How to maintain the pool water

The clarity and cleanliness of the water is what the people notice in the first hand when they visit a swimming pool. If you have an inbuilt swimming pool in your house, you surely would like to see it as balanced as possible. Though you may consider it a tedious job, you really don’t need to be a scientist to maintain a proper hygiene to your pool water. Just knowing a few steps and adhering to them will enable you to look after your pool water with ease and efficiency.

Difficulty level: Moderately easy

Time required: Continuous process requires daily to yearly monitoring

Estimated cost: Maintaining a swimming pool is a moderately expensive ask though it is nothing in comparison to owning a pool.

Resources required:

1. Chlorine/Bromine tablets or sticks
2. Tools to measure PH value, acidity, alkalinity etc.
3. Floating or automatic chlorine feeders
4. Skimmers

The process consists of the following steps:

1. The priority should always be given to the cleanliness of the pool water. For this purpose you can use either chlorine or bromine tablets or sticks. However chlorine is more popular and is easily available in the market. Chlorine acts as a disinfector for water. It kills the germs present in the pool water. Make sure you keep the chlorine under a skimmer or an excessive concentration of chlorine would mean corrosions of your tools and equipments. Alternatively you can use floating or automatic chlorine feeders so that the chlorine is gradually released in the pool water.

2. A periodic check should be performed to see whether the PH level of the water in the pool is right or not. The PH level should lie anywhere between 7.6 to 7.8. If a greater PH is recorded, the result may be the scaling on your tiles. On the contrary, if too low PH is maintained it may result in the corrosion of the tools and equipments of the pool. PH should be monitored daily.

3. Be sure to use a shock treatment for the pool water once in a week. This will remove the dead bacteria as well as the used chlorine from the pool.

4. Use of cyanuric acid makes the water stabilize in chlorine content. A reading between 20-30 ppm is considered adequate for the pool water. If you don’t want to use it you can look for Calcium hypochlorite or sodium hypochlorite. Both of these are strong bases and greatly increase the PH value of the water.

5. Periodically check the alkalinity of the water. It should be maintained between 80-120 ppm.

6. Last but not the least, you should monitor your calcium hardness once a year. The suggested calcium level is between 150 and 250 ppm. The excess of calcium may also cause corrosion or unexplained build ups in the pool.

Frequently asked questions and answers:

[Q.1] Why does the water sometimes turn green?
[A] The green color of water denotes that there is some algae in your pool on the condition that the PH level is high enough. This happens due to low level of chlorine in the pool. On the other hand, a low PH level and around 3ppm chlorine in the pool points towards the possibility of existence of copper in abundancy.

Quick tips:

1. If you can afford you can use bromine in place of chlorine. It is less irritating and allergic substance .
2. The need to handle chlorine or bromine levels can be considerably reduced by the use of salt chlorinators. These salts easily get converted into chlorine and save the extra effort.
3. The most used chlorine tablets are 3” tablets which dissolve slowly into the water. Always remember that tablets are preferable to sticks.

Things to watch out for:

1. As chlorine or Bromine are highly hazardous, they should be handled with care and should always be kept out of the reach of the children.
2. Chlorine is a very reactive substance. So, always put chlorine into the water, never water into chlorine otherwise an explosion may be the result.
3. Pre-dissolve chlorine into a bucket of water if you are planning to use a granular chlorine.
4. Be sure to follow the step by step instructions provided by the manufacturers. A lot of research is done to provide you those guidelines.

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