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Hey everyone, and welcome to pool school where we keep your pool clean and clear by answering your questions about pool maintenance. My name is Matt and I'm the founder of swimuniversity.com a website that teaches you how to take care of your pool and your hot tub.

Today's question is, what's the best way to test my pool water? 

Well, first. We need to talk about taking a sample of your pool water so that way we get the best results no matter what tests we use. So in order to do that, you need a very clean bottle. it could be between 12 and 16 ounces. It doesn't have to be too big.

It can be this, you know, a coffee mug, whatever it is, just enough water that we have to work with. Now it's really important that when you go up to your pool, whether it's an inground pool or an above ground pool, that when you take the sample. You need to take it from a certain depth. The depth that I think you should take it from is up to your elbows.

So you want to put your entire forearm into the water with the container upside down. So as you're putting the container into the water, there's no water getting into it. And then you want to go all the way up into your elbow, and then you want to turn the container upright so that it starts to fill with water.

The other thing you need to watch out for is to stay away from the return jet. So if you're in an inground pool, you might have multiple return jets, and if you're an above ground pool, you might just have one return jet. If you have a skimmer or multiple skimmers, you also want to stay away from that because sometimes you put chlorine in those skimmers and we just want to stay away from any sort of chemical feeder that's going to push more chemicals into your sample container. 

So you want to do it ideally in the middle of the pool, elbow deep. But if you can't get to the middle of the pool, it's fine if you're just somewhere not near a skimmer or return jet, and that's how you get the samples. So no matter what test you're going to do, that's the sample that you need. 

Now, the easiest test you can do is test strips. And I highly recommend, even though I don't believe it's the best test, but test strips are really easy to use and it's something that you can do quite frequently. you take a sample and then you dip a test strip and you measure those colors up against the back of the bottle and you can quickly determine, not with great accuracy, but it's pretty close and it's close enough to find out that if you're in the right ranges or not. 

[Now, the most accurate test you can do is a liquid test kit. Liquid test kit comes in a bunch of different sizes. And the one you want to keep away from is the one that just tests for chlorine and pH.

It's just the phenol red and the OTO yellow solution. That's a really simple test kit. We're going to stay away from that. You want to check for at least chlorine or bromine or salt, whatever sanitizer you use. pH. Alkalinity, calcium hardness and cyanuric acid or CYA. So those are the things you need to test for.

And they're bigger kits. Liquid test kits are more accurate than test strips, but I believe you should have both. You should do your liquid test kit maybe once a week, every two weeks, and then your test strips all in between that, just to make sure that you're not off the beaten path. 

Now, an alternative way to test your water is to take that same sample. And take it over to your local pool store because they can do the test for you. 

The only thing you gotta be careful about is that when you take it to a pool store, depending on what testing system they're using, they may be printing out something from a chemical company, which can be upselling you products.

So you just want to watch out for that. But if they're doing liquid testing, like using a liquid test kit over at the pool store, then you know you're getting something accurate. If they're using test strips. That's fine. You're just not getting the most accurate, reading that you can possibly get.

But I recommend doing it yourself with the liquid test kit that checks for chlorine, bromine, salt, whatever sanitizer do you use is make sure you get pH alkalinity, calcium harness cyanuric acid, and that's pretty much all you need. 

So you get the liquid test kit, you get your test strips, and you take the right sample and you do that on a weekly basis and you should be good to go.

Thanks for sending in your question today. If you want an easy to follow video tutorial plus a downloadable guide that answers all your pool questions, check out the pool care handbook and video course by going to swimuniversity.com/pool and don't forget to use the promo code podcast to get 10% off.

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