3 hours ago
6
I’ll call him Bruce. He’s any of the 3.1 million Australians living in a house with a pool or spa. Over my long career in hardware, listening to the woes of so many Bruces, I’ve discovered that owning a pool is not all fun and bubbles at cocktail hour.
In the beginning, it wasn’t so bad. On first viewing his bayside property, Bruce already believed the agent’s claim that by far the most desirable addition to any home is a pool. It did look nice, glistening blue in the back yard. And weren’t the kids rapt. But now, years later, Bruce isn’t.
Today, on yet another nippy Melbourne morning, he’s attempting to wake the pool from its long winter snooze in readiness for the interminably heel-dragging arrival of southern Australia’s viable pool season. This preparation process can bring unpleasant surprises, especially when, like so many pool owners, Bruce has been inactive too.
Even in winter, a diligent pool owner should regularly monitor its vital signs, as if a large, delicate, expensive pet lurks in a hole in the back yard. It’s a creature that must be kept under constant chemical constraint, or it risks becoming more liability than asset. “Fetid back yard swamp” just doesn’t wash in a real estate blurb.
Bruce hasn’t been in his pool for months, and rolling back the disintegrating blanket reveals its water has an alarming green tinge. That means it’s going to need a mega-hit of the expensive white powder it’s addicted to. He knows he shouldn’t put too much in – but isn’t it better to be safe than sorry? Ever since Bruce read about pool party guests infected with fatal brain-eating amoeba (or was it amoebic dysentery?), he’s always overdosed his pool, just in case.
Not that he’s had guests in bathers recently. Bruce’s wrinkled friends are well beyond the age for pool parties now. Besides, he’s always harboured a certain resentment at watching people frolic in his pool, leaving him the next day, hungover in the glare, scooping out leaves from those trees his greenie neighbours won’t remove. The leaves that somehow manage to escape his $2,000 robot vacuum cleaner, the one that makes a groaning noise the neighbours keep complaining about.
It wasn’t so bad when the kids were young, but then they turned into teenagers and kept inviting hordes of friends over when he was overseas. Then he’d return to a wince-inducing power bill, a blocked pump and a ring of God-knows-what around the spa.
Now, despite the solar heating, checking the pool’s temperature shows it’s still too cold for a dip. And the test kit indicates its acid level is haywire again too. It’s a chemical balancing act Bruce has never managed to get his head around: the relationship between temperature, pH and all those other substances the pool needs to maintain its health, or rather its sterility and the health of the people who use it. But hiring someone else to maintain it instead would mean even more expense. He’ll just have to take a sample down to the hardware store.
That’s where I come in. I’m a kind of pool doctor/drug dealer. I sell the chemicals so his pool can get its fix. Lots of chemicals. How many? On the shelves of the hardware store where I work we stock 37 different pool treatment options (as well as robot suction cleaners, extendable leaf scoops and floating drink trays).
Chlorine is our bulk seller, of course, in liquid or granular form. The great thing about chlorine – for sales – is that it readily degrades, at rates dependent on temperature, UV and acidity, by turning into toxic hydrogen chloride gas. Though my analysis of his sample shows his pool needs severe chemical shock treatment, I’ll advise Bruce to go easy, as too much chlorine risks turning blond and silver hair a shade of chartreuse, or even causing someone excessive epidermal desquamation. He’d be even less popular then.
So I’ll recommend Bruce adds soda ash to increase his pool’s pH, hydrochloric acid if he goes too far, calcium increaser to avoid metal corrosion and grout degradation, clarifier to treat the haze caused by excessive calcium levels, a four-step phosphate removal process to starve its microbial freeloaders (so hopefully he won’t have to drain the thing) then a solid dose of algaecide featuring words like “Blast” or “Attack” to massacre even the most “stubborn” algae species. Apart from green algae there’s also mustard and the dreaded black spot varieties.
Then he’ll need a dose of liquid floc to transport the millions of successfully slaughtered microbes to the pump inlet; a filter cleaner for the resultant clog, and a black spot eliminator. And a stain remover, Bruce? For that awful spa ring? Add a filter degreaser since humans are greasy creatures and … oh, Bruce, not the pump! (Don’t even start Bruce on pumps.) That means he’ll need a special spanner to dismantle it and find out what blocked the bloody thing this time. Another golf ball? Mallard duckling? G-string? Live snake? Whew. Poor Bruce. Who’d have a pool.
Really? You don’t have one? Lucky you.
