Pools & Spas
It’s one of the oldest existing lifeforms on the planet—blue-green algae. Treating bodies of water affected by “harmful algae blooms” or HABs, is an all-encompassing water treatment challenge, one that begins by understanding the opportunistic nature of these organisms and the constant nature of their threat to water quality, from pools to ponds to the world’s largest lakes.
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There’s a seasonal rhythm to pool service in the Northeast, an annual awakening and slumber that defines the business. For Long Island’s Julie Kazdin, winterizing 300-plus pools is a long, carefully choreographed process, one that defines the annual ebb and flow. As she explains here, the process begins long before the first pool is closed and ends with the first successful openings of spring.
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In the pool renovation business, builders face a persistent challenge: how do you deliver long-term performance in an industry that has historically been built around short-term surface solutions? According to Aaron King, common problems such as cracking, staining, and delamination are no longer inevitable, but are now entirely avoidable.
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The MAHC covers a spectrum of critical issues for aquatic facilities, including design, lifeguarding, and facility operation. Here in Part II of our look into the code’s fine points, Dewey Case, technical director for the Council for the MAHC, explores key areas within the code aimed at giving facility owners and managers tools needed for sustained success and safety.
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At Danville Community High School in Danville, Ind., the school's aquatic program had long operated under constraints that were becoming impossible to ignore. The existing pool—aging in both infrastructure and design—was struggling to keep pace with the demands of a growing student population, an increasingly competitive swim program, and modern expectations for safety, efficiency, and accessibility.
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For the millions of homeowners with swimming pools, water conservation means rethinking how they manage one of their property's most water-intensive features. The good news? One of the most effective solutions is already well-established—the automatic pool cover.
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Watershaping mastery reveals itself in many different guises, from the ultra-elaborate and complex to the relatively simple and sublime. The Santa Monica project by Kevin Cobabe pictured here fell into both categories, with a visually simplistic design that featured a host of fine details and precise construction.
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In Horseshoe Bay, Texas, Southern Living Pools and the shotcrete specialists at Texan Gunite faced an unusual challenge: constructing a large, curvilinear watershape with most of its structure suspended directly above Lake LBJ. The ASA award-winning Yates Project demanded months of coordination, careful logistics, and precise dry-mix shotcrete placement to transform an ambitious lakeside vision into concrete reality.
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The health and safety of public aquatic facilities rests on a complex foundation of science, engineering, operations, and human behavior. At the center of that effort is the Model Aquatic Health Code (MAHC), a living document that has become the most influential guidance resource for aquatic facilities across the United States.
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The Cognitive Current