Pool Guy!
For many years I was a Licensed Contractor in the swimming pool industry in San Diego. I held a C-61 Specialty License for pool service and repair. Since childhood I had an aptitude for mechanical and complex things, the repair side of the pool industry came quite naturally. I did exremely well in the world of backyard as well as large commercial pools while also working within the Operating Engineers Union as a land surveyor. I loved them both and was always a happy man.
In the early 90s when a section of the rebar, built too close to the plaster began to rust through, it made an ugly rust spot in an otherwise beautiful pool. My company drained the pool, jack hammered out the rusty section, and plaster patched the spot so it no longer showed.
This type of work ended soon when another company began using an aqualung to do underwater repairs. With this method, the pool never needed to be drained saving the pool owner a lot of money.
In an average day, the pool contractor encounteres many anomolies. This is one of them. An old stainless filter tank has just reached its use by date!
This pool pump has been out of service for quite some time! I replaced it for the client!
During 2008 I performed contract work for a real estate firm whose clients were all banks. I did well over 100 green pool cleanups for this client. Drain the pool, acid or chlorine wash down the walls, refill with clear water, and balance the water chemistry. Then place the pool into my weekly pool service program until the home sells. I made green pools sparkle like diamonds in the morning sun!
Here we see the pool as it looks without any water in the vessel!
All better. Everyone in the pool!
Often I would get calls from pool owners telling me it was time for a filter service! Look what I found when I opened this DE Filter! Either the homeowner or another pool guy had left vicegrips in and closed up the filter tank without noticing.
This picture was taken in the late 90s at a recently acquired weekly pool service account! The lady showed me the pool and the pool equipment. When I saw that the effluent or outgoing pipe was copper and not PVC, I asked who had done that. She told me her husband had worked on the pool pump and had changed the piping as such. I remained taciturn but inside I was laughing. She told me her husband was a genious. Right. Changing out any PVC for copper is not too swift! Way back in the 60s, with the advent of PVC, old pools were often refitted and copper piping was removed and here is why. Chemically treated water flowing through copper pipes creates a sluffing off of surface copper. These tiny copper particles blow out of the clean water return line and adhere to the adjacent white plaster making a huge unsitely black "cloud" on the pool wall. So by installing this copper fitting, especially where the pump is the strongest, the genius made the pool worse!
This automatic pool cleaner is a Hayward PoolVac Navigator. During my time in the pool business, this was the finest and most effective automatic cleaner available anywhere. Of course, nowadays thing have changed and with the advent of new technology, new cleaners have been created. This unit has a lot of moving parts and I quickly learned all about how to do repairs and which parts do what. This was fun for me and as you can see in the next couple of images, this unit has been completely disassembled revealing all the parts.
I was able to operate on any PoolVac on my tailgate and learn which part were worn out and which were still operational.
I love this sort of work and repaired lots of cleaners all over San Diego County.
Another pool cleanup my company did in East County San Diego. This pool had been neglected for quite some time but I quickly got it back on line.
What a mess!
This was a beautiful black bottomed pool which has always been my favorite. I loved saving this beauty and it looked so nice when the cleanup was done and new pool equipment installed.
Here we have a lovely pool ready to go. This is a thing of beauty!
Spa, pool slide; absolutely perfect and nice 6.0L pickup out there too!
All in all, a pool I would love to have in my back yard! Black bottomed pools stretch the summer swim season as we go toward Autum and then begin the Spring season early as we head into our beautiful San Diego summers!
The following 6 images are from a job so bizarre, so very different and unusual from the norm, but I got it done and had a blast doing it. This would have been roughly 2007 and I was then working full time performing the duties of pool repair contractor. Quite far out into the San Diego East County rural area were a few scattered homes and farms. A huge fire had been raging through the area and this homeowner contacted me and explained the situation. He told me the fire had been moving very quickly and had spared his home but taken out the entirety of his pool equipment. He wanted to rebuild the pool’s circulation system in a different location farther from the pool, so I drove my service truck out there to take a look.
What I saw was amazing. Even then I was an HTML hand coder and was operating several websites. As such, I was a web photographer and always took many before and after pictures for my site. His DE Filter had completely melted as well as the PVC pipes that were above the ground. He showed me where he wanted the system moved to and I wrote up a contract for the work which he accepted. In all, I installed a new Pentair DE Filter and Pentair WhisperFlow 1.5HP Pool Pump. I had an image of the melted filter but it is somehow missing. I will update when I find it.
This image was captured after I had cut out the old melted filter and pump so this is where the image-story begins. I had to do a lot of jack hammer work to remove concrete in key areas.
Here we see the concrete has been taken down sufficiently to begin the glue-up with enough existing pipe stubs now available.
The fire damage left lots of debris in the pool which was well into an algae bloom.
Another shot of the pool vessel as I found it. Green and derelict.
Here we see the concrete removed and new piping installed for the new system location.
And finally, a brand new Pentair pool circulation system fully installed complete with new elecrical and new Pool Timer. You can see the new piping on the right side now partially backfilled.
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