PoolsideVerdict covers what a private pool is built from and what it goes through: frame and steel wall pools, domes and roofs; sand and cartridge filtration, pumps, drain pumps, multiport valves, skimmers and inlets; heat pumps, heaters, solar collectors and solar showers; robots, handheld vacuums, nets, brushes and poles; salt chlorinators, testers and strips — then the liners, covers, cartridges, sand and glass, tablets, granules, bromine, active oxygen, algaecide, flocculant, pH products and salt bought every season after. That is 46 categories across five language editions. It is a small independent editorial project, not a shop, not a manufacturer and not a dealer group.
The subject is equipment a person buys for themselves and installs themselves, in a garden or on a terrace. Several neighbouring subjects belong to sister sites: aquariums and their filtration; taps, toilets and bathroom fittings; pressure washers and steam cleaners; portable power stations and solar panels. A page here may name one of those as a published feature of a product without recommending which to buy. Left out entirely: public pool regulation, water analysis as a service, and anything presented as advice on whether water is fit to swim in. What remains is equipment chosen on the figures a manufacturer puts in writing.
One distinction shapes every page on this site, so it belongs at the top and not in a footnote. A published volume is the maker’s statement about a shape, not the water a pool will hold. When a pool is listed at 3 800 litres, that figure is quoted at roughly 90 % of wall height — where the water sits once a skimmer is fitted — and the gap is freeboard, not an error. It matters because every dose on this site is calculated against the volume the pool actually holds, and two pools quoting the same litres are not the same pool. The same discipline governs a flow rate measured at zero head and a COP quoted without the temperature it was measured at.
There is one route by which a figure gets onto these pages, and no other: copied out from the manufacturer or the standards body that published it, credited where it is used, and left in whatever unit that source chose. Three things follow from that. A flow rate and the way it is expressed are reproduced as declared, and where a maker publishes a litres-per-hour figure without saying at what head, the page says that too. A COP is reported together with the air and water temperature it was measured at, because the number means opposite things at 26 °C and at 15 °C. And nothing here — no cover, no ladder, no chlorinator — is described as making anything safe: we report what the maker publishes, and hand the rest to the maker’s own instructions, to the safety data sheet and to the local rules.
How PoolsideVerdict is paid for
Every "Check price" button on the site is an affiliate link to Amazon, and a purchase made after clicking one earns us a commission. The heat pump, the sand filter or the tub of tablets costs you the same either way.
An incentive is only worth disclosing if its direction is disclosed with it. Amazon pays a share of the sale, so a heat pump earns us many times what a packet of test strips does. Three things stand in the way of that arithmetic reaching the pages:
- No entry has ever climbed because it pays better. Commission plays no part in ordering a family. Nobody here checks which reference earns most, and families run from the modest upward. When the cheapest thing on the shelf is the right answer — and for a first season it usually is — that is where the page puts it.
- What a thing costs and what it changes are two different scales. Some of the firmest recommendations here are among the cheapest things on the site: a second filter cartridge so the first can dry between runs, a ground cloth under a frame pool instead of a thicker liner, a bag of salt at the right purity rather than the nearest one. A cartridge rinsed every fortnight outlasts two that were not.
- Nothing here has ever been for sale. Not a place in a family, not a mention, not a warmer adjective. No fee, no loaned machine, no arrangement of any kind. If that ever changed, the page it touched would say so in its own running text, where a reader would actually meet it.
What this site refuses to become
No page here is sponsored. No family is a "top ten" stitched together from other people’s reviews. No ordering reflects what a reference pays, how well a link converts, or what a warehouse happens to be holding in May.
Nor is anything recommended on the strength of its specification sheet. A big figure makes persuasive copy and poor advice, and a page built around the largest number on the box ends up recommending the dearest thing in the family every time. Every verdict shows its grounds: what the manufacturer published, what a named standard defines where one is cited, and what owners report after a season or two. Where a judgement leans mostly on one of the three, the page says which.
And there is one recommendation this site will never make, because published figures cannot support it: what your water needs today. A dose per cubic metre is a property of a product; what a particular pool requires depends on bathers, sunlight, rainfall and what is already dissolved in it, and none of that is printed on any box. Pages here report what a maker publishes, and say plainly where the published figure stops being enough.
Corrections
Prices shift, references are withdrawn, standards get revised, and makers change a gasket, an impeller or a supplied cartridge without altering the model name. If something on this site is wrong, write and say so: it is corrected, and the correction is recorded. Every page shows the date it was last reviewed.
Last reviewed 21 September 2026