About Skim & Soak

Who writes this

Scooter M.. An enthusiast who is genuinely into this. No lab coat, no test pool, no thirty years in the trade — someone who reads the product labels, compiles the published specs, does the arithmetic and shows the working. If a number appears on this site, you can click through to where it came from.

That is the whole byline. There is no team, no expert panel and no advisory board, and there is no point implying one - a site three months old with a staff of specialists is a claim anybody can check.

What there is: a genuine interest in the category, a habit of reading the label rather than the marketing, and a willingness to publish the arithmetic so somebody else can catch a mistake. Our methodology page sets out exactly how that works.

Why this site is organized by problem

Every pool site we looked at files its content by product category: chemicals here, cleaners there, filters somewhere else. That is how a shop is arranged, and it makes sense if you already know what you are looking for.

Nobody standing beside a green pool searches “pool sanitizer chemicals”. They search “my pool is green”. So the five sections here are named for what you are looking at:

• Green Water & Algae - The pool turned green because chlorine lost a race. Here is how far behind you are, and exactly how much it takes to catch up.
• Cloudy Water - Cloudy is a symptom with six common causes. Diagnose it before you dose it, because two of the six get worse when you add chemicals.
• Leaves & Debris - Getting leaves out is a five-minute job with the right net. Keeping them out is the part worth spending money on.
• Robotic Cleaners & Vacuums - The most expensive thing you will buy for a pool. We compare the published specs, compute what each one costs to run, and say which ones we would skip.
• Testing & Chemistry - You cannot dose what you have not measured. The kits worth owning, the numbers worth hitting, and the arithmetic behind every dose on this site.

What this site does that others do not

It publishes the arithmetic. Every competitor we read says “shock your pool” and “add clarifier”. None of them says how much, for what volume, of which product, and where the number came from.

That is a real gap and it is fillable without a laboratory. Every dose on this site is computed from the active-ingredient percentage printed on the product you own and the weight of water, and every page shows the formula so you can redo it. If we are wrong, you can find out.

Who it is for

Somebody who owns a pool, is looking at a problem, and wants a specific instruction rather than an article. If you want to understand pool chemistry as a subject there are better places; if you want to know how much shock to add to 17,000 gallons tonight, that is what this is.

What it deliberately does not cover

• Pool construction and resurfacing. Different trade, different expertise, and we have neither.
• Gas, high-voltage electrical and structural work. Those need a licensed professional. Nothing on this site should be read as an alternative to one.
• Local service recommendations. We have no way to assess a contractor in your area, and the searches for it are the most lucrative in this whole category - which is exactly why we would not trust ourselves to answer them well.

The things we will not do

• Claim to have tested anything we have not. Units we claim to have tested: 0. It is on the methodology page in those words.
• Publish a price we have not verified. Prices come from a live layer or the button says “Check price”. There is no third option and no field in our content model that could hold a remembered number.
• Invent a review or a rating. There are no testimonials on this site and no star ratings in our structured data, because we have not earned either.
• Recommend something because it pays more. Several pages here recommend a two-dollar net, a bag of baking soda or cutting back a tree branch over anything expensive, because those are the right answers.

Who owns this

Skim & Soak is published by Slate Mill Group. It is funded by Amazon Associates commission and nothing else - no sponsored placements, no paid reviews, no free products accepted. The affiliate disclosure covers it in full.

There are currently 47 content pages here, all of them written by Scooter M., and every one carries the date it was last reviewed.

Getting in touch

The contact page, or info@skimandsoak.com. Corrections are genuinely welcome - if a number here is wrong, we would rather know than not, and the editorial policy says what happens when you tell us.