Having A Hard Time Maintaining And Cleaning Your Pool? Try These Tips!
During those hot summer days, there’s nothing like the refreshment and relaxation that a swimming pool can provide.
Of course, before you can enjoy that refreshment and relaxation, just as with keeping a clean and functional home, you’ve got to make sure that your pool is clean and properly maintained.
Especially if you have a larger pool, this can seem like a never-ending process. Fortunately, in addition to the regular maintenance that’s crucial to the health of your pool, there are other things you can do to help keep dirt and other debris from finding its way into your pool.
Here are a few tips to make your pool maintenance job a little easier this summer.
Build A Barrier
One common way that dirt and debris enter your pool is when small animals decide to go for a swim and end up using your pool for a bathtub, instead.
Keeping animals out of your pool can help you keep it cleaner in addition to avoiding any nasty surprises of the bodies of animals who couldn’t make it out.
For complete protection, a lanai can be installed around and above your entire pool, keeping out animals big and small.
Of course, in some cases, this won’t be a practical or even possible solution. If that’s true in your case, do some detective work with a motion-activated camera to determine which animals are causing most of the problem, then utilize various solutions to control those animals specifically.
You can use a fence for some animals, screened areas for others, and edging around the perimeter of your pool for others. By keeping these animals out of your pool, you’ll be able to be more proactive about regular pool maintenance, which will keep your pool cleaner with less effort.
Control Erosion
A scenic hill that’s visible from your pool can make a dramatic backdrop and truly add to the feeling of having your own tropical escape.
At the same time, a hill that’s so close can lead to a buildup of dirt and debris in your pool as it erodes, over time. In addition to dirtying up your pool, a badly eroding hill can cause structural issues to your pool that could cost thousands of dollars to fix.
To help prevent erosion, a variety of methods can be used.
If the soil is fertile enough, you can plant grass, trees, and other plants, whose roots will help hold the soil in place. If you can’t get much to grow, you can build a retaining wall using bricks, blocks, or large rocks that will help prevent any eroding soil from entering your pool.
If things get really bad, you can utilize a metal grid placed over the area of the eroding soil, which will serve as sort of an artificial root system to help hold the soil in place.
Be Tree Free
Trees certainly have many advantages when they’re in close proximity to your pool. They help prevent erosion, they provide shade to prevent sunburn, plus they provide a beautiful natural backdrop to add enjoyment to your swimming experience.
For all they’re good for, though, trees that are close to your pool can be a maintenance nightmare. Dropping leaves, blossoms, sticks, and other debris can quickly clog your filter and lead to a reduction in water quality.
As with animals invading your pool, a lanai is the most effective protection against these pool intruders. If that isn’t practical, however, you can utilize a barrier in the areas around your pool where you have the most leaves to help reduce the number of leaves that enter your pool.
Of course, the most permanent solution is to remove the trees that are closest to your pool so the volume of debris will be reduced.
You don’t necessarily have to remove all your trees, and you can plan in advance to observe which trees provide the most shade, then only remove the ones who don’t add much to the shade canopy.
If you do need to remove all your trees, you can install shade structures around your pool to provide continued protection against sunburn.
Keep the Weeds at Bay
Another common culprit of pool contamination are pesky weeds that seem to pop up, even in the most well-manicured lawn. As the weeds sprout, they loosen the soil above them, which can get washed into your pool.
Additionally, as the weeds die or drop leaves, those can end up in your pool, as well, leading to a lot of small debris in your pool that can be difficult to remove.
If you find yourself fighting weeds on a regular basis, it’s important to consider where the weeds are coming from. If you notice they’re popping up in cracks in the concrete around your pool, it may be time to replace the concrete.
You can use the opportunity to spruce up the area around your pool with some decorative concrete. Decorative concrete is good for keeping weeds off your pool just as much as more standard concrete is, plus it adds a touch of fun and personality to the area around your pool.
If the problem is a little further out, you can utilize a plastic weed barrier to prevent weeds from growing, plus mulch to choke out the weeds and spruce up garden areas.
Staying Ahead With A Routine
With any type of potential pool maintenance issues, the key is to stay on top of them and tackle them as soon as you notice a problem.
Though it may require more consistent effort to tackle problems as soon as you notice them, it definitely beats having to deal with problems once they’ve become more well-established.
So, take the time to analyze your pool and the area around it to see what elements exist that may be causing your maintenance issues. Then you can tackle the issues that are actually causing the problem instead of just guessing and potentially getting it wrong.
Then, when combined with your regular pool maintenance regimen, you’re likely to see great results so you can get back to enjoying the refreshment and relaxation your pool was designed to provide.
Looking for more help keeping your pool clean? Check out our review of the top 5 above ground pool vacuums.
