Noted, your input is appreciated. I have had some problems with my lightning node going down unexpectedly and since I don't check it daily I perceived value in a pool service.

If you're not online, a pool will not help you. Not for real solo mining at least. It could for more evenly dispersing your reward payout of you have some down time but it's not really even helping then so much as just lowering your average reward to make up for your down time. Not helping, just smoothing out your payouts. Which could be useful depending on the payout methodology. And I could be missing something. I'm not expert but I do run miners (S9s) and I just don't get it (ckpool). Just gives me a scammy gut feeling is all.