Nor have I.
I may have an above ground pool installed at the farm for the grand kids. Don't now how they differ as far as maintaining vs in ground.
I could just get the grand kids a couple of cows and chickens, and see if they even notice there's no pool LOL
Our above ground has been a piece of cake to maintain. Don't get me wrong, we've had some issues. For example...
Our oldest kid developed a skin sensitivity reaction to chlorine. We switched to Baquacil and used that for probably 10 years. While it worked great, it was extremely expensive and we usually had two pink algae outbreaks every year, where the only solution was to dump $$$$ chemicals in it. And, towards the end of each summer, the water would start tasting metallic. Fall drain down and spring re-fills is what I think was the only reason it worked as well as it did. I'd never recommend it again to anyone unless they had a situation like our kid with the skin reaction.
Kid toughened up over the years, and when we went back to Chlorine, I also converted to salt water. Will never do anything else. It's great!
The salt concentration in our pool is about 3500 parts per million, about equal to the amount in human tears. So you can open your eyes in a salt water pool and feel absolutely nothing uncomfortable. That's about 10X less than the amount of salt in sea water, which is about 35,000ppm. There's so little salt, the EPA considers it fresh water. You can taste it a bit in the water. For that matter, I stopped using test strip for salt levels and just keep adding salt until it tastes good in the spring! :licking:
Its soft water. So your hair (not my hair, I'm mostly bald) is nice and it doesn't effect clothing/swimming suits badly, either. When you get out and dry off, your skin (and mine, too) is nice and soft.
The salt water chlorine generator uses electric current to convert the salt into hypochlorous acid (HClO) and sodium hypochlorite (NaClO). Notice the sodium hypochlorite.... that's liquid bleach.
The nice thing is, when it breaks down, it turns back into salt. Salt can't evaporate. Therefore, you don't have to add chlorine, it just keeps converting to chlorine and back to salt.
But you do have to keep your CYA levels correct or you can overwork your SWG (salt water generator), and you have to add muriatic acid to control your alkalinity once in a while. That's $5 per gallon and I use maybe 2-3 per summer. And the SWG uses electricity, so you have to pay for that. However, for us, at least, the pluses outweigh the minuses, in that I rarely adjust my chemistry, I can go on vacation for a week or two and come home and the pool isn't a swamp. All I do is dip my test strip once or twice a week and check, and add my weekly dose of algaecide.
