The memes are already circulating. It's a special type of algae, found in Georgia, that can only be in that pool because it was dumped their on purpose by Democrats, and they're forced to peroxide the pool.

Pay no attention to the fact it's >90F and that's how pools work, especially when you kick start it with algae strips from the pipes that you didn't pump out to waste.

Stupidity aside... I run a peroxide pool, pretty nice, better than chlorine. Better on the skin. So if you're homeless, dive in. Now's the time.

Pretty good.

The math on the peroxide is still wild. Not the 550 gallons of chlorine, 140 gallons instead. Going to need it every 2-3 days until it goes back under 90. If you don't have bottom jets and another 70 gallons of clarifier it's just going to be a giant white cloud of dead algae.

Expensive status symbol as far as pools go. You can't even swim in it.

Is that the same as salt? Having been in both kinds the salt is night and day better but apparently more expensive.

#11 | Posted by snoofy at 2026-06-16 10:27 PM | Reply

No, a salt pool is a chlorine pool. There's an electrolysis bit added to the system which converts the salt to chlorine over time.

If you mix peroxide and chlorine the chemical reaction neutralizes each other and then they don't anything. Overall there's quite a few advantages to running peroxide. It feels nicer, it doesn't smell like chlorine, the shock time is 30 minutes instead of 24 hours before you can swim again, running costs are about the same, you use one gallon of peroxide where you would use for liquid chlorine gallons, there's no acid build up like you get with chlorine pucks, and if you have family members with chlorine sensitivities it's perfect.

Alsosalt is definitely cheaper to run than liquid chlorine. My neighbor has a small fiberglass pool with a salt system. They add three bags of salt a year from the hardware store. It's really cheap. The downside is it's really bad for your metal components anywhere in the system. They will corrode like hell the moment salt scrubs off that protective film off of the stainless bits.

ty. Next for me is a modest lazy river design. Sculpted in Fusion360 CAD, I'll pre-form every piece of rebar myself... along with a helper from home depot, it's a lot of rebar U shapes.

That was a major problem that the reflecting pool recoating patched at least. Ground shifts, it cracks the slabs forming the base of the pool. Water penetrates the cracks, gets to the rebar, and the rebar begins rusting, rust replaces the metal at 3.5x the volume which causes more concrete fracturing. Now you have to replace entire sections of pool, or the entire pool.

or you coat it, kick the can to the next guy, and pretend there is nothing horribly going on under that pool.

They'd have been better off bulldozing the pool and starting over... but then it wouldn't be a gilded age.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., is highly prone to algae blooms every summer, regardless of who is president.

Was there some kind of crazy Trump promise it would be algae free from now on? If so... lol, no, that's not how pools work.

What a terrible band aid for glamour.

Switching to municipal supply, you still have to flood it with heavy amounts of chlorine or you've got algae soup in 2 weeks from fresh.

28 | Posted by sitzkrieg
The NPS must have been doing something to prevent algae the dozens of times I've been in DC since the early 80's, including summer.
I've never seen it green with algae. Well, I hope they can fix the problems ...

#29 | Posted by AMERICANUNITY at 2026-06-17 12:32 PM | Reply

Adjust for it being hotter in DC summers now than it was 40 yeara ago.

I was there most recently summer of 2024 when it was in the 90's. No algae.

#32 | Posted by AMERICANUNITY at 2026-06-17 01:24 PM | Reply | Flag:

Apparently I'm the only person in the world that has seen algae in the reflecting pool. It's never happened before this.

This is intro to chemistry stuff. Chlorine demand function: L(T)=(L_0)*e^k(T'T0)

If you have the budget allocated for the chemicals it will stay clear.

If that maintenance is deferred for more than a week for any reason whatsoever, and it's anywhere above 85F, you get fast algae blooming regardless of the bottom finish.

Looks like it. If you wait a week to dose it, after you fill it AND wash your pipes back into the pool itself, you fucked up.

A symphony of mistakes.

Give me 2 day laborers, a $500 pvc pipe budget, some pantyhose, and none of that algae backwash happens.

We don't need DOGE. We need a McGuyer Department.

I watched it slowly bloom out on the live cam. It looked like every pool ever. Starts to glow grey, then green in the deeper end, and the rest quickly catches up within a few days, then you may get pea soup to neon green with a gradient across the whole pool depending on the sunlight.

The second they saw the environmental paperwork they probably said F that. Fill it, take the check, run.

"Let NPS deal with it. It's their pool, we're just here to do the resurfacing."

and they did do a decent resurfacing job, and it does make it easier to clean algae stains that form under debris. Everything else about that pool, all of the massive underlying issues, lot of can kicking.

It very, very slightly increases the warming effect of the sun everywhere.

It's completely irrelevant compared to chlorine load and ambient temperature.

Everything affects everything.
Someone up the line nailed it.
It's just chemistry.
#52 | Posted by donnerboy at 2026-06-17 02:22 PM | Reply | Flag:

That was me. The same person saying the pool color doesn't matter. That's just a meme distracting you from the actual gross negligence and corrupt contracting process. Probably circulated by Republican bots.

Q_absorbed=(1')IA

If there was a significant cooling advantage my pool would be white. Keep chasing outliers though, never stop swinging for the fences, I hope you own a pool one day.