Chemicals and treatments represent a small fraction of inground swimming pool prices, but the higher cost actually consists of time and attention. If you are new to maintaining a swimming pool, you’ll soon realize it entails some amount of observation and measurements necessary to keep your pool usable at all times. In time you’ll become better at this, but first you should learn about the most common problems in order to avoid them.
Avoid excessive chlorine smell
A common problem with swimming pools is knowing how much chlorine you should have in the water. If your pool has a strong smell of chlorine, most likely it has too little free chlorine. Free chlorine is the amount of chlorine that is actually working by disinfecting your water. The rest of the chlorine has already mixed with other substances in the water such as sweat and urine, this reaction is what you’re smelling and this chlorine is not working for you.
To be sure of this, you need to measure the amount of total and free chlorine in the water. If this is the problem you can fix it by giving your pool water a chlorine shock treatment.
Eliminate the chance of algae growing
Having algae in water is another common problem. In itself algae is not harmful, it’s just a plant. The issue is that it provides food for bacteria, allowing it to reproduce and thrive much faster. This, in turn, causes the chlorine to be consumed rapidly and your water more vulnerable.
It’s not pleasant having algae because it makes the water look, taste and smell dirty. To prevent algae from growing you need to have proper levels of free chlorine in the water, and if it’s already out of control it’s recommended to use algaecide. Check your filters, and swimming pool lights to spot algae build up.
Illnesses
One of the worst problems is probably having your water in such a bad condition that it transmits illnesses. Your water is always exposed to contamination, especially if there’s a high swimmer load, so bacteria will always be entering it. As with algae, the amount of free chlorine will be used up faster, and in attempt to fix this many users will use excess chlorine, which unleashes other health problems. It’s necessary to keep constant check of free chlorine, and to avoid using high levels of it, you can consider mineral water sanitisers, which can reduce chlorine consumption by 75%.
As you can see, keeping your water safe is a very delicate process and requires a constant check on your water’s chlorine levels. Of course, there are also other factors to measure such as pH and alkalinity; this preventive measure will almost always be enough to have clean water. It becomes more challenging as you have more swimmers in the pool, so in addition to chlorine you can use mineral water sanitisers.