I would avoid all of those mystery miracle pool potions.... I find it best to keep it simple, use chlorine as a sanitizer and keep the LSI balanced with the base chemicals themselves. There's really only a handful of chemicals you need to keep a pool safe and clean and neutral, and they're all pretty cheap.

My problem with all the pool stores is that they are in the business of selling chemicals. It is in their best interest to maximize the amount of chemicals sold. They have experience selling chemicals. I am in the business of cleaning pools. I have experience cleaning pools. And I have no skin in the game - in fact, it's actually better for me to minimize the amount of chemicals used because I charge a flat rate (adjusted for each pool but it stays the same).

The flat rate includes all of my costs including chemicals necessary for regular maintenance. This works out well for my customers because it incentivizes me to keep the pool clean and to be efficient.

I'll stop here for now.... I could literally write a book about this and I know people don't really like reading walls of text anymore

Good luck hope this helps!

Ok, I decided to continue lol. I think you would benefit from being pointed in the right direction. Check it out.

I'm not a huge fan of troublefreepool community because their solution to every single thing = get a taylor test kit & slam. But I'm not gonna digress on that. Despite that, they have a great pool chemical calculator called pool math. Just Google pool math. It's the first result. It's a little old school. I think they have an app now if that suits your tastes more.

That handful of chemicals I mentioned before:

- Calcium hypochlorite (chlorine aka shock)

- trichlor (stabilized chlorine tablets)

- cyanuric acid (Chlorine stabilizer aka conditioner)

- sodium bicarbonate (baking soda)

- sodium carbonate (soda ash)

- salt

- muriatic acid

- Calcium chloride

- aluminum sulfate (aka alum)

If I was going to create a pool store, that's all I would stock. I never use clarifiers, enzymes, pristine blue, algaecides (chlorine is literally the best algaecide, it's also the best everything-cide), curealls or mystery fixes. I like to know exactly what I'm putting in a pool and why.

All of those chemicals I listed have a purpose. To keep a pool clean, safe, & neutral, you need to keep a few parameters in check:

- free chlorine

- alkalinity

- pH

- calcium hardness

- cyanuric acid

- salt (if saltwater pool)

Granular and tablet chlorine destroy microbes and keep the water sanitary. In saltwater pools, electricity is used to convert the salt in the water into chlorine gas, which sanitizes the water then breaks down back into salt, and the cycle continues.

Sodium bicarbonate raises alkalinity which keeps pH stable. Muriatic acid lowers pH and soda ash increases pH without raising alkalinity. Calcium chloride is for water hardness, which is more important for gunite and plaster pools than vinyl pools, but still necessary to keep water neutral in all pools, to avoid scaling or pitting.

Neutral water maximizes the lifespan of equipment like the pump, the pool itself, basically everything. When I say neutral, I mean a LSI as close to 0 as possible. The further you get from 0, the more aggressive water is.

For example, let's say you have a pool and the pH is 2. (I saw this happen a few days ago, it is possible, funny story actually, it includes exploding pipes lol). That water is extremely acidic - somewhere between battery acid and lemon juice. That water is going to corroded and eat away at the metal bearings in the pump and ruin it very fast, probably within days. It will leave rust stains on the floor. That is extremely aggressive water. Water is the universal solvent  - it can dissolve almost anything in the universe. The goal is to make the water as neutral as possible, so that it doesn't destroy your clients stuff. And that means balancing the chemistry.

Then there's aluminum sulfate. This is what I use for green pools. You have to be careful with this one. If you mess it up and it doesn't sink, then you have to deal with cleaning it up on top of the problems you already had. It's commonly referred to as a flocculant, but it's actually a coagulant.

(Real flocculants, like what they use in drinking water treatment facilities in combination with a coagulant can clear a body of water in less than a minute. But they aren't available for use in other applications (such as in pools) because it is a very hazardous and carcinogenic material that you can't just dump in someone's yard.)

As interesting as that is, it's irrelevant. What you need to know about aluminum sulfate is what it does. It turns into a gel-like substance and sinks to the bottom of the pool over 12-48 hours, catching everything in the water and sinking it to the floor where it can be vacuumed out. (More useless info: It's the same stuff they use to make those little tablets in survival kits that will turn a bottle of muddy water into water you can drink.)

So..... that's pool chemistry in a nutshell.