Hear from Our Customers
You’re standing in the pool aisle staring at test strips that show colors you can’t quite match to the chart. You add chemicals based on your best guess. A week later, the water’s cloudy or your eyes are burning, and you’re back at square one throwing more money at the problem.
Here’s what changes when you get accurate water testing. You know the exact levels of chlorine, pH, alkalinity, and hardness in your pool. You get a printout with specific recommendations—not generic advice, but exactly what your pool needs based on its size and current condition. You stop buying chemicals you don’t need and start preventing problems before they show up.
Your equipment lasts longer because the water isn’t eating away at metal fittings or corroding your pump. Your family swims without red eyes or skin irritation. You’re not dealing with algae blooms or cloudy water that forces you to cancel the weekend pool party.
That’s what professional pool water testing does. It removes the mystery and gives you a clear path forward.
We’ve been serving families around Bushnell and throughout Coffee County since 2014, built on over 30 years of hands-on pool experience. We’re not a national chain reading from a script. We’re local professionals who’ve built pools, fixed pools, and maintained pools through every South Georgia summer and storm season.
We know how afternoon thunderstorms dilute your chlorine levels. We understand what the heat does to chemical consumption. When you bring us a water sample, you’re getting recommendations from people who’ve seen thousands of pools and know exactly what works in this climate.
The water testing is free because we’d rather build a relationship than make a quick sale. Bring in a sample, get your results in a few minutes, and walk out knowing exactly what to do next.
Grab a clean plastic bottle or container and collect a water sample from about elbow-deep in your pool—not from the surface where debris floats and not from right next to a return jet. You want water that represents what’s actually in your pool. Bring that sample to our location in Douglas, just a short drive from Bushnell.
We run your sample through professional-grade testing equipment that measures seven critical parameters: free chlorine, pH, total alkalinity, calcium hardness, cyanuric acid, salt level, and total dissolved solids. This isn’t a visual color-matching test. It’s laboratory-quality analysis that gives you precise numbers.
The whole process takes about two to three minutes. You get a full printout showing your current levels, the ideal ranges, and specific recommendations for what chemicals to add and how much. We’ll explain what the numbers mean and answer any questions you have about your pool’s chemistry.
No appointment needed. No charge. Just accurate information that helps you maintain your pool the right way.
Ready to get started?
You get testing for all seven major chemical and mineral levels that affect water quality and equipment longevity. Free chlorine tells you if your water is properly sanitized against bacteria and algae. pH measurement shows whether your water is acidic or basic, which affects everything from swimmer comfort to how well your chlorine works. Total alkalinity acts as a pH buffer and prevents wild swings in water chemistry.
Calcium hardness matters more than most people realize. Too low and your water becomes corrosive, etching your pool finish and damaging metal components in your pump and filter. Too high and you get scaling and cloudy water. We test for that.
Cyanuric acid protects your chlorine from being burned off by UV rays—critical in South Georgia where the sun is intense most of the year. Salt level matters if you have a saltwater system. Total dissolved solids show the overall mineral content and help identify when your water needs dilution.
Here in Bushnell and the surrounding Coffee County area, we see specific patterns. Heavy summer rains dilute chemicals fast. High temperatures increase chlorine consumption. Our recommendations account for these local factors, not just generic textbook ranges.
The printout you receive isn’t just numbers. It’s a roadmap that tells you exactly what to buy, how much to add based on your pool’s volume, and what to watch for in the coming week.
At minimum, bring in a sample once a week during swimming season. That’s the baseline for catching problems before they become expensive headaches.
Increase that frequency after heavy rain, which dilutes your chemicals and can introduce contaminants. Test after you’ve had a pool full of swimmers—high bather load depletes chlorine and affects pH. If you’re opening your pool for the season or closing it down, get a test to establish a baseline or make sure you’re winterizing with proper chemistry.
If something looks off—cloudy water, algae starting to form, or your home test strips showing weird results—bring in a sample immediately. Waiting a few days can turn a minor adjustment into a major chemical correction that costs significantly more.
The testing is free, so there’s no reason to skip it. Most pool owners who stay on a weekly schedule spend less on chemicals overall because they’re making small adjustments instead of trying to fix big problems.
Test strips rely on you matching colors to a chart, usually in imperfect lighting, and they often don’t test for everything that matters. The color matching is subjective—what looks like 7.4 pH to you might look like 7.6 to someone else. That margin of error compounds when you’re making chemical decisions based on inaccurate readings.
Our equipment uses photometric analysis and titration methods that give you precise numerical readings, not color approximations. We test for seven parameters including calcium hardness and cyanuric acid, which most home test kits skip entirely. Those two factors directly impact equipment longevity and chlorine effectiveness.
Test strips also degrade over time, especially in South Georgia humidity. If your bottle has been sitting in a hot garage or got exposed to moisture, the results become even less reliable. You might be treating problems that don’t exist or missing issues that do.
Professional testing removes the guesswork. You get exact numbers, a printed record you can reference, and recommendations from people who understand how those numbers interact with each other. It’s the difference between driving with a blindfold and driving with a clear windshield.
Don’t dump everything in at once. Chemical adjustments need to happen in a specific order, and some changes affect others.
Start with total alkalinity if it’s off. Alkalinity acts as a pH buffer, so if you adjust pH first and alkalinity is wrong, your pH will just drift back out of range. Once alkalinity is stable, then adjust pH. After those two are balanced, address calcium hardness if needed.
Chlorine and cyanuric acid work together—if your cyanuric acid is too high, you’ll need more chlorine to achieve the same sanitizing effect. If it’s too low, your chlorine burns off too quickly in the sun. We’ll walk you through the priority order when we give you your results.
The printout specifies how much of each chemical to add and in what sequence. Follow that roadmap and retest in a few days to confirm everything moved in the right direction. Trying to fix everything simultaneously usually creates new problems because you’re essentially guessing at how the chemicals will interact.
This is exactly why the free testing matters. You can come back in three or four days for a follow-up test at no cost, ensuring your corrections worked before you move to the next adjustment.
No appointment necessary. Bring your sample during our regular business hours and we’ll test it while you wait.
The analysis takes two to three minutes from start to finish. You’re not dropping it off and coming back later. You hand us the sample, we run it through the equipment, and you walk out with your printed results and recommendations.
Make sure you’re collecting the sample correctly—from elbow depth, not the surface, and not right next to a return jet or skimmer. Use a clean container, not something that had soap or other chemicals in it. If you’re adding chemicals to your pool, wait at least four hours before collecting a sample so the water has time to circulate and give you accurate readings.
Bring the sample in as soon as possible after collecting it. Water chemistry can shift if the sample sits in a hot car for hours. Ideally, collect it and bring it straight to us.
If you’re coming from Bushnell, we’re located in Douglas—an easy drive that takes just a few minutes. The time you spend getting accurate results saves you hours of frustration and money wasted on trial-and-error chemical treatments.
Your pool equipment takes the biggest hit. Corrosive water from low calcium hardness or improper pH eats away at metal fittings, pump seals, and heat exchanger coils. A pump replacement runs $500 to $1,500. A heater repair or replacement can hit $2,000 or more. Those aren’t small expenses, and they’re completely preventable with balanced water.
Your pool surface suffers too. Acidic water etches plaster and concrete, creating rough spots that are uncomfortable to walk on and expensive to refinish. That’s a $5,000 to $10,000 repair depending on your pool size. High pH and calcium cause scaling that’s difficult to remove and makes your pool look neglected.
Then there’s the health aspect. Improperly sanitized water allows bacteria like E. coli and parasites like giardia to thrive. Your family gets sick. Eyes burn. Skin gets irritated. You end up draining and refilling the pool or doing an expensive chemical shock treatment to kill everything and start over.
Even your chemical spending increases when water is out of balance. Chlorine doesn’t work efficiently in water with wrong pH levels, so you’re adding more than necessary. You’re buying algaecide because your sanitizer isn’t doing its job. You’re purchasing clarifiers because the water’s cloudy from calcium issues.
Regular testing catches these problems when they’re small adjustments costing a few dollars, not major corrections costing hundreds or equipment replacements costing thousands. The testing is free. The information is invaluable.
We test any residential water system—pools, spas, hot tubs, and swim spas. The chemistry principles are the same, though the ideal ranges differ slightly because of temperature and water volume differences.
Hot tubs and spas actually need more frequent testing than pools because the water is hotter, which accelerates chemical reactions and increases evaporation. Higher temperatures also make the water a better environment for bacteria growth, so maintaining proper sanitizer levels is even more critical. The smaller water volume means chemical levels can shift faster with just a few people using it.
Bring in a sample the same way you would for a pool—collect from mid-depth in a clean container and get it to us quickly. We’ll test all the same parameters and give you specific recommendations based on whether it’s a chlorine or bromine system, what your typical usage looks like, and what we’re seeing in the results.
Many people in the Bushnell area have both a pool and a spa. You can bring samples for both at the same time. We’ll test them separately and give you individual printouts with recommendations for each. Still no charge, still just a few minutes of your time, and you leave knowing exactly how to maintain both systems properly.
Local Resources
Useful Links
Other Services we provide in Bushnell
