Chaichara

And expat customers complain about the still low prices for pools, maintenance, and repairs by pool companies which for reasons of quality, professionalism, and knowledge of languages, employ expat staff. Such clients seem to want their cake and eat it.

Sometimes you need a real pool expert to talk to on the phone and in your language. Personal experience shows that WinWin is geared up to selling, selling, selling, to Thai customers and not to expats who might well pay a tiny bit more to a firm that can provide professional advice and a genuine e-commerce website with transparent shipping costs and conditions etc. WinWin provides neither; in fact when they detect a foreign voice on the phone they generally just hang up - even on one who can speak fluent (but not accent-free) Thai. It's different of course if like Sapparest, you already know exactly what you want.

Correct. Same as ภาษาฝรั่งเศส means French (language) What a load of cobblers gets posted in these Thai Visa threads. I've been here 22 years and never felt or known anyone to be offended by it. I'm not even offended when the Krauts call me Inselaffe, their pet word for the Brits. If one wants to hear frequently used offensive words about a non-ethic people, just go to the UK or the US. It seems to me that some expats in Thailand deliberately look for things to complain about or feel offended by.

Despite having been fully vaccinated in early December (Pfizer) I got full COVID-19 in February and was in an expensive international hospital for 7 weeks. At my age I've been lucky. Within days of being admitted, I received a call from some pig ignorant government official asking why I had not spent time in the Puket sandbox. It took my wife many minutes to explain to the idiot that I am not a tourist and I have lived in Udon Thani legally for 22 years and not left the country since 2016. He still did not understand. BTW, be aware that AETENA cover 80% of the hopitalisation, but not any medication or ICU directly associated with the cure of COVID and its associated pneumonia. These IV meds are very expensive. At home now, but a full recovery is expected to take several more months.

Bought on LAZADA perhaps? The advertisers on the LAZ -e-commerce platform include a great many scammers, especially among those that 'ship-from abroad'. Generally, Thai based suppliers are more trustworthy, but 20% of the orders are received broken due to inadequate packing, or even the wrong product. Getting a refund from LAZ is a minefield of excessively complicated administrative procedure but if you can wade through it, they will collect the return product for free - and then the waiting starts...

Well saved, but their website and other product and customer support services leave a lot to be desired.

That would be about right, depending on optional required features. Overflow pools will cost more. Pools in remoter areas will cost more too - this is the disadvantage for expats who built their house in their wife's vilage in Isan and now want a pool!

I meant 'shill', quite clearly, 'shill'.

The difference is, I'm not a shill, and I have nothing to 'flog'.

Please quote your scientific/academic source. Nobody is talking about anything 'cool' or 'sexy'. World class developers don't waste R&D and setting up manufacturing plant in their factories on modern systems for fun, especially when they save effort and money for end users and can outsell traditional, clumsy, hard-to-manage chlorination.

I think this is an excellent idea. I have rarely gotten so involved in such a tedious discussion.

Small indoor pools in poorly ventilated spaces, particularly where a large sliding door-window cannot be fully opened up to the outside, can accumulate very unhealthy levels of chemical residue at face level when bathers are in the water. Fortunately, new technologies are now available for disinfecting pools almost totally avoiding the use of chlorine or any harsh disinfectants. They are also far more economical.

'Could' is a modal verb.

Nothing is obvious, Bagwain. Those of us who have professionally built and serviced hundreds of pools across Europe and Thailand for 50 years have almost certainly accumulated some knowledge - some of us may even be actually technically and and academically qualified to boot, beyond the claims in the manufacturers' brochures. It's already been mentioned that the tone of your comments may not always instill confidence in those who read them. You may not be actually selling the stuff, but your persistent claims could lead one to assume you have have some kind of vested interest in moving a stockpile of it.

Many jurisdictions have laws regarding the water quality and sanity of pools for public purposes. These measures are the results of independent scientific studies commissioned by the governments. Some of the more serious pool professionals and companies base their calculations for filtration and disinfection on these reports. I do. One does not 'debunk' such scientific papers but of course there are plenty of shirt-sleeve pool 'pros' who always want to know better. What one does in their private pool in the confines of their own back garden is up to them, but genuine pool consultants and companies won't take the risk of spreading dilettantish and possible harmful information. Like car manufacturers, they have a duty to the pubic they serve with their their products and the safety that surrounds them. We don't debunk the criteria for motor vehicle Construction & Use regulations - or do we? Debate that.

Is the bold type strictly necessary? Are you a pool professional? Under what technical terms of reference are you 'debunking' anything? Please provide peer reviewed academic sources.

Thank you for the lecture, but it detracts from the fact that this is a pool forum. That's all that former pool professionals are interested in discussing here. People can and do get quickly ill from poorly maintained pool water because it's constantly recycled. It's not a bathtub where you pull the plug and flush the water away after every use. Nor does passing the water through a few grains of crushed glass destroy the unsafe microorganisms.

Correct, Sapparest, and thank you for that, but for years, some of the other participants in this TV pool forum have a strange habit of totally confusing pool filtration with pool disinfection. Two entirely different processes even if they (sometimes) take place in the same pump room. Sorry to say, but even some who claim to be pool professionals get it wrong. Are we not already saturated with the constant stream of fantastic/fantasy claims for crushed recycled glass - for example?

Both, but the more professional they are, the more polite they express themselves. There is a difference between a polished pool showroom with a truly qualified pool expert and a street marketeer with a surplus of stock in his garage desperate to get rid of.

Claims of any kind of glass media being safer or better than Zelbrite are a marketing ploy to get rid of what is ostensibly a mistakenly large ordered quantity of stock of crushed, recycled glass. Zeolites have nothing in common with common silicone dioxide - crushed glass / beach sand / whatever. Zeolites are the standard media for laboratory and hospital water filtration - only better is very expensive reverse osmosis that provides drinking water purity. Never confuse water filtration with disinfection/purification. Some filtration systems can retain very small microorganisms and algae but they don't destroy them.

As others have stated, D.E. , once the best known method, compared to modern, maintenance-free sand filters, is messy, maintenance intenhsive (regular cleaning and replacement if the screens, etc), is now very oldfashioned. Zelbrite is the absolute way to go (forget shills trying to get rid of their over-purchase of stock of glass media). That said, Bob, yours is not the only store selling it.

Terms&Conditions are flagrantly abused, especially by Thai based swimming pool shops. Never buy pool equipment from other than a recognised supplier, hem preferably from their own online store - if they have one. Never order at the first price you see. The price differences between tgevendors can be totally rediculous. Obtaining refunds from Lazada is a long and laborious process - even if it works. Especially if you live a long way from the nearest return drop off. Some products delivered from local Thai stock arrive very quickly. Tey re sent from and by genuiine Thai companies. Anything else can sometimes take weeks, arrives damaged, and is poorly packed in thin, grey platic bags with little protection. Always select COD for such items, unpack on delivery and id broken ir incomplete, refused the deliver, even if the van driver says he can't take it back.

Having followed your comments for a while now, I don't think the tone of them reflects the pool professionalism you ascribe to. If you want to find resonance for your famous EcoClear, you might wish to come across in a more friendly manner. Just sayin' ????

The positive noise, at least, is to sort the hype from the marketeers who use the forum free of charge to sell their wares, and in the faint hope that some readers won't let the wool be pulled over their eyes by street market-style shills. Yes, pool people in Thailand often have a bit of the Del Boy about them ????

Astral don't actually make many products these days. They are just a brand name of Fluidra who bought them out a few years ago along with a host of other pool brands who reputations were sinking. It's all made by Fluidra factories around the world and probably in places where labour is cheap. A quick comparison of online prices will soon establish that Astral prices for all 'their' products are extremely high, due mainly to the need for satisfying layers and layers of Fluidra shareholders' demands for dividends. In the pool market, high prices are rarely indicative of best quality whether here in Thailand or in Europe. EcoClear is just another of the dozens of run-of-the mill glass crushers - there are about 6 different purveyors in Thailand of the same brand in various packaging design and wildly different prices, all making the same wild claims. There is no knowing where it actually comes from.