Advice

Jobs written out in the sequence they are done

Each page walks one job from the first move to the final check, and marks the step that everything after it depends on. A product is named only where the job genuinely needs one — and more than one of these ends by telling you to buy nothing, because levelling the ground changes more than any purchase could. Where the answer depends on your own soil, your own supply or a limit the maker sets, the page hands over to the documentation instead of paraphrasing it.

Getting started

The first purchases that earn their place beside a new pool, and the order to make them in.

Where to begin, which depends on whether the water is in yet Three starting points, depending on where you are: no pool yet, a pool and no idea what its water is doing, or a pool that worked last year and does not now. This page says which of the others to read, and what all of them have in common.

A first pool

Working from the ground upwards: what has to be level, what goes underneath, and what can wait until next season.

A first pool, in the order each step commits the next Two of the steps below are irreversible once the pool is full, and neither of them is a purchase. Everything else on this page can be changed later at the price of an afternoon — telling the two groups apart is nearly the whole job.

Choosing filtration

Matching a flow rate to a volume, a media to a filter, and a cartridge type to the years you will be buying it.

Choosing filtration, which is a decision about the next ten summers A filter is bought once and fed for a decade. The figure on the box is a flow rate at zero head; the figure that decides the purchase is what that flow does against your pool’s own volume, and what the medium costs each time it is replaced.

Treating the water

Testing before dosing, the order the figures are read in, and the products that must never meet each other.

Treating the water, read as products rather than as prescriptions This page sets out what each family of product is, what figure makes it comparable with the tub beside it, and how the shelves relate. It does not say what to put in your pool — no published figure supports that sentence, and the reason is worth reading once.

Heating a pool

What a cover saves before anything is bought, and what each kind of heater actually costs to run.

Heating a pool, where the cheapest thing on the list is a cover Most of the heat a pool loses leaves through its surface overnight. That single published behaviour is why this page starts with a cover and only then reaches the machines — and why the cheapest item here changes more than the dearest one.

Buying

How to read a pool listing: which figures are specifications, which are adjectives, and which are neither.

Reading a listing, starting with what it left out Every headline on this shelf is a real measurement taken under conditions the listing rarely states. This page goes through the six that recur, says what each one omits, and names the one situation a comparison cannot rescue: a figure nobody published at all.

Closing & reopening

Lowering rather than emptying, what to dose in October, and the order to bring a pool back in April.

Closing and reopening, two jobs that decide how the next season starts A pool that reopens green in April was closed badly in October. The two jobs are one job with six months in between, and the published figures that matter — snow load, residual depth, stated coverage — all belong to the first half.