Robert Henry
Founder
Over fifteen years on every side of the pool business — service routes, equipment repair and warranty work, new construction, and the test counter.
About
I started PoolBuff because the good pool advice never gets written down
Not in articles. In the heads of route techs, builders and pool store staff who explain the same six things every day and never write any of it down.
If you search for almost any pool problem, you get three kinds of result. A retailer page that ends in a product. A forum thread from 2011 where three people disagree confidently. Or a 2,000-word article written by someone who has clearly never held a test kit, padded out to hit a word count.
None of that helps the person standing in front of a green pool at seven on a Saturday morning.
PoolBuff is my attempt at the fourth thing: what a pool professional would actually tell you if you caught them at the equipment pad and they had no reason to sell you anything.
What that means in practice
The answer goes first. If you asked how much acid to add, the number appears before the history of pH. I would rather you left in ninety seconds having solved it than stayed six minutes and not.
I tell you when not to do it yourself. Plenty of pool work is well within a homeowner’s reach. Gas heater internals, bonding and anything structural are not, and a site that never says so is selling confidence rather than advice.
Nobody buys a recommendation. I do not sell placements, rankings or awards. Some links earn me a commission at no cost to you, and that arrangement has never decided a verdict — the affiliate disclosure sets out exactly how it works.
Pages get revisited, not replaced. When a product is discontinued or a code changes, I update the page and move the date. I do not publish a near-identical article with a new year on the end.
What this is not
This is not a laboratory, and I do not pretend otherwise. I run equipment on working pools for a season and report what happened, which is a different and in most ways more useful thing. Where a number comes from a standard, a manufacturer specification or published research rather than my own testing, I cite it on the page.
This is also not a substitute for a licensed professional on gas, electrical or structural work, or for your local code. Codes vary more than people expect, and the version that matters is the one your inspector holds.
Who writes this
One person who did this for a living
Every article carries a byline, and the person named on it is the person who wrote it.
How to hold me to it
- Written by someone who did the jobFifteen years on service routes, repair calls and build sites. Not a content farm.
- Checked against the manufacturerModel numbers, specs and warranty terms come from the maker’s own manuals, not a retailer listing.
- Kept currentEvery page carries a visible last-updated date and a correction path.
Found something wrong?
Tell me. Corrections go to a person, not a form queue, and a material correction changes the page’s last-updated date, so nothing is quietly edited away.