How I Learned to Lower Alkalinity in My Pool And Found an Unexpected Hero in Beatbot

It began with an itch and a lot of frustration. The pool makes the heat a little more bearable, but now it was anything but a reliable refuge. Everything looked fine on the surface of the water, but swimming in it just didn’t feel right anymore — my kids moaned of having red eyes, chlorine wasn’t doing the job, and it felt like I was always fussing with chemicals. A fast bit of testing showed the problem: off-the-chart alkalinity. I figured that dropping it should be a snap. I was wrong. The result was a clumsy education, some wasted afternoons and, somewhat miraculously, a quiet revolution spearheaded by a small contraption I have since come to refer to as my pool’s best friend — my Beatbot .

I think that most new pool owners, myself included, concentrate on pH and chlorine. Those are the eye-catching numbers on the test strip. But alkalinity? That one sneaks in from the wings and subtly ruins everything else. When it is too high, it buffers pH so tightly that chlorine cannot do its job and scale begins to accumulate on tiles and equipment. It might be the pool that resists all of your TLC.

The numbers weren’t lying, my total alkalinity was pushing around 160 ppm. Each time I put in muriatic acid , the pH would drop for a day, then zoom back up. I brushed and vacuumed obsessively. I attempted oxygenating the water, running fountains, soaking in online forums for hours. It was a full-time job. And to be honest, it was sucking the joy out of me.

The moment things shifted for me wasn’t when I discovered a magic chemical combo. It was when I stopped doing everything myself.

I stumbled across Beatbot on a random Tuesday night, just after angrily Googling, “Why does my pool hate me?” What drew me in wasn’t just the idea of a robot that cleans your pool. It was how many people said it actually improved their water balance. At first, that didn’t make sense to me. How could a cleaning robot lower alkalinity? Spoiler: it doesn’t. But it made everything else start working like it should.

I ordered one from the AquaSense 2 series and let it loose in the pool the next day. I didn’t expect magic, but that’s kind of what I got.

The robot moved like it had a brain. Not just random zigzags like the cheap vacuums I’d used before. It scanned, mapped, learned. And it cleaned more than just the visible stuff—leaves, dirt, bugs. It scrubbed the grime that sticks to corners, the biofilm along the waterline, the invisible gunk that builds up and creates little chemical imbalances all over the place.

The difference wasn’t just visual. Within a week, my acid doses started holding. My pH didn’t shoot up the next day. The chlorine stabilized. I wasn’t fighting the water anymore. I was working with it.

I realized then: dirty pool surfaces were interfering with my chemical treatments. I’d been dumping acid into water that was clinging to scale and debris, and expecting perfect results. But the Beatbot gave my pool a clean slate every day. And that made all the difference.

Now, instead of obsessing, I’ve got a rhythm. I still check alkalinity weekly. I still use muriatic acid when I need to. But the difference is, the rest of the system cooperates. The water accepts the treatment. It changes. It stays changed.

Meanwhile, the Beatbot runs quietly in the background. I send it out at night sometimes—watching it glow under the moonlight feels oddly peaceful, like something futuristic and serene. Other times I start it in the morning before work and come back to a pool that looks like it belongs in a resort commercial.

I also stopped brushing manually. I stopped wrestling with hoses and wasting weekends with back-and-forth trips to the pool store. And I stopped feeling like my pool was a burden.

I’ll be honest—before all this, I almost gave up on the pool entirely. I started fantasizing about filling it in, turning it into a garden, or pretending it was just a decorative pond. But now? It feels like an ally again. Like it’s working with me, not against me.

The Beatbot doesn’t talk. It doesn’t beep or flash fancy messages. But somehow, I feel like it understands the quiet rhythm of pool care better than I ever did. It's consistent. It's calm. It's precise. And that’s exactly what my water needed.

I still tell my neighbors I “lowered the alkalinity in my pool.” But the truth is, the robot did half the work—maybe more. Not with chemicals, but with care. With clean walls, smooth floors, and the kind of invisible maintenance that makes everything else easier.

Sometimes, late at night, I sit on the edge of the pool, watching the water ripple and glow. It’s perfectly still, perfectly clear. Balanced, not just chemically, but emotionally. And somewhere in the deep, my little robot glides silently, like the unsung hero of my summer.

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