Fred Wagner is president of Poolman, an Arizona-based pool servicing company with more than 45 years of industry experience. Having seen swimming pools around the Phoenix area, Wagner knows all the things that can go wrong when a pool isn’t properly maintained. In this article, he tells us how frequently a homeowner should have his or her pool maintained.
How frequently someone comes out to check your water chemistry depends largely on what type of pool system you have, among other factors. If you have the type of system where you are manually adding chlorine, then you need to have someone come out once a week in order to ensure the pool is always properly maintained.
Overall, the time between maintenance visits for a swimming pool varies greatly from pool to pool. A lot of things go into it, including what the beta load is, how many people are swimming in the pool, what kind of debris is falling into it, and how dirty it is.
Any time you have a pool system where someone is just throwing a liquid chlorine in, you need to have that pool maintained and checked once a week. If you have a saltwater system, though, then just the water chemistry needs to be checked and you don’t need anyone to come out as frequently to specifically put chlorine in. So not only are saltwater systems more friendly toward the environment than other pool systems, but they can be easier to maintain as well because you don’t need someone to come out to your house to throw chemicals in each week.
Instead, here at Poolman, we can go out to a customer’s home and balance the water every other week, since we don’t have to put so much chlorine into the pool. So that makes life easier for everyone, and definitely better for the pool owner. It is usually cheaper to simply hire a pool company to come out and handle your pool’s servicing than to try doing it yourself in most cases.
I would highly recommend everybody who has a pool to call around to find out how much it costs to have somebody come out and maintain your water chemistry for you, versus how much you will spend going to a pool supply store and having them test your water and buying their product each week or month. In many cases, pool owners will end up discovering that the cost between the two scenarios is fairly close, not counting all of the time spent trying to maintain your pool on your own if you’re doing it yourself. That right there is why so many pool owners come to us at Poolman for their weekly servicing needs rather than trying to maintain their pool’s proper chemical balance on their own.
