The South Tempe pool owner’s field guide

After a dust storm, resist the urge to vacuum first. Big debris goes out by net, then brush the walls and steps so the dust in the water column can be caught by the filter. Run the pump and filter continuously for 24 hours, then shock — chlorine fights dirt before it fights algae, so chlorine added to a filthy pool is half wasted.

Check the skimmer and pump baskets the next morning; a single storm can pack them twice. If the water went from cloudy to green within a day or two, the storm seeded algae faster than your chlorine could respond — that’s the point where a couple of professional visits cost less than two weeks of guess-and-dump chemistry.

Every gallon that evaporates leaves its calcium behind, and in a Tempe summer your pool evaporates a lot of gallons. Calcium hardness climbs all year until it shows up as white crust on the tile line, scale inside salt cells and heaters, and plaster that feels like sandpaper.

Chemistry can slow scale but not reverse the math: eventually the fix is a partial or full drain and refill — for most pools here, roughly every two to three summers. Two cautions: never drain a pool in midsummer heat (plaster can crack, and in high-groundwater spots a pool can literally lift), and if the tile already has heavy buildup, a bead-blast cleaning while the pool is low is the moment to do it.

Trichlor tablets — the ones in every floating dispenser — are about half cyanuric acid (CYA), a stabilizer that protects chlorine from sunlight. Some stabilizer is essential in Arizona. But CYA never leaves the water; every tab raises it, and somewhere past ~100 ppm it starts handcuffing your chlorine entirely. The pool reads “fine” on a test strip and still turns green.

The only real fix is dilution — a partial drain and refill — and then managing how much stabilized chlorine goes in afterward. This is the single most common thing we find behind “I’ve dumped $200 of chemicals in and it’s still green.”

Heat, sun, and swimmers can burn through chlorine in a day or two at the peak of summer. Water needs to turn over more often too: figure roughly 8–10 hours of pump time a day June through September, and 4–6 in winter. If you have a salt system, expect to raise its output percentage in summer and watch the cell for scale — see the hard-water section above.

Running a single-speed pump 10 hours a day is real money, which is why a variable-speed pump is the one upgrade we recommend without hesitation — longer runtimes at low speed filter better and still cut the power bill, and SRP/APS rebates frequently sweeten it.

Palo verde bloom is beautiful and absolutely relentless — millions of tiny yellow flowers that mat the surface, slip past the skimmer, and sink. During bloom weeks, empty baskets every day or two and net the surface before the flowers waterlog. Mesquite pods follow in early summer, olive trees drop through fall, and any storm shakes loose whatever the trees were saving up.

Debris that sits on the bottom stains plaster and feeds algae. The difference between a pool that survives May and one that doesn’t is honestly just frequency — which is most of why weekly service exists.

A pool that just turned — green tint, floor still visible — almost always recovers with staged shock, daily brushing, and a mid-process filter clean over one to two weeks. A pool that’s been black-lagoon status for months, with CYA through the roof and a winter of debris rotting on the bottom, can cost more in chemicals and filter wear than a drain, chlorine wash, and refill.

We quote both paths when it’s close. Either way, the filter is the unsung casualty of a green pool — plan on cleaning it during the recovery and again after, or the pool will re-cloud the week you think you’ve won.

Cartridge filters here want a real teardown cleaning about every four to six months — Arizona dust is not a “rinse it when you remember” climate. Sand filters want a sand change around the five-year mark. A pump that’s started screeching has weeks-to-months of bearing life left, and catching it then means a seal-and-bearing job instead of a motor.

The cheapest insurance is somebody laying eyes on the pad every week: listening to the pump, glancing at filter pressure, looking for the wet spot that wasn’t there last Tuesday. That’s built into every weekly visit we make.

Do yourself, happily: netting, brushing, emptying baskets, watching your test numbers, rinsing a cartridge between deep cleans. Worth a call: anything electrical, anything that involves opening a pressurized filter you haven’t opened before, acid washes, drains (hydrostatic valves are unforgiving), green pools past the “tint” stage, and any chemistry mystery that’s survived two weekends of your best effort.

And if you just want all of it off your plate for a flat monthly rate — that’s the business we’re in.