Dear Ben,

Thank you for your reply with clarification. I was fooled by that article - it did not seem bogus to me when I first read it. On closer inspection, I see that you are correct and it is a product ad masquerading as an impartial review. I've been all over the internet researching and trying to learn as much as I can as fast as I can and that one tricked me. You see, we had a Chlormatic II SWCG that just kept on working year after year, while our local pool service came out once a week to do the other chemical adjustments to our in-ground, 10k gallon pool. He said our SWCG (which they installed some 7 or 8 years ago) was the only one they knew of that was still working. Then he stopped coming 1 per week, down to every other week, and as you'd likely predict, the pool got pretty messed up - very green water, then long-lasting bubbles and "Don't go swimming in it until tomorrow since I put in all the chemicals" etc etc. Then the SWCG failed and so the pool guy left us a gallon of 'chlorine' in a generic, unlableled white bottle to "Dump in the pool in 3 days."

So we've said enough of this and started researching, beginning with looking into getting a new SWCG, since Chlormatic was bought out and the parts are getting pretty hard to get, and more expensive than a new, different brand of SWCG. All this research led us to this forum and the BBB method, but also to all the many, many websites offering ionizers (Cu-AG etc) and UV sanitizers and ozonators. After some phone calls to some of these places, it is clear that they are indeed pretty bogus - one ionizer place said they wouldn't put a pdf of their manual online because "the competition would steal our ideas."

All of this has been very revealing indeed. I think our pool problems were just waiting to happen, since now I think that there is just no substitute for daily testing and daily adjustment. Doing this once per week, and for sure every other week, will just not ever work and will inevitably lead to problems. And at this point, since we're both going to learn how to do this ourselves, and do it daily, the benefits of a SWCG seem pretty minimal. Instead, we'll put our money into a shed near the pool with the chemicals and test kit we'll need, and maybe a pool vacuum to make it easier/faster to get out all the leaves that are going to fall into the pool in October. We haven't yet started researching pool vacuums, so we don't know how much better/faster they'll be than our long handled basket scoop-net - but since we are in our 60's, we'll probably need to go with solutions that are not too strenuous.

All the urgency to get this right as soon as possible is because we have grandkids coming over, other guests this weekend, and the pool guy still hasn't shown up and so we need to start taking care of our pool ourselves now!

Lastly, we keep trying to update our profile on this forum by clicking on "My Profile." But we always get the same error message:

"You are not logged in or you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons:

You are not logged in. Fill in the form at the bottom of this page and try again.
You may not have sufficient privileges to access this page. Are you trying to edit someone else's post, access administrative features or some other privileged system?
If you are trying to post, the administrator may have disabled your account, or it may be awaiting activation."



I'd really like to update our signature, put in our location (Northern California) and so on - can you please look into this or send it on to the right administrator?

Thanks,

Jill and Jon