Friday, May 23, 2008

Ecosmarte Pool

We bought a house with a pool. I did not want a pool. I did not want to deal with the headache of maintenance and I certainly didn't want my family in chlorine. But we fell in love with the house and my husband really felt strongly about a pool. So here we are!

For the first month or so, I had analysis paralysis. I normally don't get that, but I needed the chlorine system replace and there is not a lot of information on alternative systems. One reference I found by digging around on Dr. Mercola's website stuck with me. It was about Ecosmart Pools. It was wrong, actually! It said that it these were just another salt system, which is totally false! I finally called the company and got a quote on the system and it was a heck of a lot of money. So more spinning my wheels here.

It is important to me to live our lives as toxin free as possible. This definitely fit in with my values, but it meant giving up a lot! Was it worth it? As our pool turned to pea soup before our very eyes, I decided it was.

Once we got everything installed and started doing the testing, things did start to turn around. It took a few weeks and regular phone calls for hand holding to their toll free number. At some point, it all started to make sense and I didn't need to call anymore! It is not a huge headache!

I don't have a clue how it works. Something to do with copper. They did have us buy a sand/glass filter. The old filter didn't actually seem to do anything so this was just as well. We were skimming leaves out at least daily. When we turned this thing on, all the leaves wound up in the skimmer and all we had to do was dump it.

We did have to deal with algae and we may need to again. We are not completely chemical free but the times we will have to add anything to adjust the water going forward will be very rare.

We had a leak recently. Out of the blue, the water was disappearing at an alarming rate! My daughter suddenly remembered that she'd pulled something off the bottom of the pool. Ahah! It had been patched! We repatched the hole - thank goodness it was clearly visible - and refilled the pool. And now I am all itchy! The chlorinated water definitely messed with my skin! I can't wait for all that to be gone and back to our nice clean water!

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