With summer finally here, you are thinking more about opening your pool than taking care of your winter pool cover. But we here at Middlesex Pools know the importance of a good summer hibernation for these heavy duty beasts. So that when next autumn comes, you would have a reliable and strong winter pool cover to put on your outdoor pool. For both the solid and mesh-style covers, care, maintenance and storage play a big role in ensuring a winter pool cover’s long and happy life.
Take It Off
The first step of summerising a pool usually is taking the winter cover off, but the process will be different depending on which type of cover you’re dealing with. For a solid cover (that would have collected water on top) the engineer will start siphoning some of the water off the cover. These covers can have a lot of water on them when it comes time to take them off, if a cover pump hasn’t been used. Mesh type safety covers, on the other hand, are anchored into the coping of the pool, and require engineers to use tools to remove them.
Dry It Out
The cover is off and it’s big, bulky and wet. What now?
Either kind of cover will take a little time in the sun to dry off before storage, but the mesh covers usually require less cleaning at this point, just take it off the pool and they lay it on the patio or on the lawn or wherever and then hose it all off. They are usually quite clean, since they have a trampoline type fit across your pool, so in the spring all the leaves that were on there usually just dry up and blow away.
If you are lucky, you don’t have to do anything to the cover. But in case they are extremely dirty or damaged, your pool engineer should send them away for repairs. In some cases with heavy damage, it might be better to just replace the cover.
The unanchored solid type covers will require a little more time to get clean, although they are fairly uncommon here in the UK. If you have one of those solid ones, those generally will collect all the rain water and the leaves, and it can be kind of a murky mess in the spring. To prevent this, leave an automatic pool cover pump on it during the winter.
Put It Away
Proper storage is the key to ensuring a long life for a winter cover, especially the mesh ones. It doesn’t matter if the cover is wet as long as you hang it up somewhere. The bag is a mesh, the cover is a mesh, so if you hang it up there’s always air circulating. You don’t have to worry about mould or mildew or anything. Generally your pool engineers would leave it lying on the pool surround for a couple of hours while they’re there anyway, so it will be fairly dry before you put it away.
Besides hanging them in the plant room or store, the other common storage method is folding and boxing the covers, but in that case, the cover needs to be dry, regardless of whatever kind it is. It’s important not to have anything in there that’s going to make it smell bad when you open it up in six months.
Closing a pool vs. Opening a pool
The winter cover, of course, gets its moment to shine not in the summer, but in the autumn when the pool is being winterised. Putting on the cover is usually the last step in winterising, when your pool engineer will blow out all the pool plumbing, winterise all the equipment and add chemicals to the pool, and at the end when they’re done with all that, they put the winter cover on.
However, taking off the cover can also be the last step in opening for some pools, where the engineer will go out and start the pump and filter, but will leave that cover on. That will allow the water to circulate and mix the chemicals in the pool, and make sure the chemicals are where they’re supposed to be, so that you have crystal-clear water. Then if it starts raining in May, when you will usually take the cover off and start using the pool, the pool water’s already clear and nobody has to do a last minute running around for a pool that is green or water out of balance.
If the summerising protocol is followed, how long can one reasonably expect a winter cover to last. Safety covers can last for years; Certikin covers have a 5 year warranty, but with proper care we have seen them last much longer than that.
So the tricks to ensure a good summer holiday for the winter cover are pretty easy to master: Keep it clean, keep it well ventilated, away from mice and other things that like to chew on them, and it will last for years to come.
Think clean and dry — you just want keep them clean and dry, and your winter pool covers will give you a good service in the following season.
Long live the cover!
If you need help with your winter pool cover, please give us a call on 07950972561 or fill out the form on the right and we will call you back.