About & editorial policy

Why this site exists

Pool chemistry is not complicated, but it is badly explained, and it is explained almost entirely by people who profit from the answer. The pool store tests your water for free and then sells you the remedy. Manufacturer sites explain the problem their product solves. Affiliate sites rank whichever product pays best and call it a review.

The result is that a straightforward hobby feels like guesswork, and people spend hundreds of dollars a season treating symptoms of a single number nobody told them to measure. That number is usually cyanuric acid, and the fact that so few pool owners have ever heard of it is the entire reason Pool Water Guide exists.

🔴 What we do not claim

We do not test products in the field, and we never say we do. Nobody here has taken these kits to a dozen pools over three summers, and if we wrote that we had, you would have no way of checking it — which is exactly why so many sites write it.

There is no invented expert here. We have not created a fictional pool professional with a friendly headshot and twenty years of experience to make the advice feel more authoritative. It is a common tactic in this niche. We think it is a lie told to the exact people least equipped to detect it.

What we trade for giving up those claims is that everything we do assert is checkable. That is a worse marketing position and a better deal for you.

How a recommendation is actually made

1. We only write where we can add something. A lot of pool questions are already answered perfectly well — by the manufacturer, by a forum thread, or by whoever installed your pool. Before we start a page we ask whether there is a genuinely useful answer missing, and if there isn’t, we don’t write it. That is why this site is deliberately narrow: we would rather cover a handful of questions properly, with a tool that uses your own numbers, than publish a shallow page about everything.

2. Products are screened on data, not vibes. Live Amazon listing data, verified review counts, monthly units sold, and — critically — what the product physically measures or delivers. Every ASIN we mention is re-verified before publication, because Amazon listings silently drift to different models.

3. We read the reviews properly. Not the star rating, the most-upvoted verified complaints, several hundred of them. That is where the useful material is: the reagent that expires first, the strip bottle whose colour chart washes off, the 9-in-1 kit that ships with salt instructions and no salt reagents. Competitors rewrite the manufacturer’s bullet points. We read what happened to buyers.

4. The chemistry is derived, not copied. Every calculator computes from one shared set of constants worked out from first principles, with the derivation written in the source. Where we could cross-check against manufacturer dosing labels, we did — our stabiliser figure lands within rounding of what three separate brands print on the bag.

5. The recommendation follows a rule, not a preference. Our tools return one product because a stated rule selected it from your answers. You can change your answers and watch the recommendation change. On the test-kit page, the cheapest product wins two of six paths.

What this method cannot tell you

It cannot tell you how a kit holds up over three seasons. It cannot tell you how one brand’s reagents compare against a laboratory standard. It cannot tell you which product feels nicer to use. Those questions need hands on equipment over years, and we have not done that.

When you need that kind of answer, TroubleFreePool’s forum has years of it, written by people with nothing to sell. We link there repeatedly and earn nothing when you go. A site that never sends you anywhere else is telling you something.

Where we are, and who we write for

Pool Water Guide is a US-focused publication, not a local business. We serve pool owners across the United States: prices are in USD, products are sourced from Amazon.com, and every figure uses US conventions — gallons, ppm, degrees Fahrenheit.

We do not publish a business address, and we want to be straightforward about why rather than leaving a gap. A street address on a national publication signals a local service business we are not, and a great many affiliate sites invent one precisely because it looks reassuring. We would rather tell you what we actually are: a small independent site that researches product data and pool chemistry, serving the whole country and no particular part of it.

What we do instead is take geography seriously where it changes the answer. Season length, UV load and tap-water hardness vary enormously across the US — a Phoenix pool and a Boston pool are genuinely different problems, and advice written as though the country had one climate is part of why pool care feels contradictory. Where a regional difference matters, our pages say which region.

Corrections

If a number here is wrong we want to know, and we would rather correct a page than defend it. Material corrections are made in place and the review date at the top of the page changes. All pages currently carry a review date of 18 August 2026. Reach us via contact.

Money

We earn Amazon commissions on some links, disclosed in full on our affiliate disclosure page — including the detail most sites omit, which is that Amazon’s cookie lasts 24 hours and pays us on unrelated purchases too. No paid placements, no sponsorships, no gifted products, no brand has seen a page before publication.