Chaichara

Sapparest is wise. I suspect, like me, a retired pool professional.

Too much backwashing seems to be a tradition here in Thailand and many (if not most) pool firms recommend doing it once a week or after every vacuuming session. The wasted water helps boost their sales of chlorine and chemicals. Unless one is using a pool filter to filter a murky koi fish pond, it actually takes quite a while - sometimes weeks - for the pressure to build up whichever media is used.

AFM is more than double the price here than the far superior Zelbrite - which they conveniently didn't include in their 'research'. I swear by Zelbrite. I've been using the same load since before most expats had pools built in Thailand!

(Disclaimer, I'm not a shill for the product or the people who sell it. I'm just a very old, very long-term customer of what I belive to be one of the most trustworthy pool firms in the country. Tough luck if they are not in you area and you have to buy online) ???? 

Sapparest provides some of the most intelligent answers on this forum. In my former days as a pool engineer, D.E. filters were all the rage and naturally one brand monopolised the market. In terms of filtration, they were highly efficient. The filter grids of the better brands were all made by the same OEM and are interchangable. However, D.E. was always messy and maintenance intensive, not to mention the recommended yearly total disassembly to check on the grids that often require replacing.

Then came Zelbrite. A media which together with a new, quality brand sand filter, is far less expensive and far outstrips the performance of D.E.,  and is almost totally maintenance free except for occasional backwashing.

(and no, I'm not a shill for the product, or even for the people who sell it -  just a happy  pool owner using  it for 17  years and perfectly  happy  with  my  local  pool company who built the pool and still give me the best service.)

It's not possible for a genuine registered business with a proper infrastructure (shop front, sales staff, presentable vehicles, etc) declaring their sales for taxes and VAT, to build a pool for around ฿14,000.00 per m2 and make a livable GP on it.

17 hours ago, The Hammer2021 said:

Most expats who catch covid do not cooperate with the Thai authorities because they believe they are superior to Thais.

That's an interesting  comment. I  have friends who run a very busy online store that  offers products and services for expats. They say they are amazed at the arrogance and unreasonable demands made by their customers.

16 hours ago, brewsterbudgen said:

This thread is about retirees not tourists.

Yes, it is.

I renewed my retirement visa yesterday. There was no mention of insurance. I'm still curious to know what would happen if I left the country (for example for one day to Laos over the nearby friendship bridge) and return the same day. Fortunately I do have medical insurance (who would want to stay in a public Thai hospital?),  although it doesn't cover as much as  ฿3mio.  At my age it's already very expensive.

3 hours ago, gk10012001 said:

I got internet on my phone which I carry with me.  And I grew up using rotary dial telephones!  Eiesenhower was president when I was born.  I remember using pay phones and thought those were pretty cool to be able to call home from most places if needed and if I could find a dime !  Remember putting dimes in the top of my loafer shoes!  It really came in handy some times

I remember pay phones in our UK town where you picked up the phone and waited for the operator to say "Number please". Then when she had connected, you put three pennies in and pressed button A.

Eisenhower was POTUS and Clement Attlee was UK PM. I might be old, but I never forget to renew my visa.

You want some genuine first hand experience:

I was 3 weeks late at Immigration in Nong Bua Lamphu last month and it cost me a ฿2,000 fine. All smiles, a free cup of coffee,  and a 'try not to forget again, and remember that your wife can do it for you when she's here shopping in town.' BTW, the amount of the fine is totally arbitrary - look old, infirm, and humble...

3 hours ago, Bagwain said:

I have troubleshooted many hundreds of commercial, resort & hotel pools in 3 countries. 

 

Well done! So have I : Germany, France, Netherlands, Switzerland. First pool built in Celle in 1975. And I still stay very much up to date with developments. You're right though, once it sets in, Black Algae is extremely hard to get rid of. Most people here in Thailand leave it too late. They think it's sugar cane ash settling on the grout, and they wonder why it won't come off. Most expats are reluctant to invest ฿1,900 in a bottle of algicide, but  the cost of regrouting and/or retiling is a bit more than that....

On 7/1/2021 at 11:38 AM, tgw said:

Thanks for that more detailed answer.

Do you have any insights on what keywords in Thai script cost?

Google luck with your Google Ads advisor. Ours (apparently based in the Philippines) is only of any help for finding one's way around the pages of the highly confusing Google Ads website.

The sectors where I operate mainly target  the expat community (over 98% of the customer base) -  most are native English speakers and and others (z.B. Francophone and Germanophone) with  a fairly  high level of English at least for searching the Internet in Thailand.  Expats naturally do not always expect their Google searches for products or services in Thailand to return websites here that  are available in their languages, any more than I would expect a local SME in Genève, Lugano, or St Gallen to have pages in  Danish or Welsh.

The exceptions are again services that specifically target expats: International schools and hospitals, health insurance, legal, and hospitality. The advertisers on LAZADA, southeast Asia's huge e-commerce platform, are notoriously bad at providing linguistic alternatives for non Thai speaking consumers, as are home supplies centres which would probably benefit enormously from providing their pages in English (and certainly have a budget for it), but they don't bother.

That said, we do use a limited number of  Thai keywords for some of the most common web searches, because expats often believe that  only  searches in Thai language will bring  results and they therefore delegate web searching to  their Thai wives or partners.

Much depends on your client's product  or service and his/her target demographic.,  consumer or B2B, single product/service (Google Ads for online stores offering 100s of products are probably the most difficult to administer).  Here in Thailand with  its much lower general cost of living and prices of hospitality services,  the cost of employing  the services of Western consultants and web services is often prohibitive - particularly  for SMEs.

The cost of the Thai language keywords we use is high, around ฿15.00 or more - even for niche industries. Possibly  because there are a lot  of Thai competitors that  use them. But they do bring enquiries even if the number of conversions might not justify the expense. The branding it brings is nevertheless important. Thai consumers are very brand-aware.

฿

On 6/29/2021 at 11:20 AM, tgw said:

...so it is possible to give an idea of click prices. supposing one has been managing internet marketing campaigns of course.

I'm not interested in monthly costs, just other professionals' experiences with click costs in the Thai market.

I manage GoogleAd accounts  in Thailand in low to medium-margin retail SME branches where the use of GoogleAds is commonplace. I do not use Facebook or Instagram. The Google results are considered by some to be satisfactory. Based on that experience over the past  5 years, using around 400 keywords in English for one of the campaigns, Google Ad 'bids' in Thailand start from around THB 1.05 for some keywords, up to  THB 134.00 per click for others. 

My campaigns use highly granular demographics (which are not difficult to establish in the expat market here and the various industry sectors of interest to them). The campaigns also exploit highly optimised ads, and specific landing pages.

That said, I have always failed to fully understand what Google appears to interpret  as highly competitive keywords, because in my experience some of the high cost ones are not necessarily highly sought after and do not always attract a particularly high number of clicks, whereas some of the least expensive ones are more common search terms,  invite more clicks, and possibly also more likely to be used by competitors.

Obviously Google spends a lot of money researching different regions, demographics, and industries for setting its own CPC algorithms and developing the plethora of stats and analysis for their customers, and that's obviously why business that  rely  heavily  on their Internet  presence are a captive market for monopolistic Google, and its cash cows. Google can set its own prices as high (or as low) as it likes; nowadays such businesses must either pay up, or get lost in the undergrowth. However,  much of that information offered by Google, apart from the ad display rate and clicks per word, are not necessarily helpful and the small(ish) sample rate for a niche operation for expats in Thailand does not permit the drawing of really useful stats.

More important  is the testing and comparison of the number enquiries and/or sales during periods of active campaign, and times when the ads and/or various keywords are paused.

The CPC depends on what you want web ads for: a specific product, a service, a hospitality business, a brick-and-mortar retail outlet,  an e-commerce, a non-profit, a forum or blog that generates revenue from advertising, or pure branding. Due to the many factors involved, your quest therefore seems to beg a rhetorical answer more like: 'How long is a piece of string?' 

Hence unless you intend to enter the Thai market as a marketing consultant, or are considering using GoogleAds for your company or service,  I fail to see how much my (or anyone else's) feedback can/could be of help to you.

Maybe you are indeed far more clued up than I am on Internet marketing, which is very possible (at  least  in  Switzerland) - I didn't get fully involved in the market/ing potential of websites until around two years after the Internet hit France in 1995-6. Now I'm old, an expat in Thailand for 20 years, and no longer working full-time either as a web developer or in my specific branches of commerce. Nevertheless, your thread is intriguing and as we say in English: "Be careful what you ask for" ????

If you already manage internet marketing campaigns, you'll know there is no such thing as 'common prices for clicks', and the same applies here in Thailand. The choice of options for the exposure of the ads is so highly granular, that coupled with Google's complex algorythms for calculating the PPC, it's impossible to predict a monthly cost. Most companies with a product or service to sell will set a monthly expenditure ceiling, which when reached, the ads will stop displaying. They will then reset their ad budget after an empirical study of several month's results.

That granularity however, can be extremely useful when targeting the expat community here in Thailand and I assume that's why you posted your question here. That said, not all expats here have an even passable knowledge of English, and not all of them read Thai Visa regularly. There are a lot of expats in Thailand, but whatever product or service you are offering, it is always a niche market, and in some sectors, so highly competitive that many firms are struggling to maintain a living profit margin.

Besides all the other tasks involved in bringing a product to the end user, one needs to be a dedicated, full-time Internet marketing person to fully understand how search engine pay-for ads work, and to constantly administering and adjusting them for best impact. So not only the cost of the ads, but also your own time should be taken into consideration. It depends on the size of your (or your client's) company and your general PR/advertising budget.

Times and technologies have changed since waiting for a search engine spider to find your website, index and reference it, getting backlinks, and then waiting for your ranking (display result and page position) to improve. Nowadays, the only way to guarantee a listing here in Thailand, and one in a good position, is to pay for it - see how huge E-commerce platforms here such as Lazada do it. For an SME, the cost can either be disproportionately high for the price and sales potential of your product or service, or it can even be practically the only solution for a company that exists solely as an online store. That's why, for example, many small to medium sized hotels and resorts here don't even bother with a website; they prefer to pay booking commission to hotels.com, agoda, and booking.com etc.,  instead.

An SME here with an annual gross turnover of 6 to 12mio baht on a retail operation, might be able to benefit from spending 10 to 30K baht a month on Google. It all depends on the GP ratio. For the traditional services for expats, such as for example, law and real estate,  with their very aggressive marketing, the GP ratio could be very much higher and the advertising conversions more profitable.

4 hours ago, RocketDog said:

 ...need to do some research too.

It's worth investigating and investing  in  proper grout  for pools. It's expensive and many  so  called pool companies cut  corners and skimp on  it -  plus a lot  of them don't  know how to  do  it  properly.

I believe there are only  two brands of pool  grout  available here, Crocodile Platinum and WeberColor. They  are aavailable at GlobalHouse and probably  also  at Thai Watsadu and DoHome.

My pool  builder use the Crocodile stuff  16 years ago, and the grout  still looks like new.

Good to know. Thanks for this handy tip for the readers here who don't have overflow pools with a surge tank. The Emaux automatic top up is not excessively expensive, but it is designed for being built-in during the construction of a new, skimmer type pool or spa.

Just a caveat however, when buying anything from Lazada - there is very little genuine product or customer support, especially in English, or for pool products which can still be purchased online at better prices, better quality, better service and better T&C direct from almost any truly genuine pool dealer.

Getting a refund for wrong and/or damaged deliveries from Lazada can be a real headache, especially if getting a refund for an inexpensive article means trekking 40Km to your nearest Kerry.

Well, mine works perfectly but my pool is rectangular. Anyways, the Dolphins are by far the best brand out there. They are the only ones that come with a proper after-sales service in Thailand and all the other brands are rubbish, most of them not even manufactured by the brand name on them.

Pool Pro&Labs and JDpools are the same company.  They bought a stock of one robot from each model to sell to  every one of their franchises in Thailand. hat came to several hundred robots so Maytronics agreed to give them a different colour and a different model name.

The robots marketed by JD are identical (except  for  the plastic cover) to the original branded Maytronics Dolphin robots distributed by SwimmingPoolsThailand.

I  have been using  a S200 from  SPT in  my  4.5 x 12 pool for over two years. This machine is excellent. SPT is the official service agent  and I  get  10% discount  on  consumables (tracks, filters, etc).

I just discovered that SPT have a video report on Dolphins on their site from an independent company in the USA. This will answer most questions.

18K per m2 at an average depth of 1.2m (calculating for the slope from the shallow to the deep end) is probably the lowest available for a basic quality, skimmer pool built by a bona fidae, well established registered limited company with full commercial premises, overheads, declared employees and profit, turnover, and VAT taxes to pay. This should include quality pumps, filters, and other technical equipment from a recognised manufacturer with decent guarantee and customer/product support in  Thailand (this will however preclude many  of the brands that abound in Thailand).  A purpose built walk-in pump house would usually be included in the price. Some tiles, especially the cracked glaze 'Antique'-style tiles that are currently all the rage, will add significantly to the price. Overflow pools will cost more.

From what I hear, IssaanPools (which is the same owner as the  Pool Master pool shop) build good quality pools, but I would be cautious of the claim that they build most of the hotel pools in Bangkok. As I mentioned in my post above nearly 2 years ago, high prices are not always a barometer for high quality - although expensive pools can certainly be expected to be of high quality, a less expensive pool does not necessarily mean lower quality. Always shop around, talk to the people, meet them and decide who comes across as a serious constructor.

This should never have happened. This is what  comes of having  a house built by  an incompetent  contractor or their electrician. Always demand that  home electrics are installed to  Western standards when buying  or having a house built. Even houses on  modern estates (developments) often do  not  have them. These RCCB/GFCI work as described (own experience!). Absolutely  essential  if you  have a pond or swimming  pool. There are miniature DIN-rail  ones that  fit  inside a standard consumer unit.

See more at  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual-current_device

My  condolences.

iStudio (also called Studio7) runs dedicated apple shops in most cities now. iCare, their Apple authorized repair facility is also usually nearby. They are very good but expensive - of course. Don't  expect  them to  speak  English. Their counter staff  are very  slow, it's takes them 30 minutes to  enter up  the repair  contract, and they  will  want  your  passport. They  charge THB 900 non  refundable deposit  'for looking'. No same day service, but  they  will  call  you when it's ready  or with the quote for  the repair. Always back up  your  files -  they  will  delete everything.

(3 x MacMini, 1 x iMac 27", 1 x MacbookPro, 1 x iPad. Absolutely  no  iPhones).

54 minutes ago, stillhereandlovinit said:

No thats not what I asked for, I want Pura Pool minerals. Not Pure pool

try  the Internet.

For example: http://paradisepoolsthailand.com/products/

and: http://siampool.com/our-products/

They  stock  it, but  beware -  they  don't  display  the prices ?