Pool Blues

I've been working on our swimming pool a lot lately. It's now about five years old, and for about two of those years I've been more or less completely out of commission and neglected some basic maintenance. So this year I've been trying to fix some of the things that have gone wrong with it.

It's a thankless task, because the pool builder put the control boxes in the worst imaginable spot, crammed into a corner formed by the house and a block wall. The only real way to get to the control boxes is to lie on your right side and work with your left hand, which means that unless you're a left-handed gibbon, there's really no easy way to get at anything.

Then someone (it might have been me, but I don't remember) covered the ground around the pool equipment with coarse gravel. Very coarse, as in one-inch screened stuff that I think was intended for septic tank leach fields. Every time I work on the thing I end up covered with bruises from lying on the rocks, and my knees look like they've been attacked with hammers. It's awful.

And then nothing is ever easy. To wit:

THE POOL LIGHT

The pool light quit. So I thought it was a bad bulb, and I wrestled the fixture out of the "wet niche" and got it out on the pool deck. The bulb was thoroughly dead - it rattled like a gourd when shaken. So I got a new bulb and a new gasket. Still nothing. So I get out my trusty Radio Shack DMM and take a few measurements, and note no AC going to the remote switch. Aha - the GFI outlet had probably tripped. But they put the GFI receptacle between two boxes in such a way that the hinged plastic cover cannot possibly be opened. Solution: grab the plastic cover with both hands and physically rip it off so I can reset the GFI. The light comes on. The light stays on for about two hours, and quits again. Grrr. At that point I had to go back to work and just had no time to work on it, so we had the "pool guy" come out to look at it. Turns out that the white replacement gasket had failed and the lamp fixture was full of water, and the GFI receptacle had also failed. One lamp, one GFI outlet, and one new gasket later, it was working. Only, it wasn't. The remote switch no longer worked. Turns out that the outlet it was plugged into had ALSO failed; its GFI mechanism had permanently tripped out. So now the remote switch is on the countertop in the kitchen, and the light works again.

THE CHLORINATOR

We have a salt-water pool, and I happen to like them. But tests revealed that there wasn't so much as an atom of chlorine in the pool, and the salt water generator control box was showing fault code 94, meaning no current draw in the generator. Oh, how hard could that be to fix? I replaced the fuse inside the box, which was blown, but still had a 94 fault. More poking with a DMM (again carried out while lying on my side, using one hand) revealed 28 VDC at the output pin of the box. So I thought it was perhaps a problem with the cell itself, perhaps a corroded or broken contact. So I tore the cell apart, which involves taking about about fifteen enormous screws with the biggest Phillips screwdriver I possess, and half-breaking my wrist in the process. Then thirteen (or so) plates fell out like playing cards, $600 worth of titanium and ruthenium oxide clattering around on the rocks.

By now it was getting dark, way too dark to figure out how to reassemble the cell, so I just screwed the cover back on and reassembled the plumbing. But in the process, a little rock got stuck in the o-ring groove and when I turned on the pump, a veritable Old Faithful eruption ensued. A great deal of struggling with enormous water pump pliers ensued, only because of the way the pool installer did the plumbing, the lower union was now in a pool of muddy water. It's enough to make a man scream. In the darkness. While lying on one-inch rocks.

The next day I did more electrical tests. Only the pool installer wired the disconnect strangely. The cell had a white and a black wire. The control box had a white and a black wire. But they crossed them at the disconnect plug, so the white wire connected to the black wire and vice versa, making a mockery of my continuity tests. For a long time this miswire made it seem like the fuseholder had failed, so I cut the shrink sleeving off it to get to the terminals, and then cut more shrink sleeving off the disconnect to get to the pins, and finally I figured out what they had done.

Finally, I found that the cable was bad. The white wire was open. But where? I had to slit the sheath of the cable along most of its length and finally found a spot where a squirrel had bitten through the insulation and exposed the conductor of the white wire, which had then corroded completely away. Half an hour later, armed with black tape and wire nuts, the cable was fixed. But now I had to reassemble the cell, which involved aligning all thirteen plates in twenty-six parallel grooves. I ended up using model railroad scale two-by-sixes as spacers to keep the plates aligned.

I guess the bottom line is that the light now works, the chlorinator is once again generating chlorine, and the water is now unbelievably clear, like glass. And my bruises are slowly healing. But the emotional trauma is still with me. So tomorrow I'm going to start the tractor and drag as much of that stupid gravel away as I can, and then get in there and get the rest of the rocks out by hand. And then I'm going to pile up the rocks and scream at them for a while, just because, and then invite the dog to piddle on them.

I look forward to that.