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DIY is possible for minor repairs like patching liners. Professional services handle structural and mechanical issues.

There are some disadvantages to a salt water pool. Besides costing slightly more than chlorine pools, salt water pools require a lot of salt. It's also harder to find a professional with salt water pool experience to do minor maintenance and repairs. Salt water can also damage some materials, so you’ll need to use specific heating, fixtures, lighting, liners, and masonry when building a salt water pool.

Pool concrete or gunite can take several weeks to cure, or an average of 30 days, before workers can resume construction. Additional work and finishes push the time to build a pool out of concrete to between three and six months. There are many types of pools that take far less time, so keep these in mind if you're on a short timeline.

No, shock and chlorine are not the same thing, though they are related and both are used for pool maintenance. Regular chlorine, often in the form of tablets, is a sanitizer used for routine, day-to-day maintenance to keep a steady chlorine level. Pool shock, however, is a highly concentrated dose of chlorine used periodically for a more intense cleaning. It rapidly raises chlorine levels to fix issues like cloudy water or algae growth and also eliminates chloramines, which are byproducts of regular chlorination. Because their purposes and concentrations differ, they are not interchangeable, and proper pool care typically requires using both.