swimming pool cleaning and maintenance

The pool does not need to be emptied monthly and the costs for cleaning vary.

I pay €65 per month for the pool to be cleaned every week, no doubt you could get it cheaper.

If you maintain it yourself, the only routine material costs are for chemicals. I've never kept a record, but I'd say this is probably €5-€10 a month.

On top of this is electricity for running the pump. I'm on the night tariff, so run it automatically during the cheap rate, and manually when we're using it.

Then there's water to top it up - in hot weather or when there's a breeze across the pool, the level can drop about a centimetre a day.

There are also occasional maintenance costs like changing the sand in the filter and having the tiles re-grouted every few years.

Breakdowns obviously aren't predictable. In fourteen years we've had a couple of minor leaks that I fixed myself, and a blocked pipe that I had to get the experts to do and which cost quite a bit.

Thank you so much for replying i will take on board what you have said thanks

Totally agree with what the others have said, please DONT empty your pool!

If you need any advice, that you can't obtain from YouTube!, please drop me a note and I will happily help.

Thanks

Just out of interest Jim, do you just use chlorine or do you need chemicals for ph level too ?

thanks

In winter I just bung in some granulated slow release chlorine.

When the water's warmer, I use 3-in-1 tablets which contain chlorine, stabiliser and algicide.

You can get 4-in-1 and 5-in-1 tablets, with 'added ingredients', but they contain a smaller amount of chlorine than 3-in-1 tablets, and you need more of them to maintain the chlorine level, so they work out more expensive. The one time I couldn't find 3-in-1 tablets, I foolishly bought some 5-in-1, and when I next back-washed the pool, it killed off an orange tree near the soakaway.

I find that the pH level does slowly increase, and when it drifts out of the acceptable band, I throw in a cup or two of pH Minus.

If the water goes a bit hazy after brushing and vacuuming, I put a couple of flocculante tablets in the skimmer bucket and leave the pump running overnight. That works like isinglass used to clarify wine, and restores the sparkle to the water.

I also have a packet of algicide, in case I let the chlorine level drift too low and algae starts to form.

And I also have a tub of quick release 'shock' chlorine, and periodically give the pool a dose of that to ensure that any nasties are killed off.

It sounds like a lot of chemicals, and perhaps it is, but most of them are only used occasionally, so the average running cost is pretty low.

Thanks very much Jim as always very helpful, much appreciated 😊

Jim, you say that you use granulated chlorine or blocks all the time. 

Do you check the level of cyanuric acid in your pool? This is one of the ingredients in granules and blocks and acts as a stabiliser, to prevent the sun from burning off the chlorine. The optimum level of cyanuric acid is around 80 ppm, but any reading under 100 is ok. Above 100 it starts to inhibit the effectiveness of the chlorine. I have been to pools with a cyanuric acid level above 300, where often the pool man can't understand why it's starting to turn green. And pool men's remedy (quite rightly) is to "shock" the pool, but sadly they usually do it with a big dose of granules, which just compounds the problem by increasing the cyanuric acid level!

I use liquid chlorine most of the time. It contains some stabiliser, but nothing like the amount that's in blocks and granules. Yesterday, a water quality check on my pool showed an almost perfect level of cyanuric acid.

Just something to bear in mind, if you ever find yourself struggling to sanitise your pool satisfactorily.

Every three months, I get a full water quality check done on my pool which measures the level of about 6 or 8 different things in the water. Just for example, the calcium hardness level is important, because if the calcium level is low, the water will "look" for more and in doing so will eat into the grout, cement etc.

Geoff.

Hi Geoff, thanks for that. I didn't know that granulated chlorine contains cyanuric acid - there's no mention of it on the tubs, but having done some Googling I now take your point. The chlorines I've got are symclosene, but I see that as this does its job and decomposes, it then produces cyanuric acid.

I do get an occasional check on cyanuric acid level, not as often as I should, and if it creeps up too much, I grit my teeth about wasting water and vacuum to waste when cleaning the pool, repeating this as often as necessary until the reading is OK.