How To Open Your Swimming Pool

If you were ever interested in how to open your swimming pool for the season, here is a great resource. If not, I have a funny story for you nonetheless.

Last year, Laura’s parents purchased and had installed a beautiful in-ground swimming pool. Her mother wanted to have this for people to enjoy while at the house. I think it’s a great idea. Well, I for one, have never owned or maintained a swimming pool, so I am not really skilled in those arts, if you know what I mean.

It is a bit hot for this early in the year, I think. The other day, it was about 90 degrees, so Laura wanted to get the pool opened for the season. She is like a fish…a minnow to be exact. She LOVES to swim. We volunteered for the job of opening the pool this season.

When we arrived, we saw what we needed to do. It seemed pretty simple…remove the pool cover, turn on the filter, add some swimming pool chemicals, clean the cover and fold it up.

As we were walking around the pool looking at the water on top of the cover, we noticed about a hundred billion little tadpoles, or pollywogs as I know them. We knew that if we just tore the cover off, they would all die. I went into the basement and grabbed a plastic bin and started scooping the tadpoles out with the pool skimmer. I think I got about 75% out before I quit that project. Laura and I loaded the bin up in my back seat and we drove down to a swampy river and released them into the wild. Hopefully they will be ok and turn into nice big frogs.

This particular pool cover has a mesh type stripe going down the center. I figured that if we untied the cover from one end, we could just fold the cover over as the water flowed through the mesh. When we got to the end, we would simply lift the cover out of the pool and all would be good. Well, we started folding the cover over itself, and when we got about halfway down the pool, I discover that the “mesh” wasn’t really all that meshy. It allowed the water to flow, but not exactly at the rate I would like. We pulled the cover all the way to the steps of the pool and were stuck. We had something like a huge water balloon and no where to go. We couldn’t just let the water in the balloon go into the regular pool water, because it was filthy.

Poor Laura and I kept trying to pull the cover up as we watched the the water slowly filter through the so called mesh. Remember, it was 90 degrees and we had a pool, but couldn’t go in it. It was hot.

Laura’s brother, AJ, finally got home and gave us a hand. He jumped in the pool and decided that it might be a good idea to section off the water in the cover and push it out little by little. After a while, it seemed to work. We finally got the pool cover out of the pool and on to the lawn for AJ to spray off with the hose. Laura’s father primed and turned on the filter. Laura and I poured some pool shock into the skimmer after we read the back of the bag and learned how to shock a swimming pool. We also poured in some algae killer.

That was a week ago. We called over yesterday and Laura’s mother told us that the pool still looked a little funky. Her father was vacuuming and cleaning the filter, but it would still take some time. Hopefully by next weekend, I will be enjoying some nice clean water.