Summer is almost here. It’s time to open your in-ground pool for the season, which means it requires some attention. Opening and maintaining a clean pool is important not only for you and your family’s health, but helps keep costly repairs at bay.
Steps for Maintaining Your Pool
- Shock your pool. We don’t mean zapping it, so it jumps. Shocking your pool is the practice of significantly increasing the chlorine levels to kill off dangerous bacteria that clouds the water of your pool, making it murky. To get that crystal clear clarity back, make sure you shock your pool at the beginning of your summer season, after major pool parties and gatherings, or extreme foul weather. Dilute three-to-five times the amount you’d normally use and dissolve into water. Aim to shock your pool at least twice during your season. The best time is at night since the sun burns off chlorine at about 1 ppm every hour, wasting your money and time!
- Skim and Scrub Regularly. To keep a pristine pool, it’s a necessary evil. The tools you will need are a net skimmer, a pool brush, and a manual vacuum. These are necessary to remove bacteria causing debris from the water and scrubbing the sides and bottom of your pool to reduce or prevent algae. You can probably get away with scrubbing the bottom and sides every other week or consider using a robot vacuum that will clean the bottom of the pool for you.
- Check your filter weekly. It’s important to clean out your filter weekly since a terminally clogged filter will help to kill your water pump, sending it to a premature death. About once a month you should reverse the flow of water through your filter, “back washing” grimy pipes and other places you cannot reach just by cleaning the filter.
- It’s basic chemistry, baby! Don’t be afraid of your pool’s chemistry. There are very easy test kits out there to make sure the ying and yang of your pool are lining up. It’s a simple, hand-held kit you fill with your pool water and small bottles of chemicals that will test for pH-levels, alkalinity, and chlorine levels. Just a couple of drops of testing chemical in each tube, wait for a few minutes, and voilà! Testing complete. Make any adjustments to your pool per the results.
Alan Jackson Pools
If maintaining your pool seems like a lot of work, don’t worry, we have got you covered. The professionals at Alan Jackson Pools know exactly how to keep your pool is shape throughout any season and are here to take the burden of upkeep off of your hands. Call Alan Jackson Pools to schedule your regular pool service today at (661) 273-7231. Happy summer!
