Okay stupid question time:
If you have a “salt system” is the baking soda needed? I am thinking no, that it is only for the chemical pools.
When we started house hunting in Las Vegas, our mantra was “and room for a pool”…our real estate agent would then only show us homes with backyards “and room for a pool”.
They started putting our pool in a week after we closed on the house. It cost $20,000 - or the price of a mid-sized car. It is in-ground, 35 feet long and 15 feet wide, starts at 3 and a half feet deep and only goes to five foot deep. We have solar heating which is not solar cells like some people think. It is a black rubber mat on the roof that has tubes going through it. You have to have the water pump going at least 6 hours a day anyway, and all this does is force the water up there to be heated by the sun, and it comes down HOT - as long as the sun is hot, which is seldom a problem in Las Vegas. We have to turn off the solar ever couple of days or it turns into a huge jacuzzi…right now the temperature in our pool is 88, but we had it up to 95 last week (too warm). You can also use those solar heater to cool the pool! You simply change the water pump to go at night and it moves the water to the roof (that is now cool) and it actually brings the temperature down. The solar heater allows us to start swimming earlier (late February, early March depending on the weather) and swim later (last year it was still warm enough to swim on Thanksgiving). December and January are, well, just a tad too cool and without the heater, we had a little teeny piece of ice on the pool mid-January.
We have a vaccuum cleaner thingie in the pool that sucks up all the dust, dead leaves and stuff, and the skimmer takes off whatever is floating so cleaning the pool is - well, a non-issue. We clean the fliter once every two weeks, unless it is a particularly windy/dusty week and then we clean it weekly. We put in a couple of chlorine tabs a week (about a dollar per tab) and that is it. I have never heard of the baking soda trick and might try that.
We absolutely love our pool, I use it every night when I come home from work (and we have had the pool for 5 years now) and when we turn on the pool light and just sit on the patio at night, it is peaceful to see and it is nice to sit next to water. And at least here in Las Vegas, selling a home that has a pool is a major plus.
Also, even though we have a drought, the water company here finds pools are not a problem - unlike grass, pools actually use very little water. Even on hot summer days, we probably have to re-fill only about a bathtub of water once a week due to evaporation and sometimes not even that. Wind seems to make the water evaporate faster than normal.
If we ever buy another house in the Southwest, we will continue our mantra of “and room for a pool”. The only thing we might do next time is have the pool be about 5 feet longer, and two feet wider - but that’s just nitpicking.