The Pools Scientific Podcast

If your pool smells like chlorine and your eyes are stinging, you've probably heard the same explanation everybody hears: too much chlorine.  That answer is backwards. In this episode, John Cooper breaks down what's actually happening in that water. Free chlorine reacts with the nitrogen everyone brings into a pool (sweat, saliva, sunscreen, and yes, urine) to form chloramines. There are...

A short, straight answer to what the Chemist's Circle is, what it costs, and why it exists. Two personalized chemistry submissions a month, a real response within twenty four hours, written for your pool, not a general answer. Plus the founding rate, the one thing this week's episode doesn't say on air, locked in permanently for as long as you stay a member. The first hundred people...

This week, John answers real questions from real listeners. No filler. Plus the first-ever So What? segment, and a check-in with Warren Bell, three weeks after we first told his story. Contributors to this episode: Mark Yancey U/Barnacle_Meat, from the swimmingpools subreddit Alec Wasserman U/Striking_Manner9380, from the swimmingpools subreddit U/wankertank, from the pools subreddit Warren Bell W...

This one's different from every episode before it. Episode 10 is the origin story. All of it. A strawberry farm in Missouri. A submarine. Twenty five years of homebuilding. And a swimming pool route in Kansas City that none of it would have led to on its own. I'm not going to tell you more than that here. Some of this episode is funny. Most of it isn't. It's the most personal e...

The pool industry has been repeating the same rules for decades. Bigger pump. Add algaecide. Keep pH between 7.2 and 7.8. Most pool owners follow those rules without question. Most pool professionals teach them without question. This episode asks why. Three rules. Three real mechanisms. Three cases where the answer you were given is the simplified version, and the complete answer would change how...

Every pool professional has one. A pool that breaks the rules. The chemistry looks right. The equipment runs fine. And the water still does something it shouldn't. This episode is about what to do when the obvious answer isn't there. John Cooper walks through the diagnostic framework he uses when a pool stops making sense, built from years of working pools that refused to cooperate and s...

Every week there's a new product promising to replace pool chemistry with something simpler. One pod. One scoop. One treatment. The testimonials say it worked. The price says it's worth trying. This episode is not about mocking the people who bought them. It's about what the chemistry actually says. Because the chemistry doesn't care about the label, the view count, or how conv...

You add acid. pH comes back up. You add more. Eventually you grab the whole jug. Then you pull up the next morning and the liner is wrinkled — across the walls and floor in that specific way that only happens one way. This episode explains why that happens. Not with a product recommendation. Not with a different test kit. With the physics that's been governing dissolved gases in liquids since...

"My pool guy is full of crap." It shows up in forums, in Facebook groups, in Reddit threads. And sometimes? They're not wrong. But most of the time the pool guy isn't the problem. The problem is what he was handed before he ever showed up at your pool. This episode is his defense. Five things your pool guy is most likely getting wrong right now — not because he's cutting c...

 Salt chlorine generators are, in my professional opinion, the best residential pool chlorination method available today. I recommend them. My company installs them. And they fail constantly. Not because the technology is flawed. Because the information gap between what owners are told at installation and what the chemistry actually requires is enormous. Today we go inside the cell. The electrolys...

 There is one calculation that determines whether your pool water is slowly destroying your equipment, etching your plaster, or quietly depositing scale on every surface it touches. Most pool owners have never heard of it. Most pool guys never mention it. It runs in the background of every service visit I do, every single week. Today we talk about the Langelier Saturation Index. What it is, what i...

Your test strip shows chlorine. The water looks clear. But is your chlorine actually working? In this episode, chemical and nuclear engineer John Cooper breaks down the relationship between cyanuric acid (CYA) and free chlorine — and the single ratio that determines whether your sanitizer is doing its job. It's called the 7.5% Rule , and most pool owners have never heard of it. John covers wh...

John got a call from another pool guy who was in way over his head. What he found when he walked into that equipment room is the single best argument for why pool care needs to be treated as a science — not a trade skill passed down by feel and guesswork. This is the episode that explains why Pools Scientific exists, what’s fundamentally broken about the way pool care is practiced, and what it act...