxyl radicals, the most powerful oxidizer available for pool water, well beyond what ozone or UV manage on their own. It's not a replacement for chlorine. It's closer to a turbocharger for whatever sanitizer is already in the water, asking far less of it than it would otherwise need to do.

Ask us if you want to talk through which of these options fits your pool.

The instructions on the chlorine jug assume your pool is in chemical balance. If it isn't, and most aren't quite, chlorine gets partly consumed by side reactions and doesn't kill algae effectively. The four most common reasons algae returns despite chlorine:

Cyanuric acid is too high. Above about 80 ppm, chlorine becomes sluggish. This is the single most common cause, usually because the pool has been chlorinated with tablets, which add cyanuric acid as they dissolve.

Phosphate levels are high. Phosphates are algae food, and they enter the pool from rain, fertilizer, tap water, and bathers. Without removing them, you're fighting an enemy that gets fed every day.

Circulation is poor. Algae loves dead spots. Steps, behind ladders, and corners are usually the first sites of a bloom.

Brushing is irregular or skipped. Brushing dislodges the early biofilm before it becomes visible. It's the single most effective thing a homeowner can do.

Weekly, in almost every case. In San Diego, where pools are open year-round, weekly is the rhythm that keeps chemistry stable, surfaces clean, and equipment lubricated. Every-other-week service is sometimes offered as a money-saver, but the math rarely works out. Chemistry drifts further between visits, more chlorine gets dumped to catch up, and the equipment runs harder.

Different, not easier. Salt pools generate their own chlorine through electrolysis. That's the real appeal. What you still need to manage: pH, which drifts steadily upward on salt pools, cyanuric acid, and the salt cell itself, which scales and degrades over time.

And the salt. You add salt to the pool when it runs low, which happens slowly with normal use, or faster if there's a small leak somewhere. On a typical pool, we add eighty to a hundred and sixty pounds of salt twice a year.

Is the water "softer"? A little. Most of the smoothness people associate with salt pools comes from cleaner overall chemistry, not from salt itself. For scale: a salt pool runs at roughly ten percent of the salt concentration of the Pacific Ocean, so no, you can't taste it.

One thing that catches people off guard: salt cells don't measure salt content directly. They measure the water's electrical conductivity and convert that into a salinity reading, and conductivity changes with temperature, not just with how much salt is actually in the water. The same 3,000 ppm of salt can read closer to 3,600 ppm on a warm summer afternoon than on a cool morning, purely because warmer water conducts electricity better. Most quality systems compensate for this to some degree, but not perfectly across the full range, which is one more reason a single salt reading doesn't always tell the whole story.

Because the work varies enormously, and most of that difference is invisible from the pool deck.

You can hire someone who shows up, skims what's floating, brushes the walls, and dips a test strip in the shallow end. He'll do it in five or ten minutes, and by every visible measure the pool will look fine when he leaves. He isn't lazy. He's just never learned water chemistry past the basics.

Every service hits the fundamentals: chlorine to sanitize, muriatic acid to bring pH back down (left alone, it drifts up). That's table stakes. What separates services is what happens after that.

We also test cyanuric acid and alkalinity, and this is where it gets interesting. Total alkalinity is the number every test kit reports, and it's the number most services stop at. But total alkalinity isn't the number that actually protects your plaster. Meeting the standard ranges is the baseline every service should hit. The Langelier Saturation Index, which we lean on for target chemistry, takes it further. But even a properly calculated LSI usually stops at total alkalinity. Going one layer deeper, correcting for cyanuric acid's effect on that number, is what gets you carbonate alkalinity, and it's the piece most companies never get to. Skip that calculation, and a pool can read "in range" on paper while its carbonate alkalinity sits too low, a contributor to spot etching: permanent, pitted damage to the plaster that costs far more to fix than years of proper service would have cost to prevent. If you want the full explanation of how that calculation works, we get into it on our Beyond the Surface page.

The higher price isn't for a longer visit. It's because we spend less of our time on the mechanical cleaning and more of it on the preventative side: the chemistry and the equipment checks that don't show up as anything visible in the moment, but keep problems from starting in the first place. It's not the right fit for every pool owner. It's how we do it, and it's why the pools we maintain have very few issues.

So when you're comparing quotes, the real question isn't "what does it cost." It's "what do I actually need." If you're fine with someone showing up once a week to mechanically clean the pool, and you're willing to take a water sample to Leslie's once a month to keep an eye on the chemistry yourself, that's a legitimate way to run a pool, and you know who to hire. It should land on the lower end of the price scale. If you'd rather never think about your pool and just have it handled, that costs a little more, and the company doing it should carry a contractor's license, certifications from the relevant pool organizations, and technicians who know what carbonate alkalinity is.

Not long, when everything's working right. A weekly visit covers netting the surface, brushing walls and steps, checking the equipment, and testing and adjusting the water. None of that is complicated. It's just something done often enough to do quickly. When there's a problem (equipment acting up, chemistry that's drifted, an early algae bloom) the visit takes longer, because that's when the real work starts.

A homeowner servicing their own pool well typically spends thirty to forty-five minutes on it. We spend a little less time than that on the mechanical cleaning and a little more on the preventative side: proper water chemistry and confirming the equipment is running the way it should.

Most of our technicians have serviced a pool ten thousand times or more by now. Do anything that often, and you get fast. More importantly, you get good at spotting what's slightly off before it becomes a real problem.

It depends. With chemistry held in balance, filters cleaned on schedule, and equipment serviced per the manuals, the following are reasonable expectations. How hard the equipment is run and how many hours a day it cycles can shift those numbers either direction.

Pumps, ten to fifteen years. Filters, fifteen years or more, with internals replaced or rebuilt on occasion. Salt cells, around five years. Gas heaters, fifteen to twenty-five years. Plaster, ten to fifteen years. Pebble surfaces, twenty or more.

Hard water and unbalanced chemistry shorten every one of those numbers. We've seen heaters fail at two years and salt cells at six months, almost always because the water had been running scaling or aggressive for a long time before anyone noticed.

For a typical residential pool, the short list is: a sanitizer (chlorine in some form), a pH adjuster (muriatic acid most often, sodium bicarbonate going the other direction), a stabilizer (cyanuric acid) to keep chlorine from burning off in the sun, and a calcium adjuster only if your fill water is unusually soft. In San Diego the opposite is the issue, so calcium adjusters are rarely needed.

Beyond that, a good weekly service adds enzymes to break down body oils and lotions, and a phosphate remover to starve algae of its food source.

We don't endorse brands, and we won't send you to a specific store. The product matters less than the dose, and the dose depends on numbers you can't read off a test strip. That's the harder problem.

Eventually, yes. Total dissolved solids and cyanuric acid build up over years and can't be removed by any other means. The common recommendation in San Diego is to drain and refill every five to ten years, depending on use, rainfall, and how hard the local water runs.

That schedule comes up faster than people expect because our tap water averages around 275 ppm calcium hardness. Every time water evaporates, the calcium stays behind, so the pool quietly drifts toward scaling chemistry whether anyone is watching or not.

An alternative to draining is reverse osmosis treatment, which removes the dissolved solids while keeping the water itself. It costs more than a fresh fill but uses far less water, which matters in drought years.

One last thing: in San Diego, draining to the storm drain is regulated. Water has to be dechlorinated, pH-adjusted, and free of algae before it leaves your property. A good service handles that for you.