Prepping Your Pool For Summer
Following are some great tips for getting your pool party prepped for summer. My Ever Clear Pool can take care of all of it for you, if you’d like to keep your poolside life care free.
1) Remove the Pool Cover. Remove any debris and leaves from the cover and drain any water that may be sitting on top. Whatever you do, do not feed the water back into the pool as this can cause more work to restore balance to your pool water.
2) Fill the Pool. Bring the water level up to the middle of the skimmer opening.
3) Physical Cleaning. Using the leaf net, remove leaves, sticks and debris from the pool. Check that your filtration system is working and vacuum the pool.
4) Test the Water. Take a sample of your water to a professional for a complete analysis. The water should be taken 18″ down and away from the returns. Do not use just any container but use a clean plastic water sample bottle available at your dealer.
5) Test Reagents. My Ever Clear Pool is more than happy to do all your testing for you, but should you wish to do it yourself, make sure that your test reagents are new to get an accurate reading from your home test kit.
6) Balance Your Water. If your home test kit is sophisticated enough to test for alkalinity, stabilizer and hardness, as well as pH and Chlorine, great! Otherwise, take a water sample to the pros and adjust your pool water chemically as follows:
a) Adjust Alkaliinity to 80-125 ppm for plaster pools or to 125-150 ppm for vinyl pools. Total Alkalinity should be adjusted before adjusting the pH.
b) For chemical efficiency and swimming enjoyment adjust the pH to between 7.2 and 7.6.
c) Test stabilizer level by measuring the amount of pool water stabilizer or cyanuric acid, making sure the pool has at least 30 ppm. This prevents loss of chlorine from the sun’s ultra violet rays.
d) Calcium hardness should be between 150-280 ppm. It is now recommended to add a sequestrian agent before shocking the pool. This will keep any dissolved metals that have made their way into the pool water during the winter from discoloring or staining the pool.
e) It is necessary to do a shock treatment to oxidize water soluble organic matter that the filter cannot remove. You can do this by super-chlorination and this should be done once a week during pool season.
f) The weather is often unpredictable at the beginning of spring which can lead to algae. The addition of a poly algaecide safeguards against this.
g) Adjust your chlorine level to 1.5-3.0 ppm and maintain a regular chlorine addition of 60 gms per 50,000 liters or 2 oz per 10,000 gallons.
h) Your brominator should be adjusted to a bromine level of 3.0-5.0 ppm.