When we moved into our house, we decided to stick with Poseidon because the previous owner was a real estate professional and said Poseidon had done a good job taking care of the pool. As first-time pool owners, Brad was fantastic about coming out and showing us how to do things like change the valves and turn on the heater for running the hot tub. As summer heated up last summer, we started having a significant amount of algae that would accumulate each day on the floor and walls of both the pool and the hot tub. Brad's advice was to repeatedly have the filters cleaned. The algae problem persisted. We reported the problem to Brad numerous times and the pool guy would have also seen what was happening. It would take about 30 minutes each day to scrub the walls and floor of the hot tub and pool just to keep it from getting out of control. Each day during the summer algae would accumulate on every surface where water touched. At several points during our 18 months with Poseidon, Brad mentioned coming out to do a cyanuric acid test to check to see if we had "bad water." That never happened. Towards the end of last summer Brad told us our pool guy, Derrick, was color blind. We thought that's maybe why our pool service was so bad. But as this summer started to heat up this year and with a new pool guy, we started to once again have algae problems. My in-laws who are in their 80s have a pool service here in Las Vegas and never had an algae problem where every day they'd have to go scrub every nook and cranny, wall and floor of their pool so we started to think maybe Poseidon wasn't doing the job a typical pool service does. There had been many times where they'd report they had cleaned baskets but we'd go out right after they left and there would be huge amounts of debris in, say, the pump basket. Our last day with Poseidon, my husband and I intentionally didn't brush the algae and the pool guy reported he had brushed the steps and walls but hadn't brushed anything. I'll post pictures for you to see what the pool walls and hot tub looked like after he left. At any rate, I told my husband that if we wanted a green, dirty pool, I could do that for us for free. So we terminated services. Ending services was the best thing we could have done. I went to Leslie's Pool and picked up a test kit, purchased chemicals from Lowes, and started learning how to take care of our pool from YouTube videos. When I tested the cyanuric acid levels, which probably takes a total of two minutes to do, the cyanuric acid levels were so high that it became quite apparent to us that no one at Poseidon had ever done that test on our pool. It's supposed to be closer to 30 ppm to 50 ppm and ours was so off the chart that I'm guessing it was ten times that amount. What that means is the free chlorine that kills not only algae and germs was completely getting bound up and neutralized by cyanuric acid. This means we had been swimming around in filthy water with neutralized chlorine all last summer and the beginning of this summer. To make matters worse, the pool guys had been putting two to three pucks into the pool every week. HALF of those pucks is cyanuric acid. So every week they were making the problem worse We could have been pouring buckets of shock in and never have been sanitizing the water like it needs to be cleaned. High cyanuric acid also messes up other chemical tests. Had Poseidon tested at any point beyond pH and free chlorine, the problem would have been obvious. It was NOT a dirty filter problem. We drained our pool with a sump pump, fixed a couple of spots where rebar was too close to the surface, acid washed the hot tub, refilled the pool and hot tub, and balanced all the chemicals and now we have a sparkling pool that has NO ALGAE. In fact, there had been algae in all of our vacuum tubes and skimmer that is completely gone now that we have our pool balanced and the chemicals are actually working to kill it. Places where there were tannin stains from leaves and bird poo are also gone because having the pool balanced is allowing the chlorine to do its job.The best thing we ever did was let Brad and his team go. He's a nice guy, but I question whether or not his company can do even the most basic of chemical testing and maintenance. He's a super nice guy, but he let us go a whole summer and a month into this one scrubbing a pool thirty minutes a day that a two-minute test and putting in fresh water could have made into a much lower maintenance and much cleaner swim experience. My advice if you're going to hire Poseidon is to make sure they do occasional cyanuric acid, total alkalinity, and hard water tests and report those numbers to you in addition to free chlorine and pH. They should be letting you know what the normal range is and what corrective action needs to be taking place. The other tests beyond the pH and free chlorine levels do matter and should be done routinely by your pool company. read more