With spring and summer just around the corner, regular pool maintenance is important for keeping water crystal clear and ensuring everyone is healthy and happy when using your pool. No one likes swimming in algae-filled, slimy water, but this can be easily remedied with the right treatments. 

Maintaining a pool can feel like a bit of a chore, as it can be challenging to balance all of the essential chemicals involved in pool water testing. This is especially true if you don’t know much about the chemistry involved in pool maintenance. 

Pool chemistry

As a brief overview, pool water testing has three basic steps. Firstly, you need to manage the pool’s pH using two chemicals. This can be done using either an acid to lower the pH or a base like sodium bicarbonate to raise the pH of the pool. You can test the pH with a range of litmus tests, such as an indicator. 

There are also a few other chemicals routinely used in pool chemistry. These are chlorine and calcium. Chlorine is the chemical everyone associates with a pool and is used to kill off any germs that might be in the pool. Calcium makes the water less harsh on the pool’s structures and stops it from corroding surfaces like pipes. 

As a pool owner and maintainer, your job is to keep all of these chemicals in their appropriate ranges, and it can be quite a complicated task. Seasonal temperature changes leaves falling from trees, or overnight rain can all significantly impact the pool’s chemistry. As a result, it is important to check your pool routinely with your pool water testing kit and top up on any missing pool chemicals. 

Routine cleaning

Regular pool maintenance also requires cleaning the pool often. Regardless of how often your pool is being treated, if it is rarely used, it will collect algae on the walls from standing water. If you use it often, you’ll need to collect any debris that gathers in the pool. 

It’s important that you know how best to maintain your cleaning instruments. This includes your filter and your pool vacuum. The pool vacuum can remove small debris from the bottom of the pool, but a skimmer is much better for removing larger debris or objects from the surface and middle of the pool. 

Brushing the pool is another option when the vacuum isn’t quite up to snuff. This is often a once-a-season chore that occurs after the pool has been left to sit. A vacuum is usually good enough for regular maintenance if you can do it weekly. 

Filter maintenance can be done with various substances, including sand, cartridges, or diatomaceous earth. The type that’s best for your system will depend on your pump and your pool. However, each has pros and cons depending on its size. 

The diatomaceous earth tends to be the smallest size for filtration and is usually the best filter option. Cartridge filters are the next smallest, with sand being the largest filtration material. This means that the biggest objects can fit through sand so that the most water will filter through sand in the shortest amount of time with the same pressure level. 

Chemical management

Pool chemicals are hazardous substances and need to be handled appropriately before diluting them into a pool. It is very important that you store them away from children’s play areas and in a locked or inaccessible space. 

This is because compounds such as chlorine and sodium bicarbonate can be seriously harmful if ingested or mixed with other household ingredients such as bleach or alcohol. It is very important that only the appropriate person capable of managing the pool chemicals is able to access them and that all members of the household are aware of the dangers of the pool chemicals. 

In addition, diluting these strong chemicals to the appropriate parts per million is essential, as getting the measurements wrong could seriously irritate or injure the skin. The skin’s pH level is quite tightly regulated, so changing the pH of the skin by swimming in a pool with a mismanaged pH could cause irritation. 

However, because the volume of water is so large in a pool, you would have to add far too much of either chemical before it becomes hazardous, so it’s not as big of a worry as you might think. Instead, it’s more important to give the chemicals time to diffuse within the water before swimming. This will ensure you avoid accidentally exposing anyone’s skin to high concentrations of chemicals.

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