MP Industries (Huntington Beach, CA) has released the Auto-Lev Model 1953-J, an accurate, easy-to-install device…
RicoRock (Orlando, FL) is now manufacturing pre-cast, artificial-rock copings for use with new vinyl-liner pools…
Lifeguard Lift (Eaton Rapids, MI) makes two battery-powered, ADA-compliant lifts (Models 100287 and 100289) that…
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
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
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
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
County to Create Pool Network Safe for People with Dementia
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
