You might think that once your pool is installed all the hard work is done but you couldn’t be further from the truth.  Pools require ongoing maintenance to ensure that they are safe to swim in and the single most important thing that you can do is to test your pool water regularly.  Here we explain why. For more information or advice about your pool’s water balance, speak to your local pool maintenance professional.

Ensuring That Your Pool Water is Healthy

You need to test your pool water regularly in order to ensure that it is healthy and safe to swim in.  This is because your swimming pool water can harbour bacteria, algae and other microbes that can cause health issues for swimmers including but not limited to ear, nose and throat infections.  These microbes can increase over time and not only cause your water to be incredibly unhealthy but to also actually change appearance (such as the dreaded turning green).

Sources of Pool Water Contamination

There are several ways that your pool water can become contaminated.  These include:

• People swimming in the pool from day to day

• Pets that like to have a splash in the pool

• Debris that falls into the pool (leaves, dust, grass clippings and so on)

• People spilling things into the pool

• Wildlife and insects that may have drowned in the pool

Ensuring that the Water Balance is Correct

Testing your pool water helps you to find out if your water balance is correct.  Your water balance simply refers to the amount of chemicals that you have in the water.  You want to have enough chemicals to keep the water clean and healthy but not so much that an excess level of chemical actually prevents people from using the pool.  You should test the chlorine levels, the pH of the water, the total alkalinity of the water, and the calcium hardness as these all work together to ensure a balanced pool and if any one of these is out of whack, you need to correct it ASAP.

Visual Pool Checks

One of the simplest ways to check your pool water is to actually look at it!  It’s not a completely reliable indicator but looking at your pool every day will allow you to see if the water is clear, if you can still see to the bottom of the pool, and if the water looks the same as it did the day before.  If it does look any different to how you remember, you should definitely perform a water test using a testing kit.

How to Test Your Pool Water

It is actually not that difficult to test your own pool water as there are numerous pool water testing kits available on the market.  These test for alkalinity, pH, and chlorine levels.  Just follow the directions on the kit!  Do a pH and chlorine test daily, before anyone swims in the water.  Do a complete test for all levels every week and have your water tested by a professional pool store monthly.  This is easy to do – just take a sample of your water to the pool store and they’ll do the rest.