ANATOMY OF A MAINTENANCE CALL

So, you have the seasonal service package where your technician comes every week to maintain your pool, but what exactly does maintaining your pool involve? Pools have a combination of things that need to be addressed on a weekly basis. This includes water chemistry, cleanliness and clarity, safety, and basic operations. These are things your maintenance tech is addressing each week.

WATER CHEMISTRY

Proper water chemistry is essential to maintaining a clean and healthy pool. The five main elements of water balance being addressed weekly are sanitation levels, pH, alkalinity, calcium hardness, and cyanuric acid. Your sanitizer is either a chlorine, salt (being converted into chlorine), or bromine (on indoor applications). For our sanitizer levels, we are making sure your chemicals feeders have enough chemicals to maintain for the week and shocking your pool (if needed). The pH level is being maintained as they help sanitizer levels operate efficiently, help with bather comfort (to eyes and mucous membranes), and protect pool equipment and pool surfaces. Alkalinity is the buffer that keeps pH in place. Calcium hardness and cyanuric acid are typically not needed to be adjusted on weekly visits. Proper calcium hardness in necessary to keep the water from becoming aggressive and attacking the pool surface and pool elements. Cyanuric acid is essentially sunscreen for your sanitizer. If you are using stabilized tablets, cyanuric acid is built into the tablet, otherwise it is added manually. Both calcium hardness and cyanuric acid are adjusted at the beginning of the season and is lowered by fresh water, so typically there is little need to adjust those two factors.

CLARITY

Some of the biggest client concerns are pools being clean, clear, and blue. Water chemistry is closely related to water clarity. When your chemistry is balanced, it keeps your pool clear. Keeping your pool clean is the work of your maintenance technician. Your maintenance technician will employ manual vacuuming, skimming, and/or brushing to clean your pool surface. Skimmer basket and pump baskets are manually emptied of debris that has collected throughout the week including leaves, twigs, bugs, and sometimes an unfortunate animal that has lost its way. However, these items are continually falling into your pool after we leave the visit and supplementing during the week with a robotic cleaner or your own efforts is a plus!

SAFETY

At our visit, we are doing a visual assessment of the pool and equipment components to make sure there are no safety concerns on site. If you have additional safety concerns and want to get additional layers of protection, we can offer you options for alarms, covers, wearables, and more. We can even give you a list of safety tips you can check to make sure your pool is safe each and every time prior to getting into the pool.

BASIC OPERATIONS

Your maintenance tech does a once over on the system to make sure it is running properly. This includes making sure your pump is operating and priming, filter is clean, gauges are reading, chemical feeder is feeding, and the heater is heating. Now, some of the basics the maintenance technician can address at that call such as a priming issue with the pump or backwashing the filter. However, some of the other problems that may be found such as heating or salt system error codes require a service call at another time which we will dissect in next month’s email.