clarification

[alisonquilts]

Hi Ben,

No need to post this; I just want to clarify that I had no interest in building my own wood-burning heater, but was looking for reviews of the ones currently on the market, purpose-built for heating pools.

After I posted I found this http://www.poolspaforum.com/forum/?showtopic=19443 on another forum, and thought you might be interested.

Alison

[PoolDoc]

Thanks.

It largely confirms suspicions I had.

For what it's worth, I made the decision several years ago that I wasn't going to encourage what might be called 'hobbyist' posts, like the one you pointed out on poolspaforum.com. There's nothing wrong with that, per se, but my purpose with PoolSolutions, and later, PoolForum was to help people ENJOY their pool, rather than EXPERIMENT with it.

One of the first examples on the Internet of a "swimming pool as a giant science project" is this one: http://www.truetex.com/poolcontrol.htm which has been around almost as long as the forum. (If you take a look at it --interesting as it is -- be careful. There are some very serious and uncorrected chemistry errors in his analysis.)

Again, there's not a thing wrong with using a pool as a adult-sized chemistry or tinker-toy set. But mingling those posts in with posts from people who just want their pool to WORK, is a distraction. Plus, if I let myself, I tend to engage too much with sorts of problems, rather than with more mundane issues like 'how do I clean up my swamp?'.

It may be obvious (or not) that some of the most helpful posters over the years at PoolForum have at least some tendency to enjoy their pool as a science project -- and the forum has benefited greatly from that. But once they go as far as 'Kinch' did with his pool, or as far afield as home-built wood pool heaters, 99% of forum users are going to get lost or distracted.