How to Maintain a Swimming Pool: A Weekly Routine That Actually Works

Pool owners often tend to get obsessed about maintaining their pool. They believe that cleaning the pool needs regular testing, continuous vacuuming, and precise use of chemicals. Well, that is not the case. It’s quite opposite to the truth, in fact; excessive management of a pool creates as many issues as leaving it untouched.

What helps in making the pool clean and tidy is sticking to a consistent schedule for a week along with occasional glances in between.

For most backyard pools, one proper session a week is enough. Thirty minutes on an easy pool, closer to an hour on a pool with heavy tree cover or heavy use.

Test before you do anything else. It’s also the one thing that people tend not to do, yet it leads to the most preventable problems.

Free chlorine and pH tests should be done once a week. Total alkalinity and stabilizer are also important, but not something that needs to be checked weekly on all pools. Regardless of whether you are using test strips or a liquid test kit, the objective is the same.

After the readings have been acquired, make the corrections only where needed. Low chlorination levels and high pH are two issues that create problems silently. These two will keep the water looking acceptable for a couple of days, as the chlorine becomes less effective, and the particulate matter fails to settle out of the water. 

Take your corrective measures in small increments, as large changes nearly always cause another problem right on the heels of the first one. These are the ranges that should be maintained for residential pools:

Make sure that you clean off the surface, edges, and any place where debris accumulates, such as near stairs, ladders, and corners. This isn’t the most fun aspect of pool maintenance, but when all those leaves and organics fall into the water and decay, the demand for chlorine will increase and staining will be more common.

The pool may appear clean but could be accumulating residues. The water line becomes contaminated with sunscreens and oils from the body, while low flow areas such as corners and areas behind the ladders tend to develop algae first.

A nylon brush should be used on vinyl and fiberglass liners, and a harder brush on concrete and plaster surfaces. Weekly brushing is enough. It’s better to prevent accumulation than deal with residues.

In some cases, this needs to happen once a week while in others it is not necessary at all. Everything really depends on your location rather than any kind of strict rule. There will be much more vacuuming done in a tree-filled backyard than an open and clean backyard. Also, if you have a robot vacuum that is working efficiently, weekly vacuuming may be redundant.

Filtration issues will most often come to light before there are any issues with clarity of the water. Drain the skimmer and pump baskets if you find that there is any accumulation of debris and monitor the reading of the filter pressure gauge. This should read around 8 to 10 psi above your clean gauge reading. The same applies for cartridge filters.

If you want a single reference to keep near the pool, this covers what most residential pools actually need.