Odds And Ends
by Dennis DiPaolo
If you don’t have an automatic pool cleaner, what are you waiting for? Suction cleaners are now on clearance sale for $79.96 (#3975). And if you want something really excellent, look at our Maytronics Atlantis, Apollo, and Apollo Plus. We have never sold a cleaner or brand that was so popular with the public. And we have never sold a cleaner so popular with us! Not only do they work great, these three models were designed to be incredibly easy to diagnose (we read the computer diagnostic codes) and easy to repair.
That’s a big deal with us. We repair pretty much every brand of cleaner; always for our customers, and often as a repair center for brands we don’t even carry. It is unbelievable how many repairs we do for some brands that seem to have been designed to break every year! So if you bought your last three cleaners on the internet, why don’t you just buy something decent from someone who knows the difference? It’s less expensive to do it right.
Speaking of the internet, try researching something on the internet when you actually know something about the subject. See some crazy answers there? I love the internet, and I bought an iPhone just so I can google from anywhere (almost no one knows my cell phone number, and I don’t even know how to retrieve a phone message from it).
We hear the craziest things from people who used the internet to research. By no means is it all wrong, but it’s not filtered, either.
Look up drinking hydrogen peroxide for health. I did it when someone tried to buy it from us to drink because we’re cheaper than his online store. I refused to sell it to him. The internet is full of arguments about who has the best, and who’s cheapest, and not a word about the strength! Pool store H202 is around 27%. Drug store H202 is around 3%. Commercial H202 is over 35%. I don’t know what it is in a hairdresser’s, and what strength people are drinking, but it would be a pretty painful death if you drank a glass of ours because the internet told you to do so.
Are you thinking about a salt-to-chlorine generator? People love them, though there are a lot of myths about them. They make the pool water very comfortable, because salt water is very comfortable. Of course, you could always have added salt to any pool if you wanted to swim in salt water, but no one seems to do it unless they buy a generator. You never have to add chlorine to a chlorinator – the generator makes its own chlorine out of the salt in the water.
The myths are that the chlorine is somehow more gentle than “Pool Chlorine”. No, once it’s mixed into the water, all of the chlorines turn into hypochlorous acid and hypochloric acid (then it gets complicated). But the generator makes sodium hypochlorite – the exact same thing as liquid chlorine. All other chemistry (shocking, pH watching, balancing, etc.) is the same.
Salt-to-chlorine generation is not cheaper. It is more expensive than cheap chlorine, and somewhere between medium and expensive chlorine. People love it because it is easy and feels good. And they feel it is worth it. So if you are interested, ask us about it. Cheap generators go for $149.97 (#3927), and good ones are $1099.97 (#4287/4288) on clearance.
Take a look at our Charity Logo Department near the cash registers. All of the price you pay for anything there goes to our Local Charity Donation Fund.
Why do we call it that? Our policy is to rarely give to a national charity, because they already know how to get to the right people in the big companies. However, we almost never turn down a small local charity – to the tune of roughly 150 donations a year. It’s amazing how many there are. I assume we’re on some sort of list they all share!
Did you ever buy a gift certificate from us in a silent auction? Notice we asked how much you paid for it when you used it? We’re tracking how much each certificate brings in, so we can tell whether we will give that charity cash or another gift certificate in the future. Sometimes a cash donation would have been better for them, sometimes the gift certificate brings them more money.
Putting “Reusable” on water sample bottles seemed to be a big help in reducing waste, thank-you. We saw fewer bottles in the trash, and we had way more bottles left at the end of the year. We also set up a “Bottle Museum” behind water lab four, for samples of old bottles. If you have one that we do not have, we’ll give you a $10 gift certificate so we can add it to the museum. As far as I know, I have a sample of every Seasonal pen since 1983, and Joe has them going back to 1992, but I never thought to keep water sample bottles!
Want to save time in the store? Our Warehouse Pick-Up Sheet is on our website. Print it out, check your inventory at home, and you just saved five minutes in the store.