1. Several tabs will only add 5 - 10 ppm CYA. Overall that effect is small compared to the algae issue.

2. There are other possible causes of 'mustard' looking surfaces, but combined with green backwash, it's a pretty positive indication of actual algae. It ALSO can indicate an incipient algae bloom.

3. The problem with low PO4 is that it has to be maintained. Unless you have a bad leak, it shouldn't be that hard with only 500 ppb in the fill water. But it's an ongoing issue, which is the reason pool stores have loved it. Now that more generic forms of PO4 remover are available, and profit margins are declining, their enthusiasm will wane.

4. The issue of really high chlorine levels with liners is unresolved. Many people have no problem. The high levels of CYA associated with high levels of chlorine reduced the bleaching effect. We *suspect* that it will only rarely be a problem, but we don't know that, and testing it is troublesome.

5. Dunno if you were serious or not about "feeling dirty". Personally, I've always liked solving problems, especially when the solution could help other people.

6. My track record is not bad: pretty much every idea* that's part of the overall "BBB method" was my idea. Chem_Geek as validated those ideas analytically in a way I couldn't, and has refined the details. And a bazillion pool owners here and at TFP have tested and proven them empirically. But the ideas were mine.

But . . . I tend to solve problems iteratively: try something, look at the results, make changes, and try again. It took me 9-10 complete iterations to finally come up with a commercial chemical feed system that could be maintained with periodic care on reasonable intervals, rather than unscheduled emergency 'intervention'. (I *still* need to market that!)

Of course, if you're present during the iterations . . . it can get a bit frustrating. I try to remind myself, when speaking to owners and managers, not to respond to failures that expose a weakness with, "Wow that's great! I know how to fix that!". Their enthusiasm for those 'successful failures' tends to be a hair less than mine.


* I should add, I didn't come up with this stuff from nothing. A lot of it was field experience, but I talked to a LOT of people from whom I learned a LOT:. senior engineer Bud Frederick at PacFab (now, Pentair); Dave Knoop and others at HTH/Arch; an owner/chemist at a local regional chemical company (Farm and Industrial) supplying the carpet businesses in Dalton, GA; Jock Hamilton, at United Chemical, who finally refused to talk to me, because he kept 'leaking' bits he didn't mean to say; a number of near-retirement chemists and engineers at various large chemical companies, including Monsanto, fabric designers at Speedo, hair treatment chemists at Clairol, and more.

Of course, I had to sort through some mis-direction from from some very astute and smart people at BioLab and Great Lakes Bio.

So a lot of what I did was something I seem to have a gift for: not necessarily discovering anything that's actually new, but gathering and putting together bits of info from here, there and yon, into a newly functional whole. For a long time, I couldn't understand why no one else had seen these things: after all, the data was there. But apparently I combined several characteristics into a statistically novel result: that 'gift'; plus being endlessly curious about almost everything, and finally being enough of a 'jerk' that I was unbothered by publishing stuff that made many people, including some very nice people, look utterly stupid. It's not a socially attractive mix: I'm very, very blessed that my wife and sons still like me.