OK, so last night I double-shocked the pool in preparation for closing the pool either this evening or Thursday morning. I had a lot of outside activities planned for the day in preparation for leaving on Friday.
A few times in the summer the pool pump had stopped working, but after about an hour it started back up again. I figured we would have to get a new pump - but was hoping it wouldn't be until next year. This morning the pump wasn't working, but this time it had tripped a breaker at the electrical box - and it continued to do so whenever I tried to re-start the pump. I didn't have a lot of time to take it to a repair shop so I bought a new pump. The new pump looked so shiny & bright compared with our 17 year-old original model. However, the old pump had one virtue the new one lacked - it was wired & ready to plug in. Now, the wiring on a pool pump is very simple. Once you've wired one pool pump, I'm sure you could wire the next one in a flash. But this was my first pool pump wiring job. And of course there is the disclaimer with the pump that all electrical work should be done by qualified personnel. So I took a long time before I flipped the switch to start up the new pump, searching for any help on the internet, making sure that I had the pump set for 115v & not the factory set 230v, comparing the internal wiring of the old & new pumps, double and triple-checking the connections, and trying to calculate how big a mess I'd be in if I had done it incorrectly. But everything went well. And of course the cost of the new pump can be viewed as only the price of a couple (well maybe three or four) of decent meals in Rome or Paris.
