Welcome to my Swimming Pool Maintenance in the Sonoran Desert Blog. My name is Nick Owens and I have been in the swimming pool repair and maintenance business here in the Scottsdale and Phoenix areas since 1983. I am now retired from the business, however I am still interested in the field. It is my intent to explore all the facets of swimming pool ownership here in Arizona, and in particular the rather unique problems that occur with swimming pool ownership in the Sonoran Desert. Please note that all of this content is Copyrighted 2011 by Nick Owens and is not to be used in or by any other website except for small excerpts with a credit and link back to this blog.
The first topic that we need to discuss is that of swimming pool design. If you are a Arizona resident and an owner of a pool here, you already know of some of the problems that occur on a repeated basis: extremely high temperatures and high water evaporation rates, repeated trashing the pool by dust storms during the summer monsoon season, blooming of the pool into a green pond, seasonal overloading of the swimming pool, sometimes poor maintenance by professionals, repair problems, and the list can go on. As the years went by and my experience grew, I became convinced by my "in the field" observations of customers swimming pools that there sometimes are what I call "structural problems". Some pools just cannot be fixed without perhaps ripping the whole thing out and starting over.
I remember one lady in north Scottsdale who was nearly in tears because the pool was just too complex. The pool equipment was below the water line and the piping was a rats nest. The pool was one with an negative edge, and the water flowed over the side of the pool into a trough. The home was new and very expensive, and the pool was designed by an architect which explained a lot. As an example, because the filter, pump and most of the piping was below the pool's water line, every time she wanted to clean out the pump strainer basket she would have to turn two large valves to keep the water from squirting out of the pump, another problem was that the water (due to the extreme hardness of tap water here) had already deposited white calcium onto the waterfall area and to top it off the whole pool was controlled by a remote control system that was difficult to use, with a user manual written and printed overseas.. Unfortunately, I had to tell her that there was not much I could do for her....so optimal swimming pool design will be the first topic that we will explore.
