Keep Your Pool Safe And Trouble Free
A backyard pool can be the best thing that a house can have. It encourages people to gather outdoors, provides endless hours of fun and makes for great parties both in the day as well as night time. A pool is also one of the best places to spend hot summers as it can cool you off almost instantly. Something this fun does not really come without its own set of quirks and maintenance work.
Here are a few things that you must be aware of about your pool.
Check for debris around the pool
While most people will gladly filter out the pool and catch all the errant debris on the water, not everyone takes the same amount of care around the pool itself. If you have hedgerows on the far end of the pool, a tree in the yard, other flowering plants in the garden and a soft lawn, there are chances of them wilting away and getting blown into the pool. It is much easier to prevent these things from happening than to pick up after them the next time you want to take a dip.
Bathroom breaks belong in the bathroom
Check the water for chemicals like trichloramine and cyanogen chloride. They form in pools that have chlorinated water in them and when mixed with human urine, can go through reactions in the right conditions and become part of the water. They are colorless, odorless, and poisonous. Cyanogen has been used in chemical warfare in the past and can affect the nervous system, lungs and the heart. So make sure your water is not harboring these chemicals. Again, this can also be easily prevented by simply not peeing in the pool.
Check for leaks
While there are a number of complicated instruments and gauges for it, checking for a leak can be done by you, right now. Take a bucket, drop a brick in it, place it on a step inside the pool such that the water level in the bucket is exactly the same as the water level in the pool. Wait for a few days. If there is a significant difference in levels, you have a leak. Do note that checking for leaks is not the same as finding the leak. Once you find out that there is a leak, you need to find where the leak is and get it fixed. A leaky pool is a serious hazard to your home as well as your pocket.
Keep your filter clean
The filter is one of the most important parts of the pool they work constantly to keep the water clean from small debris and it is what maintains that clear sparkly looking pool the way it is. If it wasn’t for the filter, your pool will get murky real quick. Make sure you pick out the filter basket and clean it at least once a week. It will have a lot of mud, sand, leaves, small toys and even little dead insects. Once a month, backwash the pipes that take in the water before cleaning.
Chemical balance the pool regularly
At a minimum, you need to check for 5 chemical levels weekly:
Cyanuric acid
free chlorine
pH levels
Alkalinity, and
Calcium
You can either get a home kit to check them yourself, or get a professional to do it for you. (recommended)
There are a number of other things that you need to be aware of and check. The above pointers are only a start, so if you aren’t already doing it, you should get on it right away.