Most pool owners have a love hate relationship with their swimming pools. They are great when it comes to keeping guests and kiddies entertained. They make for a great backdrop for parties and are ideal for those that want to get a bit of daily exercise without schlepping all the way to the gym. People who do not own pools would be thinking now, “Well, what’s not to love?”
The short answer is that pools do require a fair amount of maintenance. In the old days this meant chucking a cup of chlorine in every day, checking the pH levels every now and again and skimming the surface removing leaves from your pool as well as other debris before it settles. Pool maintenance has not changed a whole lot except that now there are ways to dose your pool only once a week rather than every day. The skimming and checking of pH levels must still be done though.
Skimming your pool to remove dead leaves may not seem important enough to do daily but it actually is – if you do not do this, you could end up upsetting the pH balance of the pool, introducing dangerous bacteria and even possibly damaging your pool’s machinery like its pump, etc.
The Pool’s pH
Like any other body of water, the pool needs to be kept just acidic enough to restrain the growth of algae, etc. but also just alkaline enough so that you can swim in it without serious damage to your skin. This can be a tricky enough balance to maintain without throwing decomposing leaves into the mixture.
Bacteria
Bacteria really only needs a little bit of encouragement to grow and a nutrition source. A rotting leaf will not only introduce harmful bacteria to your pool, it will also provide it with ample nutrition for this bacteria to grow and reproduce. The bacteria, in turn, damages the pH balance of the pool and provides more room for bigger plants such as algae to grow. From nought to green in a few days.
Damage to Machinery
It may not seem as though leaves could do a lot of damage to the machinery of the pool but, if any of them make it into the pool’s pump, for example, they could end up causing trouble. It’s not that the leaves are particularly strong but they can really end up gumming up the works. This can be pricey to fix and, in really bad cases, might mean getting a new pump altogether. It is far better to avoid this problem entirely by performing pool maintenance daily.
All in all, it does make sense to skim the pool every day and remove leaves before they have time to cause a problem for you. It really isn’t that much effort if you think about how much hassle it could save you in the long run.