Whether you’re planning to install a new swimming pool in your backyard or just renovating the current one, you should always stay on the lookout to use new methods that can help to keep its maintenance costs on the lower side.
But do you know how to lower your pool maintenance costs? No? Don’t worry, we’ve discussed 7 ways that can help you.
Table of Contents
Routinely Clean Your Pool
You should brush your pool at most once a day. Along with it, net & skim your pool once a day to remove any big debris such as leaves.
Did you know? By brushing your pool, you can remove all the dirt & debris from the pool, especially from the areas where there’s slack water. Why is it important? It helps to regulate the circulation so your filter can do its work efficiently.
Whereas when you skim your pool, you not only remove leaves but bugs. When you skim and net your pool daily, you can avoid creating an imbalance of the pool’s water.
Use Baking Soda To Control Pool’s Alkalinity
The baking soda readily available in most households is a great additive to minorly regulate the alkaline levels of the water of your pool. As soon as the baking soda dilutes in the water, it raises the alkaline levels of the water.
Additional benefit of baking soda is that they cost less than the pool-specific alkaline additives, of course when baking soda is purchased in bulk.
PS: Be cautious when you use baking soda to alter alkaline levels of your pool’s water. You should only use it to make minor adjustments to alkaline levels. Why? Because adding too much baking soda to the water can turn it cloudy. Another thing you should remember is to spread baking soda across the pool’s water evenly.
Don’t Let Tree Branches, Plants, Or Shrubs Near The Pool
Everyone loves nature, and we’re sure that you have some trees, shrubs or plants around your pool. However, these trees, shrubs and plants shed leaves or a branch breaks down and falls into the pool. This causes imbalance in the chemical levels & also reduces the chlorine levels of the pool’s water.
Apart from this, if they start blocking the pool’s filter, it’ll make the filter system work hard and eventually become inefficient.
We’re not advising you not to have greenery around your pool, but you should maintain it. For example, cut back the branches that are hanging over your pool, grow shrubs and plants away from the pool’s immediate area.
Regularly Clean Your Pool’s Filter
Regularly cleaning your pool’s filter can keep it efficient for a longer time. However, as mentioned above, leaves, branches and things like that can clog the filter. This makes the filter use excess energy and, therefore, becomes less efficient at filtering the pool’s water.
All these things add up to increasing the maintenance costs of your pool.
Apart from keeping the filter cleaned daily, you should also ensure that its strainer & skimmer baskets remain unblocked and should be cleaned regularly.
Only Heat Your Pool Right Before You Want To Use It
One of the great advantages of owning a heated pool is that the degree of heat can be easily regulated. You should always keep the heat pump of your pool on lower settings on the days you don’t want to use your pool.
For example, if you swim only on weekends, then you should keep your pool’s heating levels low on weekdays. You’ll be amazed to see how much difference a degree or two of less heat, for 5 days, can make to your energy bills.
Get A Variable Speed Pump
Variable speed pumps are around 30-50% more efficient in energy consumption than the conventional pool pumps. This will significantly bring down your electricity bills every month.
Do you know why a variable speed pump is so much more energy efficient? Because it can be set to different pumping speeds. This can easily help to lower the pump’s power & speed during the pool’s regular use. You need to set it to higher speed only when you’re cleaning the pool, which is not so frequent event.
Get a Pool Cover
You may be wondering Do I Really Need A Pool Cover? This is the most simplest, quickest, and most efficient way to reduce the maintenance costs of your pool. Just buy a swimming pool cover and use it to cover the entire surface of your pool when you’re not using it. For example, at night.
Are you wondering what could this possibly do? Well, it can reduce your pool’s maintenance costs by around 50% annually!
Here’s how pool cover can help you in achieving that:
Reduces Water Costs
Yes, you read that right pool covers can help cut water costs. Because during the 6 most hottest months of the year, you can lose around 10,600 liters of water (around 25% of total water in the pool) to evaporation out of an 8 x 4 meter pool. That’s what you will pay every season to top up your pool.
However, with pool cover in place, you can reduce the evaporation rate by approx. 97%.
Reduces Chemical Costs
When the water evaporates, it takes away the essential chemicals with it. Additionally, the water’s exposure to direct sunlight destroys the chlorine levels in the water.
Reduces Cleaning Costs
When you cover your pool with the pool cover, you avoid the leaves, debris and dirt from entering your pool. This means you have to spend less time on cleaning and your filter will stay clean most of the time. As mentioned earlier, when your filter is free from any debris, it performs better and consumes lesser energy. Additionally, you’ll be needing lesser amounts of chemicals to clean your pool!
All these factors help to cut down on cleaning and maintenance costs.
Reduces Heating Costs
Did you know? Due to evaporation, the pool loses about 70% of the heat. If you like to heat up your pool before using it, then a pool cover can significantly help to reduce your heating costs.