How to keep a pool clean?

July 16, 2009 8:56 AM

My parents just put in a pool, and what with the rain washing dirt and worms in and the trees shedding, it takes hours and hours of skimming and vacuuming work a week. What's the best solution here?

The pool is salt water, concrete, 15'x40', 3'5" deep to 6' deep. It has built in stairs and a seat, neither of which ever get dirty. The dirt mainly collects near the edges. The two options under consideration are a pool robot and a bubble cover. It is right next to a number of flower beds and under several trees.

The pool robot has to need no installation and be easily removable when people are swimming. It would be nice if it skimmed as well but this is not crucial. The pool is quite distant from a power outlet, though of course we can use an extension cord, but this means it would run through the entire back yard, so it would need to be even more removable. The robot should be able to clean the bottom of the pool in 10-12 hours. All things being equal, we don't want to pay more for faster cleaning.

Would the (less expensive) bubble cover alone keep enough dirt out of the pool that we won't be spending an hour or more a day vacuuming? (We may get the bubble cover anyways for use in early fall.) What is the best robot for our needs? The robot needs to clean up dirt, the occasional worm, and all the helicopter seeds. (The current vacuum is fine with dirt and worms but fails badly on helicopters, but mostly it just takes forever.)

Having someone come in and maintain the pool is not an option. The trees and flower beds cannot be changed.

posted by jeather to home & garden (16 comments total)

How about a tarp? You can get a 40x60 tarp for ~130.
posted by kensch at 9:04 AM on July 16

the kreppy krawler (pool robot) for my mom's pool does not use electricity, it uses the suction power to close a collapsible valve in the tube which then makes it jump about 1/2 an inch in to a new position. You need to have enough hose to allow it to traverse the entire bottom of the pool and the jets must be positioned to create a current that makes it crawl the entire pool.

I don't know how long it takes to clean the entire pool, since it is usually in the pool when nobody is swimming, installation and removal is a breeze, just drop it in and hook it up to the skimmer. Since there is usually only responsible adults in the pool we usually just tie it up to the side out of the way and remove it from the skimmer.

She also has a bubble cover, both to keep out blown in debris and to heat / insulate it. I find that most of the 'dirt' on the bottom comes from pollen or algea as dies from the pool chemicals, so the cover doesn't stop that. And for some reasons worms will always find there way in across the concrete apron.
posted by Mahogne at 9:16 AM on July 16

Can you manipulate the drainage pattern around the pool so that dirt and worms (and maybe tree debris) don't get washed in? Maybe some kind of raised edge around the pool / pool deck, or even little "streambeds" to guide the rainwater.

The trees should only shed at certain times of the year, so that's a kind of temporary problem.
posted by amtho at 9:19 AM on July 16

Pools are a PITA, plain and simple. Having lived with one for 20 years, here's what I can tell you.

The pool robot will clean the bottom but not skim. There's likely a "skimmer basket" that will collect any debris that floats into it, but it is by no means foolproof. As for power cords, all the ones I"ve seen are powered by being connected to one of the circulation jets, but those are just the ones sold to us by the pool company that opens/closes our pools, I've not researched them fully (but somehow I think a power cord into a pool of water seems inherently dangerous and unlikely it would be a popular option).

Pools are work, and at a MINIMUM require a weekly skimming by hand, and a monthly vacuuming to get the stuff the robot didn't. Due to all the foliage around the pool, this may be more.

Yes, a cover HELPS, but it is not a silver bullet. When removing the cover much of the junk that was on top of the cover will hit the water and float into the pool.

We eventually screened in the pool area, erecting a metal framework and then using screen-door material to create a screened in patio area, and that cut down on a lot as well, but also was not the silver bullet we'd hoped for. Stuff still blew in through the doors on the sides, and the dirt at the bottom still accumulated as dirt still blew threw the air, through the screens, and accumulated in the water.
posted by arniec at 9:21 AM on July 16

Would the (less expensive) bubble cover alone keep enough dirt out of the pool that we won't be spending an hour or more a day vacuuming?

Getting a solar cover on and off the pool without dumping everything on it into the pool can be a real trick. It takes several people to do right. The covers that are on reels, so they can easily be managed by one person, typically dump all the crap that collects on top of them right into the pool. You need to sort of bundle up the edges and then haul it off as one large sack, which can weigh several hundred pounds if it's rained recently. (You can siphon off the nasty water or use a small submersible pump to make this easier, though.)

I hate to break it to you, but "hours and hours of skimming and vacuuming work a week" is sort of par for the course when you own a pool. Some of the robots — and it's really proportional to price, in my experience — supposedly do an okay job (I've been told this one works well if you have an in-ground pool), but if you want a nice clean pool, it takes manual labor, either yours or someone else's.

My folks finally got rid of their pool due to all the maintenance and expense associated with it. It was fun to have around, but you really have to use it a lot to be swimming more than you're cleaning.

In the 10 years or so they've had the pool, we've tried several different types of 'robots' to do vacuuming, and none of them seemed to get down into the corners very well. They cleaned the wide open spaces, but those are the easiest to vacuum by hand, too. (These were all suction-powered models though.) For a while they hired a high-school kid to come and vacuum it three times a week and that did the job, but then he went to college and they couldn't find anyone reliable, and the professional pool cleaning companies are staggeringly expensive.

Sometimes by readjusting the inlet jet to produce more water circulation, you can make the built-in skimmer work more effectively. In circular or oval pools there are even "extensions" that you can get that attach to the inlet, basically forcing stuff floating around in the water into the skimmer/vacuum. I spent a lot of time playing around with this a few years ago, and it cut down on some of the skimming, but there were still "dead spots" in the water that collected junk, and pollen collected at the waterline and needed to be sponged off by hand.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:31 AM on July 16

Skimming is less than 10 minutes a day, really, it's a red herring. The trees shed all summer long. A few hours a week of vacuuming is fine. A few hours a day is not. A robot that decreases the vacuuming work by 10 hours a week, even though that's not down to zero, is just fine.

A bubble cover seems to be out as a solution. Any other specific robot recommendations?
posted by jeather at 9:57 AM on July 16

Similar to amtho: create a berm surrounding the pool. You could also build a deck around it; to make it flush with the pool, you'd have to lower the soil level.

Either way, it's a problem. It's not normal for dirt to wash into pools, and I imagine it's not great for the filtration system. Changing the drainage pattern is the only permanent fix. Your parents are going to have to choose between flower beds and a muddy pool.
posted by dogrose at 9:59 AM on July 16

Yeah - pool maintenance SUCKS! Had one growing up and still going back home I help my folks clean the damn thing. I feel bad for my kids that they will not have a pool growing up but I refuse to put one in.

As others have suggested skim daily and vacuum weekly. For me the real downside to the robot is that it will never clean everything so we opted for the manual vacuum option.

Also when cutting the grass around the pool you may want to have some sort of block to minimize clippings jumping in the pool. we used a big cardboard box but that was almost more of a pain to coordinate so eventually gave up and spent half of Saturdays cutting the grass followed by cleaning the pool.
posted by doorsfan at 10:09 AM on July 16

I've had two Polaris robots and both worked great. I currently have a Polaris 280 which cleans a similar area to yours in about 3 hours a day, but it needs a dedicated pressure line. I never need to do manual vacuuming. I had a Polaris 360 in the past that worked well but the maintenance was more complicated. It also needed a dedicated pressure line.

The Polaris ATV looks like the right solution for your requirements from their range. I have no personal experience with it, but if it's built to the same standards as their other products it will do what you need. Do you have a local pool supply store nearby that you use? The folks who work in those usually have plenty of good advice on selection and maintenance.
posted by IanMorr at 10:28 AM on July 16

Our pool is indoor, so I can't help with the dirt and leaves question, but wanted to chime in to say that if you heat your pool at all (based on your location I'm guessing you do), you might want to get the bubble cover after all: they're super cheap, and that tiny bit of extra insulation saves a truly startling amount of energy.
posted by ook at 10:40 AM on July 16

Can you manipulate the drainage pattern around the pool so that dirt and worms (and maybe tree debris) don't get washed in?

This is the right answer. The pool was not a standalone thing. You needed to design the entire area around it to get the best results. The good news is, there are lots of things you can do to mitigate the problems.

If stuff is being washed in, you need a system of drains installed -- either pipes or French drains or both. You also need to clear away overhanging trees and whatnot, or keep the pool covered at all times.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 10:50 AM on July 16 [1 favorite has favorites]

We did, in fact, have the area designed. Poorly, apparently, but it was designed with the pool there in mind, by a landscape architect who works with pools all the time. I'll recommend speaking to the gardener (who suggested appropriate flowers next to a pool) about drainage issues.

I have suggested a berm, too.

I suspect they will purchase a bubble cover for heating as it gets closer to fall, but I am also sure my father will want to see the change in his hydro bill before he decides it's worth it.

Thank you for the suggestions. Any more specific robot suggestions would be great (we tend to have a smaller set of options here at the best of times, and the pool companies don't like to sell robots because they prefer to sell their own maintenance contracts -- the one who installed ours has something like 2 available).
posted by jeather at 11:13 AM on July 16

iRobot (makes of the Roomba) have a range of pool cleaning robots.
posted by hylaride at 11:58 AM on July 16

I've used a Polaris return-side pool robot (no booster pump needed) in a kidney shaped pool with mostly no corners (it had 3 steps) and I recommend them. This one would retrieve coins off the bottom. The day it shed a screw, washer, and a wheel, and came up with the screw and the washer in it's bag, I was impressed!
Robot sweepers don't skim; there are apparently some powered skimmers but those don't sweep. That pool also got tree debris but probably not as severely as your parents' does. The built-in skimmers got most of it, and I'd skim it when necessary with a long-handled net.
posted by TruncatedTiller at 1:59 PM on July 16

We did, in fact, have the area designed. Poorly, apparently, but it was designed with the pool there in mind, by a landscape architect who works with pools all the time.

You'd also want to talk to the landscape contractor that installed the garden, because the contractor would be the one making sure that they are installing grading and drainage to spec.
posted by oneirodynia at 6:03 PM on July 16

The gardener is not at fault.

Talk to the architect and the contractor. I'm assuming your parents didn't ask them construct a pool cantilevered out from a steep, mudslide-prone site. If that's the case, then either the architect or the landscaper or both should make this right. If not -- welcome to the laws of physics.
posted by dogrose at 8:38 PM on July 16