Regular maintenance

[SC Team Member]

After investing in a pool, with the available technology today it would be wise to go that tiny little bit extra and include a saltwater chlorinator and Zelbrite (or similar) filter media. It will prevent tedious problems which always occur sooner or later either with your water or your 'maintenance' people. Some pool owners actually pay pool firms (this is a Pattaya tradition) to carry out 'regular maintenance'. This is a good idea if you are absent from your home for long periods. So this service is perfectly ok for something that takes five minutes every four or five days and costs a thousand baht or so a month and you don't want the hassle of this incredibly easy task yourself. But if the pool company has got 30 cleaning contracts it's worth considering just who or what, is being cleaned out. . Maintenance means trawling the surface every morning for five minutes with a net to remove any leaves, insects, dead frogs, dead dogs, dead cats, dead rats, and dead anything else which has fallen in overnight. It means bending down to the water every three or four days to scoop up a little water into a plastic double test tube, putting a couple of drops of test liquid in each tube and holding it up to the light to check its colour. If the colour doesn't match the colours on the scale, one adds a couple of tablets of solid chlorine to the pool water. And that's about it,but you can see that once your pool is built and filled, the work does not stop there.

One more warning about Pattaya pool maintenance companies: on 29 July this year (2007) it was discovered that yet another Pattaya pool maintenance firm was taking a monthly fee for a scam. A second opinion regarding the filthy water was called in from SiamConsulting who discovered that the chlorine level was completely zero and there was up to a milimeter of accumulated muck on the floor. The owner could not see the muck because the water was so cloudy. The pool maintenance firm always claimed that this is a perfectly normal condition! The maintenance operator was always careful to schedule his visits when the owners were absent, and to obtain a signature from the maid.
A further pool was recently repaired where all the Underwater Lights had broken, many tiles had come loose, and one pump seized, after only 2 years of operation. All constructed and installed by a well known firm of notoriously high prices, and, unfortunately, substandard materials and craftsmanship.

For a detailed breakdown of maintenance costssee the Pool Maintenance Costs.

See http://www.baracuda.com/ , these are the world's leading pool maintenance products, also made in the land of Koalas. Be aware that they cost exactly double their AU$ price in the UK, and in view of the low cost of labour in Thailand, manual cleaning is highly recommended and it gives somebody a job.