Preparing your swimming pool for winter

At the end of the summer, there are some necessary steps you can do to ensure your swimming pool is winterised and provided with adequate protection so that your pool water does not develop into a stinking green pond, and your pool house equipment will not deteriorate, which in turn will make it much easier to maintain over winter and prepare it for use again the following year.

Prepare for winterisation of swimming pools

Firstly, find a good place to store your cover after giving it a good wash.  You will not need this over winter, and the extreme temperatures can cause your solar cover’s material to crack and deteriorate. Resulting particles can clog and damage filters.

In soft water areas, it is important to maintain a good calcium hardness reading, and the ideal level for this is up around 200-230 ppm.  If your calcium hardness is too low, you can use our Calcium Hardness Increaser which we sell if 1kg and 5kg containers.

To ensure the Chlorine and Algaecide work efficiently, adjust your pH level so that is a little more alkaline than usual, to approximately 7.8 on the scale.  The pool chemicals to use for this are Alkali pH Plus and Dry Acid pH Minus.

How to Winterise your swimming pool

Firstly we will ensure that the pool is cleaned of all debris.  Lets get off to a good start by removing this!

As you will not need to use the pool, sanitisation can be brought to levels higher than normal.  Use a good Chlorine Shock Treatment product to bring chlorine readings to about 7 mg per litre.

Apply a healthy dose of long life algaecide (recommended) or a special winter algaecide (may require more frequent dosing). We highly recommend Pro Swim All Seasons Algaecide (1 litre of this can keep a 10,000 litre pool algae free for up to 12 months), or Blue Horizons AlgiMax Eliminator.

Then backwash your filter to increase filtration effectiveness over the winter, and also the decrease the pool’s waterline to about 15 cm below the skimmer.  Shut off the supply for the skimmer from the pool house.  Keep the circulation running for a few hours to fill the entire system with your recently applied pool chemicals.  Sometimes it’s best to backwash your pool filter a second time.

Be sure to apply enough algaecide and top up pro-actively, as the presence of algae occurs prior to going green, at which point the problem is much worse. Winter pool chemicals will certainly make life easier the following season.