Quote Originally Posted by mariner09

So far, it's clear and the kids love it. We went to a health club last summer for swim certification and they hated the chlorine in that pool.
I have not used Baquacil so I can't give you any first hand experience, just some general comments. How good a chlorine pool is depends on how well it is maintained. In a public pool with high usage, there will like be a lot of "used up" chlorine called combined chlorine or chloramines which cause the chlorine smell, eye irritation etc. If the pH is not in the right range that will also cause problems. It is much harder to maintain a public pool than your own pool.

I would say for now, if it works, don't fix it. If the Baquacil is working for you and you don't have any problems with it then continue on but read up on the other threads here so that if things start to go south, you know what to do and what to expect. It only takes 3 or 4 days to convert to chlorine if you should decide to do so at some point.

The general consensus here is that Baquacil is considerably more expensive than chlorine but I can't give you numbers. A co-worker of mine uses Baquacil because his son has an allergy to chlorine so he had no choice. He said it took him about 4 years to get a good handle on how to keep his pool in balance. He also confirmed that it was a more expensive route. Chlorine is cheap and easy. I would say that a ballpark estimate per month for a chlorine pool is $50.00 or less and that would include the one-time purchases of stabilizer etc. It took me less than a month of reading through the material on this website (and the poolsolutions site) to keep a chlorine pool in balance.

Peter