3 Essential Pool-Cleaning Secrets for Pool Owners

Your backyard swimming pool is more than a luxurious oasis of pleasure. It can help keep you and your family fit and healthy. There are many benefits to having a pool, and all of them are enjoyed to the max when the pool is cared for with best practices. Scheduling regular maintenance from a professional pool company is standard procedure, to make sure your pool remains a relaxing getaway and not a source of constant stress. There are things a pool owner should do that go beyond leaving everything to the pool guy, to make your pool the absolute best it can be.

Daily skimming

Pool professionals usually visit once per week, but pristine pools receive care more frequently than that, especially when it comes to skimming. The reality is that pool skimming chores should be done every day. Yes, the pool has built-in pool skimmers, but the needed process isn’t all automated. Every day, the top of the pool should be manually skimmed, to remove bugs, hair, leaves, and other debris that invariably makes its way into the pool.

If the manual work isn’t done, the pool skimmer that’s built into the pool can lose its effectiveness, due to being clogged with debris. This suction line of your pump system pulls water from the surface of the pool into a filter for cleaning. The skimmer baskets can fill up quickly. If a basket gets too full, the suction ability and flow rate of the system is greatly reduced. The result of this development is that debris can end up sinking to the bottom.

It’s not good for debris to collect at the bottom of your pool because it has more time to decompose there and can easily stain your pool and make it less sanitary. More wear and tear on the pool pump is another undesirable outcome.

By skimming your pool daily, one more benefit is that you can usually leave the nasty job of cleaning the skimmer baskets to the pool professional who does it as standard procedure.

Nix swimming in street clothes

Most people naturally wear their swimming suit in the pool, and that’s a good thing. The best care of your pool includes making a basic requirement that swimming fully clothed is not generally allowed. Regular clothing is not really harmful, if there is an occasional t-shirt worn in the pool. When regular clothes are excessively worn in the pool, however, there can be some undesirable results. The clothing dye can bleed because of the chlorine, and clothe can fray. Your pool could begin to look murky, as a result.

Fido needs his own pool

Chlorine is not good for dogs because it acts as an irritant on their skin. Actually, dogs aren’t good for the pool, either. A pool will get hairier and dirtier a lot more quickly if one or more dogs swim in the pool. The best idea is to have a kiddie pool on the sidelines, to let your dog cool off. For families that don’t want to deny their dog or can’t keep the dog out, anyway, here are a couple of helpful tips:

• Be diligent in keeping up with daily skimming and pool filter cleaning and
• Keep the chlorine level at the lowest level possible (below 3.0 PPM), to still keep the water safe for swimming but also reduce irritants on the dog’s skin.

These three pool secrets can go a long way to help make your pool an amazing asset that will delight and impress visitors and that you can thoroughly enjoy year-around.