Sigh, I've self educated myself on this pool and it's care since buying the house at the end of last November. The pool was covered all of winter with a badly torn pool cover we were afraid to remove until about the last week in February only because I had to find out what kind of mess to expect.

Fortunately the previous owner is a chemist and told me he would shock the pool the best way he knew how and that would mean using an extra strong shock formulation containing mercury.

Well that worked I guess because not one hint of algae but we had to fish out a lot of leaves at the deep end corner leaving it a bit stained. After that I've pretty much got it looking pretty damn good. I do something with the pool daily and we've spent lots of money on chemicals and supplies and yet have been in the pool a grand total of two times.

I've got THREE test kits. Two are strip based and one is the traditional, time consuming, hard to read chemical based kit (pool master basic 5). I use the chemical kit to cross check the strips in Minority Report style just to be sure what I'm seeing is sane. I'm fairly certain I'm getting lucid results for the 5 standard metrics.

Exotic stuff no. For instance CYA is not striking a chord with me. I work with two folks that used to do pool maintenance for a living and other then suggesting the clear spots floating on the surface of the water are a result of low hardness they have no idea what I'm looking at.

Happy to do yet another test kit but a kit the gives me colors to look at that are so close to looking the same is worthless to me. The chemical kit I have is like guess work because the clear pinks and yellows are so close you never feel confident you are reading it right. The strips at least give better discrete colors but I'm sure better kits are out there.

Happy to contribute to your forum if that's what it takes. I would have preferred to know it is a fee for service site before I did that. I've keyed in complete and valid information on who I am and that I'm not a spammer but I'm finding the approach taken for 'new members' both obtuse and, seriously just being frank and not meaning to offend, the new member process is a tad on the passive aggressive side. After doing everything I needed to do to get an 'account' (such as it is) there is really nothing I can do but reply to your response and visit links to pay or buy something.

I'll consider another kit and find out what CYA means as a pool care acronym I suppose. It's just this exchange has not been helpful and I had high hopes it would be.

Thanks for the response. Spending money here might be a good thing to do. Just not sure at this point.

Justin