Blogging has helped to democratize the way we get information and learn new things. I thought this week’s fun challenge from one of my favorite photographers, Tina at Travels And Trifles , would offer 2 things beneficial to readers throughout this platform. One of these topics is – of course – photography and the other topic is, what I hope, can be of use to at least someone here.
As you all know, I’m helping my neighbor clean his pool so his grandkids can visit, swim, and essentially have all they need in the house without having to go out. Normally, this process takes 1 week or 2,at most. However, because of factors from last year clearing the pool was a Herculean effort.
I thought that 3 days of focused leaf shuffling would be enough before treating the water with chlorine.
The picture below shows where you want to be after clearing leaves. You see the contrast between the leaves and where there aren’t leaves. You’re on schedule. Perfect. You can start treating the water.
However, after 2 chlorine shocks we noticed the water was not clearing, and furthermore, it was REALLY cloudy. We could have sworn that most of the leaves were already out of the basin. Such was not the case. A quick test vacuum of the basin revealed that there was a layer of leaves compacted into the bottom of the basin producing cloudy bacterial matter.
Vacuuming had to become a process between running the vacuum and taking the leaves out of the pipe valves that clogged the waterways.
Days went by with us having to do this repeatedly and even with subsequent chlorine dumps, the pool was simply not clearing up despite us truly having taken much of the leaves out. There where still a few stragglers, not enough for the pool to be this foggy. But it was proving to be very difficult and my neighbor and I were running into a time issue. This photo was after having practically made the water radioactive with chlorine.
Running into the last week of July, my neighbor had to make a decision. Either hire out pool people to figure out the situation, or scuttle the idea of having the pool available for the summer for his grandkids. They have a house minutes away in the Jersey shore so it wasn’t like they would suffer but I know they preferred to have their grandchildren there as the neighborhood is quieter and if the grandkids had their friends in tow, they could also have the benefit of a walled system of sorts. Everyone’s parents would be less stressed.
I felt bad for my neighbor. I know pool maintenance is expensive and in peak season, the contractors are going to be charging top dollar for even the most mundane of tasks – and my neighbor was running out of budget. However, in my years of pool maintenance, I have never seen anything like this and I knew that pool companies would take advantage of the situation. We were getting desperate.
A final idea came to me when I went over to their house for dinner. With my neighbor running out of budget money, he and his wife offered to make me dinners in lieu of cash (I’m a mercenary for full course meals, what can I say lol). Anyway, I explained this idea to my neighbor. It was cheap but it was probably the last thing we could bank on before officially cancelling the pool season.
In the library of pool cleaning products, there exists a liquid chemical clinically called flocculant. In theory, once it’s put into the pool water, it will atomically bond and collect with the micro matter floating around in the pool that give it its cloudy appearance. The bonded material will become heavier than the water itself and settle, clumped, into the bottom of the basin. It also goes by the informal names of “drop-out” and “clarifier”. The terms are used interchangeably but I am 100% sure that one is not like the other. One of those colloquialisms refers to a less stringent bonding agent, just not sure which one but you’ll have to go to a pool expert to check if you need to.
Now, I have never used a product like this and I always thought it to be a gimmick. After all, I have cleared pools using nothing but a combination of water draining and chlorine (liquid chlorine, powdered chlorine and chlorine tablets). Furthermore, I’m not introducing a product into pool water that sounds like the word flatulence 😂.
But this was an extreme case so I instructed my neighbor to order the stuff and when it arrived we promptly poured it into the pool. All there was left to do was wait for 48 hours.
The day after 2 nights, my neighbor called me at 10 in the morning telling me to come to the house quickly. At this point, I didn’t know what to expect. After all the stuff we did to the water, I figure we had turned it into blood.
However, upon arrival I was greeted by a very welcome sight. The flocculant not only worked, but worked STUNNINGLY well. The swimming pool had cleared. This was the same spot of the other photo above where the water had a bright turquoise appearance. In order to deem a pool clean and swimmable, you have to be able to see the returns at the bottom and they have to be as clear as possible. Anything less, the pool cannot be used as the water is not sanitary. If you look, you can see thick gray swirly lines at the bottom of the basin. That is ALL of the dead bacteria matter that was floating around causing the water cloudiness, clumped together, waiting to be vacuumed out of the pool (you have to vacuum this stuff out to the ground, not into the pool’s filter or else you’ll be back to square one).
I’m happy to report that as of this past Monday, I could hear the familiar sounds of water splashing from cannonball jumps and weird jumping poses off of diving boards. My neighbor’s grandkids are happy.
Summer of 2025 – at least the remainder of it – was salvaged.
And it was all thanks to a product that, prior to this situation, I always dismissed as an additional expense. It would have been a different August had I not stepped outside of my comfort zone and challenged what I thought I knew about swimming pool maintenance. Like the title in Tina’s challenge, “You Live And Learn”!
Thank you Flatulence – oh sorry! I mean – Flocculant 😂
“Mike, should we get only 1 bottle?”
“Nah, at this point, we’ve got nothing to lose if we pour 2 into the pool.”, I replied. 😁
I hope you enjoyed the photos as much as I enjoyed participating in Tina’s challenge. I encourage everyone to visit the comments section of her post to view other talented photographers that participated!
Have a great weekend, y’all!
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