When you install a swimming pool in the backyard at your house, it brings with it an immediate touch of class and elegance. Just the fact of its presence suggests to people that you have both leisure and the money to enjoy it. The sparkle of the lights on the water, or underwater lights, can illuminate your backyard at night with a romantic atmosphere.
If you’re planning to create a backyard that’s to die for, a swimming pool is a finishing touch. But if you’ve gone to all that trouble, then you should also be willing to take care of it and maintain it on an ongoing basis, even during the winter months when it is too cold to use the swimming pool. If you take the right steps to winterize your pool, it will be easy to reverse the process when summer comes, and your pool will give you endless days of pleasure and enjoyment for years to come. Let us have a look at how to do it.
Winterizing Your Pool
Before you can de-winterize your swimming pool in the spring, you first have to winterize it in the late fall or early winter. This is a relatively simple process. First, make sure the water is crystal clear and clean by shocking it, vacuuming it, and backwashing the filter. The cleaner the water is when you winterize the pool, the cleaner it will be in the spring when it’s time to get your pool ready to use again.
Drain The Water
Drain the water in the swimming pool until it is 2-3 inches below the line of all the skimmers and returns to the pump and filter. You don’t want water in the lines during cold weather.
Drain The Pump
There is a small valve at the bottom of the filter. Please open it and let all the water drain out of your filter. If it’s a sand filter, some sand will come out, and it may take several hours to remove altogether.
Cover The Pool
Cover the swimming pool with a cover made for your size pool. Before putting the lid on, but several large covers float in the water. These are inflatable pillows whose sole purpose is to lift the cover, so it doesn’t create a place for rainwater to pool. Also, you can have a solar pool blanket installed, so your pool is kept warm all winter.
There are other intermediate steps along the way, but as long as you take these, you’ll have all the basics taken care of.
De-Winterizing
Drain The Cover
In the spring, you’ll need to use one or more pool drain pumps to pump the water off the pool cover. The float covers will prevent some pooling of rainwater during the winter, but nothing can stop all of it. Unfortunately, the water will almost always be out toward the middle of the pool, where it is the most difficult to reach.
An electrical drain pump, with a garden hose attached to the exhaust, can be placed in the puddled rainwater with the aid of a long pole such as the one on your skimmer net. It will pump water off the cover and expel it through the hose. Once the pump starts sucking air, turn it off and remove it. Then remove the pool cover, deflate the cover floats, and store them until next fall.
Fill The Pump
Fill the pool pump and filter with water. Add more sand if necessary. Once the pool is filled, you might have to prime the pump to get it working, but filling it now will make it easier.
Fill The Pool
Use your garden hose to fill the swimming pool. The water in the pool will be green and gunky looking. Don’t worry. Once the pool is full, you can clear the water with a few simple steps. Once the pool has been filled to its average level, do not turn on the pump!
Clearing The Water
This is where your efforts making the water in the fall will pay off. The cleaner the water was when you covered the pool, the quicker and easier it will be to clean it up in the spring. This is one of the little tricks you can use to maintain your garden and backyard all year.
Shock the pool and stir the water manually. Wait several hours and repeat. Then use a flocculant to make all the silt and debris sink to the bottom of the pool. Vacuum the bottom of the pool. Now you’re ready to turn on the pump and finish clearing the pool.
