Vibrant Pool
I own a home with an inground pool. I love it. I will never again own a home without a pool. That being said, sometimes pool maintenance can be an issue. I use the BBB method for pool maintenance. I will explain the BBB method in a subsequent post. Because I use the BBB method pool maintenance is quite cheap. I would say that during swimming season I spend about $40.00 per month to treat a 18 x 36 inground vinyl pool. When I first bought the house I bought whatever the pool store “technicians” told me to buy. It was staggering. The first summer I spent about $300.00 per month. I went on a search for a cheaper method of pool maintenence and found the BBB method.
I said all that to say that while inexpensive the BBB method still requires me to track all the same data I would track with a more traditional pool maintenance plan. I test for and track the following information: Free Chlorine, Combined Chlorine, Total Chlorine, pH, Alkalinity, water temprature, and CYA levels. I usually write the information down on a pad in order to track the chemistry as the swimming season progresses. The problem has been that it is easy to misplace the pad from test to test and season to season. I figured that there had to be a better way.
I am a programmer by trade so I figured I would write some software to track the test results. The result of that idea is a product is called Vibrant Pool, and it can be downloaded from http://www.vibrantpool.com, free of charge. This software enables you to keep a detailed history of typical pool chemistry test results, it can also chart test results over time. The application can hold multiple “pool profiles”, so if you manage several pools you can track each one individually. The software is written in Java 1.6 and will run on Windows, Linux and Mac platforms.
I realize that this tool is specialized, but a lot of people will find it useful (I hope). Please note that the website is not fully functional, but the application will be available for download shortly.
Here are some screenshots:
Main Screen
Pool Profile Dialog
Chart Dialog