What the water is telling you
Green, cloudy, itchy or scaled all point at different causes. Treating the symptom without the cause is how a pool ends up back in the same state a fortnight later.
Green water
Green means algae has got ahead of the chlorine. The colour is the easy part. Getting it back is chlorine held at the right level for long enough, the filter running far longer than usual, and brushing every surface so the dead algae lifts instead of settling. Anyone who tells you it is a one visit job is selling you a second visit.
What we work out first
- Whether the stabiliser level is locking the chlorine out, which is the usual hidden cause
- Whether the filter can actually clear the volume, or needs cleaning first
- How long the pump has really been running each day
- Whether it is algae at all, or metals or pollen colouring the water
For a pool that is too far gone to recover chemically, draining is sometimes the cheaper answer, and we will tell you if that is where you are.
Cloudy water
Cloudy is not dirty so much as full of particles too fine for the filter to catch. Usually it is a chemistry swing, a filter that has stopped filtering, or both. High pH and high calcium together will cloud a pool on their own, which is why adding more chlorine to a cloudy pool often changes nothing.
What we check
- Filter condition and pressure, and whether the media is spent
- pH and total alkalinity, which drive most cloudiness here
- Calcium hardness, high in a lot of Lee County fill water
- Run time, since a pool that does not turn over cannot clear
If the filter is the limit, no amount of chemical fixes it. We would rather tell you that than keep selling you clarifier.
Algae on the walls and steps
Green algae wipes away easily and comes back if the chlorine stays low. Mustard algae sits in shade, brushes off and settles somewhere else, and needs the whole surface treated at once. Black algae roots into plaster and is the one that genuinely takes repeated work. Knowing which one you have decides the whole approach.
What we look at
- Where it is growing, since shade and poor circulation tell you a lot
- Whether brushing removes it or it comes straight back
- Chlorine held over several days, not a single reading
- Dead spots where the returns are not reaching
Treating the circulation problem matters as much as the chemical, otherwise you are booking the same job again next month.
Stains and scale
Brown or grey staining is usually metal, often iron or copper that arrived with fill water or a corroding heater element. A white crust at the tile line is calcium scale, and that is hard water plus high pH. They look similar from the deck and they need opposite treatments, so guessing is expensive.
How we tell them apart
- Whether the mark sits on the surface or in it
- A spot test on a small area before anything is done pool wide
- Calcium hardness and pH history, not just today's reading
- Whether the source is the fill water, the equipment, or something that fell in
Scale at the tile line is also a warning about the heater and the salt cell, because the same water is doing the same thing inside them.
Water that stings eyes and smells of chlorine
The strong chlorine smell at a pool is not too much chlorine, it is the opposite. It is chloramines, the spent product of chlorine that has already done its work, and it builds when the free chlorine cannot keep up. Burning eyes is usually pH drifting away from where skin is comfortable rather than the chlorine level.
What actually fixes it
- Free chlorine against combined chlorine, measured separately
- pH brought back into range, which does most of the comfort work
- Stabiliser level, since too much makes chlorine sluggish
- Shocking properly rather than adding a little more each day
This one matters most on pools children use, and it is simple to put right once the cause is identified.
Rainy season and heavy use
An afternoon storm can drop the chlorine, move the pH and fill the pool with debris in under an hour. A weekend with a lot of swimmers does something similar. Neither is a fault, they are just the conditions here, and a pool that is tested on a schedule absorbs them without ever going green.
What we do differently through the season
- Test more closely through the summer months
- Watch stabiliser, which dilutes with rain and climbs with tablets
- Keep run times matched to the heat, not set once in winter
- Clear debris before it breaks down and feeds a bloom
Most of our green pool calls in August are pools nobody looked at in July. Ongoing care is cheaper than recovery.
