Swimming Pool Maintenance Considerations

SlitheyTove
Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:34:34 +0000

[A Swimming Pool and Spa Care Forum • Trouble Free Pool](http://www.troublefreepool.com/) is a good resource for learning how to take care of your own pool. Trust them before trusting your local pool store.

DIY means you’ll need to purchase a kit to test the water and either an automated pool sweep or vacuum head and hoses. That will be a large up-front cost. A good automated pool sweep will run anywhere between $400-$1000. There are then ongoing costs: the chemicals, replacement test kit reagents, replacement parts for the pool sweep/vacuum hoses. Get a sense of how much it will cost you to pay for these costs, and then compare that to what your pool guy is charging.

It’s not difficult to do or to learn, but it does get tedious. Know yourself and your habits. Skipping a week can have big consequences (e.g. algae blooms, degraded plaster/liner). You’ll need to be testing not just the pH, but also (at minimum) the chlorine level and alkalinity.

The estimate of 2 hours to clean the filter sounds a little long, but not terribly so–this might depend on the type of filtering system you have. It gets done perhaps twice a year hereabouts (southern California). In between, you can occasionally “backwash” the filter, depending on your system.