Horizon Pool & Spa

Let me start off with the bottom line: do not trust Horizon Pools to take care of your pool. Their employees are not competent, they are not reachable in a timely manner when things go wrong (and they will go wrong), and they refuse to honor the promotions they offer (in writing) when you sign up. We hired them to provide weekly pool service and maintenance earlier this year. Almost immediately, we noticed that our pool started to turn green, even though it had been fine for several months before that. We pointed this out to the Horizon pool technician, and he suggested that there was nothing he could do about it, and the only solution was for us to get a new pump. In fact, the real problem was that he was spending about 5 minutes a week cleaning the pool (which consisted solely of fishing out the leaves). Within 3 weeks, the pool was green and cloudy. At that point, the owner had to come over three days in a row, and after several rounds of scrubbing, algae treatment, cleaning the filter, and running the pump 24 hours a day, he managed to get the pool clean again. While the owner was at our house, I took the opportunity to ask how long the technician should have been spending working on the pool each week, and he estimated 20-30 minutes to do a proper job. I mentioned that the guy was usually not there for more than 10 minutes, and the owner said he would have a talk with him and assign someone else to our pool. To our dismay, the next week the same technician was back cleaning our pool, and again "done" in less than 10 minutes. However, since the owner had been conscientious in fixing the problem, we decided to give them another chance. After receiving our first bill from Horizon, I was disappointed to see that we had been charged for two filter cleans in the course of the algae treatment. I would have had no problem with one, since the filter likely needed to be cleaned when we hired them, but in my opinion the second one was only necessary because of the inadequate pool cleaning they had been providing. Over the following two months, the cleaning service was generally acceptable (although definitely not great), and we twice had to call Horizon to restart the pump when the impeller got stuck. The impeller problems are not their fault, but on the second occasion I discovered the problem Friday evening and was not able to reach anyone until Monday because they do not answer their phone or respond to messages on evenings and weekends, so our pump was off for 3 days, putting us at risk of further algae problems. The technician also began to repeatedly leave our gate open. About three months after we hired Horizon, I came home from work one day and discovered that the pool had overflowed - the same technician who didn't think he was responsible for preventing the pool from filling up with algae had turned on the water to top off the pool a little bit (which it didn't need), and neglected to turn it off, so the water was running for 8 hours until I returned. Water continued flowing out of the pool for another hour after I turned it off, and it had certainly been doing so for several hours before I got there. That means that there were likely more than a thousand gallons of water that spilled onto our deck in the meantime, soaking the ground surrounding our foundation and leaving standing water up against the back of our house. Unbelievably incompetent, and absolutely inexcusable. And just to guarantee that problems like this are as damaging as possible, remember that you can't contact them until at least the next day because they don't check their messages or e-mail after 5pm! I promptly fired Horizon after this incident, and I have spent the last two months attempting to get them to return my key, which they refuse to do. They will not respond to my e-mails or answer my phone calls, so apparently they intend to keep the key permanently. We originally hired Horizon based on the positive impression the owner made when he came to give a quote, a few favorable reviews, and their low prices. If you are tempted by any of these same factors, don?t be ? it?s not worth it.

great. they come weekly. we are happy.