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Don is right about qualifying a customer on the product. It wasn't a good fit in a market like Florida due to the expense of the sanitizer and oxidizer. Daily rain diluted the efficiency of the product and then you couple that with high temps and humidity and we had a very unhappy customer base. Some northern markets in Florida sold it, but I know we didn't stock it in my Orlando stores or when I worked the south Florida territories.
Another problem with the product is with a home owner that does follow directions implicitly or a sales staff that doesn't fully grasp how different biguanide is. A home owner who stops at a big box store, deviates from Baquacil's instructions, and sees a cheap price on a bag of shock will be in for a rude awakening. Likewise, a sales person in a retail store who is untrained to ask about which sanitizer a customer is using could recommend a copper algaecide or even a bag of monopersulfate with no idea about the "can of worms" they just opened.
Baquacil and other biguanide products have their place in the market but only with a competent sales staff and a qualified customer who has a tendency to listen to the "pool expert" at their local pool store.
Clint,
I think that the other problem with Baquacil is that the product has changed hands what three times in the past ten years, and the Arch Reps really don't know the product or promote it well.
Clint Combs said:
I think Baquacil suffered a set back when their patent expired in the mid '90's. Soft Swim was rushed to the market to compete. There were rumors that Lesilie's was working on a competing product too. Baquacil responded by turning their back on their dealer network (we had previously been given protected territories). Baquacil started to selling to everyone.
As has already been mentioned, Baquacil (or more generally, biguinide) is a very different system than chlorine. Many things must be done different and some products are not compatible. That is why it worked with authorized dealers who where trained on the product and that is why it fell flat (their growth stalled) when they turned their back on their dealer network. Their dealers were a big part of its initial success.
The system itself does work. The problem with Baquacil is not in the product but in the user/pool owner. Baquacil used to be added as part of a "monthly" chemical routine. Because this was done on a monthly basis the typical baquacil customer did a good job the first and second months of the program and then began to fall off of the program. A monthly routine quickly became a 5 week routine, then a 6 week routine finally becoming whenever they remembered it.
Baquacil remidied this problem with the switch the sanitizer and oxidizer to being a weekly maintenance program. The only other issue with Baquacil has been white water mold. This used to be a problem with the older system(s). Baquacil used to have the Regular Baquacil Program and the Baquacil Ultra which was designed to handle water mold situations and the extra demand it put on the Baquacil Oxidizer. Baquacil is now a single system with an additional product CDX which is used in water mold areas.
As I initially stated the customer must be properly qualified to baquacil. That for the most part means they must have a sand filter, they must change the sand every season, and I usually dont put larger pools (over 30K gallons) on the system.
If your customer is properly qualified, and they follow the program the baquacil system works very well. It is no longer more expensive than chlorine, and it locks your customer in with a product that they can only get at a pool professional (you) not big box stores.