green
pool
Cleanup.
You went out of town for ten days in July. Or the pump quit and you did not notice for a week. Or you bought the house and the previous owner had clearly given up.
Now you cannot see the second step, and the internet is telling you to buy shock.
Stay Fresh Pools does green to clean cleanups across Queen Creek, Gilbert, Chandler, and San Tan Valley. Before you spend another dollar at the pool store, read the next section. It might save you two hundred bucks and a week of your life.
No task
is too big for us
If You Have Already Dumped Four Bags of Shock In and Nothing Happened
Your problem is not chlorine. It is cyanuric acid, and no amount of shock is going to fix it.
Here is what happens to almost every pool in this valley. Our UV is brutal, so unstabilized chlorine burns off in hours. To fight that, everybody uses trichlor tabs, because trichlor has stabilizer built in. That works, and it keeps working, and every single tab adds a little more cyanuric acid to your water.
Cyanuric acid does not evaporate. It does not burn off. It just accumulates, year after year, tab after tab.
By the time CYA hits 100 or 150 parts per million, your chlorine is chemically locked up. The test strip says you have chlorine. You do. It just cannot do anything. So the pool goes green, you shock it, nothing happens, you shock it again, and you are now paying for a chemical reaction that physically cannot occur.
There is exactly one way to lower cyanuric acid: dilute it. Drain some water out, put fresh water in. That is the entire list of options. Anyone selling you a product that removes CYA is selling you something you should ask hard questions about.
This is the single most common reason green pools in the East Valley stay green. It is also the reason a cleanup here sometimes means a drain, when the same pool in a milder climate would just need shock.
We test CYA before we quote anything. If your number is high, we will tell you that a chemical cleanup is throwing money at a pool that cannot respond to it.
How Green Is It, Actually
The right treatment depends entirely on how far gone it is, and the honest answer changes the price a lot.
You can see the bottom. Water is green or cloudy. Chemical cleanup. We balance it, shock it properly, add algaecide, and run the filter around the clock. Expect three to five days and expect to clean the filter several times, because it is about to catch everything that is currently floating in your pool. Do-able yourself if you have the patience and the free time.
You can see a couple of feet down. Definitely green. Still chemically fixable, but you are now buying a lot of chemicals and cleaning the filter three or four times. At this point it is worth pricing a drain against the chemical route, because they often land in the same neighborhood and the drain is faster.
You cannot see six inches. It is dark green or black. There may be tadpoles. Drain and chlorine wash. Chemically treating a pool this far gone is possible and it is almost always the more expensive, slower path. Nobody is doing you a favor by trying.
It has been green for a year. There is a smell. Drain, chlorine wash, and an honest conversation about the plaster underneath, because you do not know what it looks like yet and neither do we.
Chlorine Wash or Acid Wash: These Are Not the Same Thing
This matters and most homeowners have never had it explained, so here it is.
A chlorine wash kills and removes organic staining. Algae, biofilm, the green and black on your plaster. It does not remove plaster. It is the right call for the overwhelming majority of green pools.
An acid wash removes a thin layer of your plaster to get underneath mineral stains and discoloration. It works because it is taking material off your pool. That is not a side effect, that is the mechanism.
Your plaster has a finite number of acid washes in it. Realistically a handful across its whole life. Every one you spend is life you do not get back.
So when a company quotes an acid wash on a green pool without testing anything or explaining why a chlorine wash will not do it, that is worth a second opinion. Most green pools are an organic problem, and organic problems get a chlorine wash.
If your pool genuinely does need an acid wash, that is the exact moment to talk about MicroGlass. You just stripped a layer and exposed fresh, soft calcium hydroxide underneath. Densifying it right then, while the pool is drained and the surface is open, costs a fraction of a remodel and it is the cheapest that protection will ever be.
Why This Happens Here
Your water is 90 degrees. Algae doubles fast in warm water, and East Valley pools run above 90 for months. What takes two weeks to go green in Ohio takes four days here.
A dead pump means about 48 hours. If your pump quit on a Thursday and you noticed on Sunday, you did not do anything wrong. That is just the math in an Arizona July.
Monsoon season does three things at once. It dumps organic debris and phosphates in the water, it knocks out power so your pump stops, and it buries your filter. That combination is why we get a wave of green pool calls in August every year.
The UV loop. Sun destroys chlorine, so you use tabs, so CYA climbs, so chlorine stops working, so the pool goes green. See the section above. It is not your fault, but it is why the fix is often a drain.
Vacant houses. Rentals between tenants, snowbird properties, estates, foreclosures. A pool with nobody watching it in a Phoenix summer is green in under two weeks.
How We Work
1. We test before we quote. CYA, chlorine, pH, alkalinity, calcium, phosphates. The CYA number alone decides whether a chemical cleanup is even possible, and it is the number most people have never had run.
2. We tell you which path is actually cheaper. Sometimes that is chemicals. Sometimes that is a drain. On a badly gone pool, the chemical route can quietly cost more than the drain and take four times as long, and we will show you that math instead of just quoting the one we prefer.
3. If we drain, we do it right. An empty plaster pool sitting in 115-degree sun is a pool you can damage. We drain and refill on the same timeline, we do not leave it sitting open, and we do not drain into a hydrostatic situation without checking first.
4. Your filter is going to earn its money. A cleanup is mostly filtration. Expect us to clean it repeatedly during the process, and expect us to tell you honestly if it is too far gone to do the job. Cleanups are where dying filters get found.
5. We tell you why it happened. A cleanup that does not identify the cause is a cleanup you will buy again in September. If the pump is failing, if the CYA is at 140, if the filter is shot, you will hear about it.
6. No contract. We will clean it up and leave you alone, or put you on weekly service so it does not happen again. Your call, and we will not be weird about it.
Who Calls Us
Homeowners across Queen Creek, Gilbert, Chandler, and San Tan Valley, including Cortina, Encanterra, Seville, Power Ranch, Val Vista Lakes, Agritopia, and Ocotillo.
- You went on vacation and came back to a swamp.
- Your pump died and you found out too late.
- You just bought the house and inherited it.
- You are a landlord with a turnover and a green pool.
- You have been shocking it for two weeks and it is not moving.
- Your neighbor called the county and now you have a deadline.
- Your pool guy stopped showing up.
We stand
Behind our work
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