Friday, May 22, 2009

Bayrol was Best


The chap who built, single handed, our swimming pool in 1999, supplied us with a cleaning set.
A telescopic pole and several tools which clip on the end.
An ordinary brush, a net (called a leaf rake) and a special brush with an adapter for a suction tube.

The ordinary brush, marked "Bayrol", worked fine and throughout the season was used several times per day & spent the rest of the time exposed to the elements next to the pool, as you would expect.
After about 6 years, the plastic stem, where it clips into the telescopic pole, broke when it was dropped, which seemed fair enough.

I bought another brush, without paying much attention, and was disappointed to notice that the little springy 'A' piece which fixes all these tools to the pole, needed to be carefully inserted into the pole every time, otherwise it could end up pointing down & possibly rip the pool liner – an expensive disaster for a small piece of bad design.
So I had to glue in a retainer to stop that happening.
Also the brush would occasionally drop out of the pole, so you had to fish it out with the net if you were lucky.
If you were unlucky, you might poke the sharp end of the pole through the expensive liner.
So I had to replace the springy 'A' piece by the bigger & better one from the Bayrol brush, which I had kept for no good reason.
But after about a year, the pool surface started to get covered with floating white bristles.

Sure enough, all the plastic bristles in the "new" brush had become brittle & broke off at the slightest touch.

I looked around for a better new brush, but they all looked pretty similar except cheaper ones were all plastic & more expensive ones had metal stems & supports for the arms.
I bought a more expensive metal one.
Again, this needed modification to avoid dropping out.
Again, after one season, all the bristles were breaking off and floating nastily on the pool.
I took it back to the (exclusively pool) shop & complained.
They gave me another one as a goodwill gesture, but said it was unreasonable to leave a pool brush outside in the sun & rain…
That new one lasted a year, just like the previous one (left outside, of course – what else?).

So now, I have screwed the still-perfectly-good Bayrol plastic head & blue bristles to the metal stem of the last replacement brush & that combination works OK, but for how long?

The Bayrol leaf rake worked perfectly, as you would expect, for about 7 years before it started to develop holes in the net, due to rubbing.

So I bought a new rake from the same pool shop, choosing an expensive one that looked well made, from a respected name (Mareva Prestige).
Unbelievably, this just does not work well.
If you try to scoop leaves or insects from the surface, they largely get pushed away & flow round the frame instead of into the net.
If you try to scoop leaves or worms off the bottom, quite often the rake just rides over the top & leaves the rubbish behind.

So now, I have patched the holes in the old Bayrol rake & that is working well again, but for how long?

I have searched everywhere I can imagine, but there is no mention of Bayrol cleaning tools; they just seem to do chemicals now.
I wrote to Bayrol, saying how good their tools had been & asking if they still sold any or if the old ones were still available.
I got a rapid & polite reply from a Herr Doctor something, but he did not actually answer my questions.

I have given up on Bayrol & am still looking for decent quality, functional & durable cleaning tools.

Parting thot: "The more I see the less I know for sure." – John Lennon

No comments:

Post a Comment