· The Maintly team
The Pool That Turned Green
Three weeks of paying for a pool service that wasn't happening.
I didn't notice for almost three weeks.
The pool is in the back. I don't swim every day. I walk past it in the morning, look at it from inside the house, think "looks fine" and move on.
Until one Tuesday it did not look fine.
It was green. Not a little green. Green in the way that makes you wonder if something is living in there. Green in the way where you already know this is not a quick fix.
I called my pool guy (the one I'd been paying every two weeks, automatically, from the same account I use for Netflix and the gym membership I definitely use).
He didn't answer.
I texted. Nothing for two days. Then: "Hey sorry, I had to step away from some clients a few weeks ago. Thought I sent a message. My bad."
He had not sent a message.
Here's the thing I had to sit with: I had no idea he'd stopped coming.
Not because I'm a bad homeowner. Because I had no system to know. He showed up (or didn't), did the work (or didn't), and I had zero visibility into any of it. I was paying for a service and just... trusting the pool looked okay when I glanced at it.
If he'd missed one visit, I might have caught it earlier. Two visits, maybe. By the time I noticed, he'd been gone for almost a month.
The remediation (algae treatment, shock, a full chemical reset) cost me $340 and three weeks of a pool I couldn't use.
Three hundred and forty dollars because I didn't know my contractor stopped showing up.
This isn't a pool story, really.
It's a story about the gap between paying for home services and actually knowing they're happening.
Most homeowners have some version of this. The lawn guy who skips a week here and there. The pest control visit you assume happened because it was on the schedule. The AC tune-up that got "rescheduled" twice and then quietly never rescheduled again.
You're not neglecting your home. You're just not in a position to verify what's actually being done to it.
Nobody is, unless they're home every time, watching.
After the pool situation, I started thinking about what it would actually take to have visibility into all of this.
Not micromanaging every contractor. Just knowing: did they come? When? Is this thing up to date?
For a South Florida home especially (the AC running year-round, the pool, the roof in hurricane season, the pest control), the stakes of a missed service aren't theoretical. They're a $340 green pool. They're a $4,000 AC replacement that could've been a $150 tune-up.
The services aren't the hard part. It's the coordination. Knowing who came, when, and what they did.
That's the part nobody had built a good answer for.
My pool is fine now. Back to blue, back to normal. I found a new pool company, one that sends a report after every visit with photos.
I screenshot every one of those reports and save them somewhere I'll definitely be able to find them.
(I'm lying. I save them and then immediately can't find them.)
But that's what Maintly is being built for. Every service, every contractor, every visit: logged automatically and attached to your home. You get confirmation when work is done. You get a flag when something's overdue. And over time, your home builds a care record that actually means something.
The pool thing won't happen again. Not because I'm going to stare at it more carefully, but because I'll have a system that tells me when the last service was and whether the next one is coming.
That's the whole idea.