Yesterday I got home to find the bill from my pool guy in the mailbox.  Good.  He was here to clean the pool.  I opened it to see that I was billed for his regular monthly charge plus a charge for cleaning the filters (ok, they probably needed it) and a charge for a new outlet (what is this?).

I went out back to see a hole drilled in the wood fence where some giant pvc piping was coming out, going across the concrete and over the edge of the pool into the water.  It seems the pool guy felt I needed new piping to send the filtered water back into the pool.  Maybe there was a leak or a stoppage in the old piping.  However, I have a number of problems with this.  Most importantly, he just did the work without contacting me for authorization.  And this new piping is above ground, ugly and probably not to code.  Additionally, the filtered water is being dumped back into the pool right next to the skimmer.  So how does all the water from the other end of the pool ever make it down to the skimmer?  Just doesn’t seem logical.  The old water return piping is underground and goes almost all the way to the other end of the pool allowing the water to flow from one end to the other.

The big problem is that this guy comes on Wednesday while I’m at work.  So I rarely ever see him unless I’m off on vacation or sick.  And he comes at all different hours of the day, so I can’t arrange to be here when he’s here.  Guess I’m going to have to write him a letter when I pay his bill.  And, for the time being, I won’t be paying the charge for the new outlet.  I need an explanation before I just give him the $$$.

Also, I went out this morning to check out his work in the daylight.  That’s when I saw where he cleaned the filters–all over my new flowerbed along the fence, coating the ground and all my roses with all the residue from the filters!  I’m going to tell him that I no longer want him to clean the filters.  I’d rather do it myself the way I used to do it (at the end of the driveway, out at the curb) than to now have to deal with cleaning up the mess he’s made…and paying him $50 for making this big mess!

He does a really good job cleaning the pool and is the most reliable pool guy I’ve found so I don’t want to make him mad.  But I’ll look for a new pool guy if he gives me a hard time about all this.