Natural Swimming Pools

Chemical Pools

What sort of maintenance & cost is involved?

Properly maintaining pool water chemistry is the most important aspect of maintaining a swimming pool. Proper water chemistry is required to keep a swimming pool safe and clean for swimmers. Maintaining a swimming pool’s chemicals can save pool owners hundreds of pounds per year, and endless hours of time.

Start up:

To ‘open’ a pool for the start of the new swimming season the cost will be around £100+VAT from a local pool contract company.

The pool will require liquid chlorine to kill off all bacteria in the water at £22 per can. A clarifier solution is used to bond foreign particles in the water which then drop to the bottom of the pool and can then be hoovered up. The cost of this is around £14.99.

The pool will need to be left 3-4 days to balance before being safe to swim.

A copper algaecide may also be added to the water at the start of the season to work in conjunction with the chlorine. A 2 litre hit will stay in the water and last the year costing £20

If the pool has been left unattended all winter, in the worse case scenario the water will need to be dumped ready for a total refill costing in the region of £400.

The pool walls and base can be cleaned using standard pole tools, automatic cleaners and vacuum equipment totalling £500-1500.

Ongoing:

Once chlorine combines with the bacteria in the swimming pool water, the chlorine becomes inactive and no longer works to clean the pool. A chlorine shock treatment is therefore required on a regular basis.

A season’s supply of chlorine tablets will cost approx £130. Tablets will be added to the water every 3 days. Chlorine used as a shock treatment in the pool every 10 days to 2 weeks will total 500grams at around £5 if the pool remains in balance, or up to £26 for 5Kg if the pool has gone green.

Regular testing on the following water chemistry will need to be carried out:

• Chlorine levels (from the tablets, and shock treatments)
• pH level
• Alkalinity
• Cynuric Acid
• Total Dissolved Solids  (commercial pools)

Although Cyanuric acid stabilizes the chlorine level, it does it at the cost of reducing the effectiveness of the chlorine. Cyanuric acid is found in chlorine tablets, as well is being naturally found in the ground. If the levels are too high the water will loose its sanitizing ability and will need to be dumped.

Maintaining a proper pH level can be just as important as having chlorine in the pool at all. The pH level in the pool should be about 7.6.

Alkalinity is the measurement of the waters ability to maintain its pH level.

The test kit will cost about £10.

So you can expect pool maintenance to take around 1 hour a week and will include hoovering, setting up maintenance kit, leaf netting, backwashing, pump checks and cleaning, pool water testing and chemical additions.

Common Problems

• Dealing with algae

A build up of bacteria and organic matter is inevitable in any pool environment and algae can be a common problem where a pool is not properly maintained. A large shock treatment of chlorine will usually be enough to rebalance the water chemistry. You will need to leave the pool 3-7 days before it is safe to swim.

• Cloudy water

This implies the chlorine has dispersed and the most common reason for this is pool usage vs. chlorine levels. People often get used to controlling the pool and water for the number of people who use it on a regular basis and forget to take account that extra bodies over a short time will require extra chemicals.

It is best to re-evaluate the chemical levels over a known busy period (pool parties, summer etc.) rather than get into what’s called ‘yo-yo-ing’ with shock treatments to keep the water clean which is more expensive in materials and indeed swimmer downtime.

• Eyes and nose burn

This is most commonly down to the water pH level, rather than the chlorine. A test will show the pool is too high or too low on the pH scale, and this can be rectified by adding either acid or alkaline supplements at a cost of £12 per can.

• Smell of chlorine

This may be down to a lack of shocking the pool, as ‘dead chlorine’  (chloramines) emits more odour than ‘live chlorine’, if this does not work the filter backwashing and flocculation (removes dissolved solids and chloramines) are an option.

Maintenance in a Natural Swimming Pool

A Natural Swimming Pool requires a lot less work and indeed cost to run and maintain than a conventional swimming pool. However, a degree of care and attention by the owner is still needed to produce and indeed keep a healthy, clean and clear swimming environment.

Start up

A spring clean after the winter period will be required. Both the swim and planted areas need to be cleaned of any sediment and the walls should be brushed down.  Standard pool cleaning equipment and brushes can be used for the swimming area but special tools will be required for the shallows depending on the pool design. Some pools must not have their planted areas disturbed at all.

If the pool was shut down for winter any pumps used will also need to be cleaned out and restarted.

In terms of time, a half a day for a large pool (150 sq m), and perhaps a few hours for a smaller pool (75sq m) will be sufficient, and if you are cleaning the pool yourself, there is no monetary cost involved.

Ongoing

Daily skimmer checks are advisable as well as net collecting any fallen leaves. The base of the pool should be hoovered at least once a month to remove fallen sediment, or if the pool is fitted with sumps for sediment, follow the advice of your installer. It will possibly only need draining once a year.

More formal pool designs may require more regular attention (hoovering / wall brushing or the use of robotic cleaners), whereas those with a more organic pool design tend to be happy to let nature be part of the pool. The more sophisticated the system, the less work will be involved for formal designs.

November

The plants should be cut back at the end of November, so they don’t rot into the pool (usually 5cm above the water line).

As with most things, prevention is better than cure – and neglect will generate more work to recover the pool so these simple ongoing steps will keep the swimming conditions in the pool good all year round and hugely reduce the amount of work needed at the start of the swimming season.

Common Problems

• Dealing with Algae

The build up of Algae in a Natural Swimming Pool is a sign of the biology of the pool being out of balance, perhaps the pool has been neglected, or perhaps this is due to a problem in the design and the construction detail. It could also be the result of fertilisers or toxins entering the pool water by accident.

To deal with this, the pool will need to be cleaned thoroughly, remove any string algae, if a filter is employed refresh and clean it out to ensure proper function.

In an emergency situation a phosphate stripper may have to be used, or where toxins have entered the pool, e.g. weed killer, the pool may have to be drained.

• Cloudy Water

This may be a result of dirt being suspended in the water – in which case once settled it can be hoovered out. If it is cloudy due to suspended algae see notes above, however, some types of pool (especially simpler ‘swimming ponds’) will always go cloudy with suspended algae for a brief period during the transition out of winter into spring as temperatures rise.