The green one.

This one started the way most of them do — a photo of green water and a message that said, roughly, "how bad is this?" Pretty bad. The pool had sat through a warm spring with the pump off, and by the time we saw it, algae had carpeted the floor, the steps, and most of the walls. Past a certain point, chemicals are just an expensive way to make green water cloudy — this was past that point. We quoted a drain and chlorine wash instead, because it was honestly cheaper.

Out comes the water — slowly, into the cleanout, the way the city likes it. Draining a pool in Arizona is not a casual move: do it wrong in the heat or in the wrong soil and plaster cracks or, in high-groundwater spots, the whole shell can lift. It was April, the weather window was right, and the hydrostatic plug came out first. The video below picks up mid-drain, when the floor finally showed us everything it had been hiding.

With the shell empty we washed every surface with chlorine — walls, floor, steps. A chlorine wash kills the algae living in the surface without eating a layer of plaster the way an acid wash does, which made it the right call for this finish. It is exactly as fun as it sounds: a drained pool in the Arizona sun, a sprayer, a brush, and a respirator.

By late afternoon the hose was in and the shell was filling — that is the part in the second half of the video, the fill stream drawing rings on clean gray pebble. Refills take a day or two; we came back to run startup chemistry once the water level hit the tile line: balance first, then stabilizer, then a proper chlorine charge.

A rescued pool is on probation for a couple of weeks. The filter gets watched closely (a green pool murders filters — this one got a deep clean as part of the job), chemistry gets checked again, and then it slides onto the normal weekly route like nothing ever happened. That is the actual product: not the dramatic rescue, but the boring Tuesdays afterward that keep it from ever going green again.