Hey guys, in this video, I’m gonna talk about how I close my pool. So first off, the filter, the pump, the strainer, all the plumbing, all of this has got to go. Everything comes off. If you got a pool like this. They came with black plugs that you could put in from this side once you unscrew that. Same with all the inlets and the outlet over there. This has to go in the garage. I don’t care how heavy your sand filter is. I mean, you, if you really wanted to, you could drain it, take all the water completely out, leave this off. Take this off. I would not leave this outside. It’s too expensive to risk something in there freezing and the plastic cracking and you having to replace it. I would take this off and I would put a plastic bag over it if I had to leave it out. But this entire thing, all the plumbing, like I said, goes in the garage. No if ends or butts about it. Too expensive to replace.
Now I throw a big balloon right in the middle, and I have a rope around it tying to this side. And then from the balloon to that side. So basically, that’s loud. Basically the balloon stays right in the middle of the pool.
I throw a huge tarp over the entire thing. The tarp I have is 19 feet round. This is an 18 foot pool. So it leaves me a little extra over here. And it actually comes with these little holes all around it. And I actually tie it to or around this part, and then I pull it down all around the pool on the rope that I have. Goes behind this, goes behind that one. The tarp stays out on the top.
After I do that, I then take a saran wrap. You could get packing wrap. I don’t use Saran wrap. I use packing wrap. But I’m just saying it’s the same thing, only Saran wrap is much more expensive. Packing wrap you could pick up at Home Depot.
I take packing wrap, I tie it around here, and then I just walk all the way around the pool and I basically, sir, ran, rap that tarp to the outside of the pool. It helps keep compression on the tarp all the way around this way. If you get huge gusts of wind, your tarp won’t be blown up in the air and that’s that.
Then I don’t drain the pool, believe it or not. I leave it probably higher than this. I’m a little low right now. The reason for not draining it is you don’t want any ice to get anywhere near these holes. Even with the plug in there, if there’s a small leak or something, water gets in between here and that’s when, if it freezes, you’re gonna have big problems. You’re gonna have holes at all the inlets and outlets. I leave my water all the way up here like this. If it does freeze, you’re only looking at about 5,6 inches of freezing. It may freeze a little bit on here, but it’s not enough. The temperature, just the water will never freeze all the way down to the bottom. We don’t live in the last, the, I’m just Upper New York. It’s gotten so frozen that I’ve actually walked out off of my running board there and walked onto the pool. I don’t know how thick it was. I didn’t drill any holes or anything, but it’s gotten that cold and that frozen where this is the third year that it’s thirds, third winter and it’s been out all the time.
Now, what happens when it rains with the tarp outside? When it rains, the tarp will get wet. It will push down and basically push the water that’s in the pool out of the pool through these holes. Not a big deal. It’s really not that much water that you lose from inside the pool. Regular maintenance when you are, throughout the winter is you get one of those scoops, one of these guys over here, and you scoop out all the leaves that fall on the tarp because if you leave that, the leaves on the tarp, you’re gonna have a brown, muddy mess when spring comes along and you wanna open the pool.
The other thing that really works for me is I don’t know that much about chemicals, but what’s been working for me and every time I open my pool, it’s perfectly clean. You have to clean the pool before you close it. Not one spec of anything should be in your pool because that’s just gonna fester in there and it’s gonna grow bacteria or whatever. And when you open the pool, you’re gonna have a mess. So it when I open my pool, it’s clean. What I do is I check the alkalinity. Once the alkalinity is where it needs to be, I shocked the hell out of it. Then I wait like two or three days, test again and either put more baking soda or put more chlorine. I use powder, I use liquid chlorine. It doesn’t matter. I’ve had luck with everything.
One of the biggest things I found, if you open your pool early, it works out much better. When your pool is cold, algae won’t grow as fast. So if you’re shocking to kill all that algae, you probably open too late. The heat got to it. Algae bloomed and you had a huge bloom of algae. And it’s, you’re wasting hundreds of dollars on chemicals trying to kill all that stuff. So open when the pool is cold, use minimal chemicals and maintain it, and that’s pretty much it. So that’s what works for me. It may not work for you. And if something I’m missing you wanna add in the comments, please go ahead. I love criticism. I don’t take anything to heart. Thank you.