Pool math, with the work shown.

What PoolSolver is

22 calculators + 1 orchestration hub across four clusters

PoolSolver covers pool ownership through four connected clusters — chemistry (the sanitiser, balance, and saturation arc), heating (sizing, cost, evaporation loss, heat-up time), filtration (the turnover spine through pump, filter, and cost), and water and filling (cost, time, and the round-pool capacity lookup). Each cluster is a connected sequence of calculators, not a flat list: the cluster hubs explain the order; the spokes do the math; the homepage's system view renders the dependency graph the whole site rests on.

The audience is pool owners who want to understand the number, not just receive one. Every calculator on the site exposes its constants, formulas, and substitutions; every reference figure traces to a primary source named on the page; and the site states the epistemic status of every claim — what is a standard, what is a textbook mechanism, what is industry practice. The next section describes that editorial standard in detail.

Editorial standard

Verified or omitted

Every constant, formula, and factual claim on PoolSolver traces to a primary source. If a number cannot be sourced, it does not appear on the site.

Concrete: precision matters

Most pool calculators round the gallons-per-cubic-foot conversion to 7.5. The NIST-exact value (231 in³/gal, the legal definition of a US gallon) is 7.48052. The difference compounds: 0.26 % per gallons calculation propagates into every chemistry dose (ppm × gallons × 8.345), every heating BTU (gallons × specific heat × ΔT), and every filtration turnover (gallons ÷ flow rate). PoolSolver uses the full precision of the primary constant; the volume calculator shows the substitution. Conventions, by contrast, are labelled conventions: the 0.85 kidney-shape area factorused by the volume calculator's freeform-shape path is named and bracketed with an error bar (real kidney pools vary from ~0.80 to ~0.90 depending on lobe proportions), not presented as a measured constant.

The named sources

• NIST and the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics — physical constants used at full precision: 7.48052 gal/ft³ (from the NIST-exact 231 in³/gal), 8.345 lb/gal water density at 60 °F (CRC). These anchor every volume, dosing, and heating calculation.
• The CDC's Model Aquatic Health Code (MAHC) — water-chemistry operating ranges (e.g., the 7.2–7.8 pH range, §4.7.3). The site is explicit that MAHC governs public pools and contains no saltwater-specific provisions; saltwater chemistry on the site labels its claims by epistemic tier accordingly (see tier labelling below).
• PHTA / ANSI standards where applicable — used on the volume, calcium hardness, cyanuric acid, and LSI methodology pages where a published industry standard exists. Not a blanket claim: where no PHTA standard exists for a topic (some saltwater-specific chemistry), the site states so and uses the tier-labelled mechanism / industry-practice framing.
• APHA Standard Methods for the Examination of Water and Wastewater— the basis for the dosing engine's ppm → mg/L convention (the formula lb of solute = Δppm × gallons × 8.345 × 10⁻⁶ consumed by the salt, chlorine, CYA, calcium, alkalinity, pH, and shock calculators). Cited explicitly on the salt and calcium calculator methodology sections.
• Manufacturer engineering specifications — not marketing pages. Pentair IntelliChlor and Hayward TurboCell install-guide outputs (the salt chlorine generator calculator's sourced cell table); Intex, Bestway, and Coleman published water capacities (the round-pool-gallons stock-size chart). Each row carries its specific manufacturer citation.
• Peer-reviewed literature where relevant. The chlorine calculator's methodology cites O'Brien, Morris and Butler (1974)on cyanurate–chlorine equilibria — the primary literature underneath the free-chlorine-target-from-cyanuric-acid rule — and Wojtowicz's analyses in the Journal of the Swimming Pool and Spa Industry, which develop the practical percentage rule from those equilibria.

Tier labelling — standard vs mechanism vs industry practice

Generic pool content blends three different kinds of claim into one undifferentiated voice — federal standards, textbook chemistry, and shop-floor industry convention all narrated as if they had equal authority. They do not, and PoolSolver labels them distinctly. The saltwater-pool-maintenance hub is the page that applies this most visibly: every claim there wears a Tier 1 (standard) / Tier 2 (mechanism) / Tier 3 (industry practice) badge in the rendered HTML, so a reader (or a crawler) knows the epistemic status of each line. The same discipline runs through the rest of the site, even when the badges aren't rendered: the chemistry-engine constants are sourced, the mechanism claims are sourced, and the rule-of-thumb conventions are labelled as conventions.

Show the work

Every calculator on the site exposes its intermediate steps — the substituted values, the units, the constants — so the result is auditable, not a black box. Two concrete examples: the salt calculator renders lb of salt = Δppm × gallons × 8.345 × 10⁻⁶ with each substituted value visible in a step table; the LSI calculator renders the carbonate-alkalinity correction TA − CYA × cyanurate-factor(pH) so the reader sees exactly how a high cyanuric-acid reading flips a “balanced” verdict to “corrosive”.

The reference datasets behind those calculators — manufacturer-published salt-cell ratings, the saltwater galvanic series for pool metals, and the round-above-ground stock-size capacities — are released under CC BY 4.0, so other authors can reuse them with attribution.

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Credential mapping

Which credential underwrites which calculator

Every calculator on the site is associated below with the credential half that underwrites it — physics for the physical-science calculators, pharmacy for the water-chemistry calculators.