I remember the first time we went to the pool store for water testing. This was a few years ago. We handed her our jar of water, and she simply stuck a test strip in, looked at it, then said 'your numbers are fine' !! I couldn't believe it!

The other pool place here in town did it with a test strip, then used some computer program to analize. When our alk was high, the program suggested adding 15+ gallons of muriatic acid! I didn't do that needless to say.