ARTICLES Archives - Page 110 of 315

Seeing Nature

Over the holidays this past December, we broke with family tradition and, instead of gathering around tree and hearth as we've done as a family every year since 1982, all of us headed to the Big Island of Hawaii for an entirely new sort of celebration. My wife and I had been there once before, staying at what was then the newly opened Hyatt Regency Waikoloa for a meeting of the National Spa & Pool Institute's Board of Directors. (I recall that Skip Philips was chairman at the time.) After that meeting nearly 25 years ago, Judy and I had taken several extra days and motored around the island at a leisurely pace, staying in tiny motels and spending most of our time

They're wildly popular, writes Scott Cohen, but he's seen enough problems with salt-chlorination systems in his role as a construction-defects expert witness that he thinks it's wise to make homeowners aware of the possible drawbacks that can be associated with saline technologies.

Coping with Salt

In my work as a construction-defect expert witness, I've seen how damaging salty water can be to hardscape materials around pools and spas equipped with saltwater chlorination systems. It's so common that, personally, I now try to avoid using those devices on the watershapes I design and build. It's not that I think saltwater chlorination is intrinsically evil; instead, it's the fact I've seen so many different things go wrong with watershapes that have these systems that I decided some time ago that they weren't for me. It's often said that

Keyboard Exercises

Among the many things I like about working on WaterShapes.com and its companion digital newsletter is the opportunity it has given me to write. Back when I was with Pool & Spa News, I wrote opening editorials in just about every issue for nine years. That kept the engine going, but I wouldn't exactly describe the "Reflections" I wrote there as either free-wheeling or exactly

Faced with the challenge of fitting a lap pool into a relatively compact backyard space, Randy Beard used geometry to his advantage in crafting a perimeter-overflow/vanishing-edge pool and spa that aligns sweepingly with the homeowners' needs.

Formal Ease

These days, we do most of our work in the hills in and around Newport Beach, Calif. To describe the area as "affluent" is understating the case: For years now, even modest homes for sale in the area usually draw seven-figure prices - and the more modest the home, the likelier it is that it will be torn down and replaced with something larger and more elaborate. Through the past few years, we at Pure Water Pools of Costa Mesa, Calif., have been called to many of these built-out properties by homeowners who

The Aquatic Quiz #20

County to Create Pool Network Safe for People with Dementia

A Critical Eye

I spend a lot of time looking at watershapes: Big and small, elaborate and simple, recreational and decorative, calm and eruptive, distant and interactive. In too many ways to count, they're so much nicer now than when WaterShapes started paying attention to them 16 years ago. I think back to a time when I was an occasional

More than 25 years ago, even before he was a watershaper, Jim Wilder came across a fountain puzzle he couldn't solve. Since then, he's figured it out -- and shares his observations of a neat effect here.

A Sloshing Mystery

Water in the open basins that commonly surround fountain jets or nozzles is never tranquil while these systems are in operation. It will slosh around in response to the upward thrust of those jets or nozzles as well as the splashing the rising water makes as it drops back into the basin. If the circumstances are right, this disruptive splashing will produce waves in a distinct, consistent pattern. By exploiting these waves, it's possible to produce an effect I find

Remembering Andreas Sofikitis

Andreas Sofikitis, president of Sofikitis Decorative Stones, passed away on October 28, 2014, the victim of a hit-and-run accident. I first met him at a trade show more than a dozen years ago and was immediately struck by what a nice guy he was as well as his level of enthusiasm and passion for his work. But I was even more impressed when I saw what he was producing in his fabrication shop and recognized that he was a game-changer in

Finding Balance

Decades ago, people in the pool industry started becoming aware that there was more to pool maintenance than just adding sanitizers to the water (to kill algae and bacteria) and filtering it (to help keep it crystal clear). Gradually, we learned that even properly sanitized and filtered pool water could become unbalanced. Further, we figured out that unbalanced water could be either scale-forming, in which case a layer of