Stop Buying Pool Chemicals You Don't Need: The Chemist's Circle, Explained

I want you to picture a shelf in your garage. Not the whole garage, just the shelf. The one with ten or eleven half used pool chemicals lined up on it. Each one bought because somebody behind a counter told you it was the fix. You didn't end up with that shelf by being careless with your pool. You ended up there by doing exactly what you were told to do, every single time, by an industry that makes more money the less anything on that shelf actually works. I built something to empty that shelf. Today, just today, I'm going to tell you exactly what it is, what it costs, and why the timing on this actually matters.

Here's the sentence I use to describe it because it's the only sentence that's ever been necessary. Bring me your numbers. I'll tell you exactly what your pool needs and exactly how to fix it. No product to sell you, just the answer. That's the whole pitch. The chemist circle isn't a course you work through on your own time. It's direct access to a working chemist for your specific pool, twice a month, with real chemistry behind every answer instead of a guess off a laminated card at a pool store counter and a trunk full of stuff for your garage shelf. Here's what that looks like in practice. You submit your readings.

Free chlorine, pH, alkalinity, calcium hardness, CYA, the actual state of your water. I read it personally. You get back exactly what to do, in order, in plain steps. Raise this first, then this, retest in two days. Your answer doesn't come someday. It comes within 24 hours of when you submit it. Let's talk about what this is actually worth, because I'm not going to ask you to take that on faith. Here's one way to look at it. A trip to the pool store runs somewhere between$100 and$200 once you walk out with what they hand you. Sometimes a lot more than that. And here's the part nobody at that counter is going to tell you.

About half of what you bring home creates a brand new problem that needs yet another product to fix. That's not bad luck. That's the pool store business model. The cycle keeps running because the store has no reason to stop it. None of this is about the kid behind the counter, by the way. He's repeating what he was taught, same as anybody who's never been given the real chemistry. This is about a system that makes more money confusing you than it would informing you. Second way to look at it, and this one's even bigger. A replaster in this market, here in Kansas City, starts at about$15,000 and can run past$50,000.

A vinyl liner replacement is three to five thousand minimum. A fiberglass refinish is about ten grand or more. Correct chemistry, held correctly, prevents all of that. Every single bit. I'm not talking in hypotheticals. If you heard episode 11, you'll know I have a fiberglass pool and active service right now that came in with calcium scale forming across the surface. Exactly the kind of thing that usually ends with a contractor and a refinish quote with a bunch of zeros and a comma in it. We didn't refinish or renovate anything. We didn't have to. We brought the alkalinity down from 154 to 75 with muriatic acid, kept the LSI at negative 0.2, and used aeration to keep the pH in check at 7.2 to 7.4 without undoing the alkalinity work.

99% of those deposits dissolved back out over the following weeks. The entire remediation, start to finish, used two gallons of myriatic acid. That's it. No extras to buy, no random chemicals to make a bigger mess, just acid at four dollars a gallon against a refinished at ten thousand or more. Eight bucks. The membership costs less per month than a single bottle of algecide that your pool never needed in the first place. One pool store visit, with its usual cascade, can pay for several months of the circle. One season of that cycle can pay for an entire year of it. The pool store sells you a cycle.

The circle ends it. Concretely, here's what's inside it. Two personalized chemistry submissions every month, through a form built exactly for this, not a comment box. A real response within 24 hours, written for your pool, not a general answer built for everyone's pool. Access to the chemist circle community where I'm answering questions every week, not just twice a month. And if something comes up that burns through your two submissions early, a flood, a party, a new piece of equipment behaving badly, there's a one-time option to cover it. That's called the spot check. Same real answer, same 24-hour turnaround, just for that one extra situation. At a member discount, because you shouldn't pay full price twice in the same month.

Two submissions a month is the right cadence for most pools. Not because I'm rationing it, but because chemistry that's actually being managed correctly doesn't really swing fast enough to need more than that. The submissions exist for the questions that actually come up, not just for busy work. If the circle feels like more than you want to start with, there's a lower entry point. It's called the test kit, and it's$13 a month. It gets you into the community, the discount code, and the door to the spot check whenever you need it. But the rate I want to talk to you about today and the one with an actual deadline attached to it is the circle membership itself.

Here's the part episode 11 didn't say on air, on purpose. I'm saying it here because this episode exists specifically to say it. The founding rate for the chemist circle is$49 a month, or$490 a year if you'd rather pay once and save what works out to about two months. That rate is capped. The first hundred people to join lock it in permanently for as long as they stay a member. After that hundred, the rate moves to the standard pricing, which will be$79 a month or$790 a year, and it does not come back down. That's not a promotional discount that creeps back up in six months. It's permanent for as long as you're a member, and it stays that way even after the price for everyone else goes up.

I'm not going to manufacture urgency that isn't real. This one is real. If this is the first time you're hearing about it, you're not actually the first to know. The email list already had this, which is exactly why spots are already filling up. I built it this way on purpose, because the people willing to commit early are the people who understand what this is worth before everybody else catches up. And if that's you, the link is on the website at poolsscientific.com. The only thing standing between you and that rate is whether you act before those first hundred spots are taken. I'll tell you honestly why I built this.

I got tired of waiting for somebody else to show up in this space and actually help a person out. Nobody was coming. So I built the thing I wished already existed for everyone standing at their equipment pad, trying to figure out why their pool looked the way it did. If you've been listening to this show for any length of time, you already know I mean every word of that. Go bring me your numbers.