How long does it take to clean a backyard swimming pool?
Fantastic question. And to be blunt not one most people think about when getting a swimming pool. Perhaps they should.
Here's why you should plan for this. I have a medium sized salt water chlorinated swimming pool in my back yard. We are lucky, as we don't have trees everywhere dropping leaves into the pool, nor do we live in a super dusty environment which would mean lots of dirt and dust getting blown into the pool
We thought about buying an automatic pool cleaner, you know, one of the types that plugs onto the filter and just scrubs around by itself. These start at around two or three hundred dollars however, so I thought I would make do with a hand held vacuum attachment on the end of a long pole.
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| My swimming pool cleaning head |
Every couple of days I spend about ten minutes scooping the leaves and larger debris out of the pool with a strainer. But after about a week a noticeable layer start to build up on the bottom of the pool. This build up is actually fine leaf litter, dead bugs and insects, dirt and dust.
It's a perfect breeding ground for bacteria and algae. In fact, I have noticed that if I don't clear it out the pool starts to go hazy, which means its coming to life literally. So every week I vacuum the pool out by hand.
Well. This brings it up to a nice safe sparkling clear water look, idea for swimming in and splashing about. It takes me about half an hour. So if we multiply that half an hour by 100 which is the number of weeks in two years we get 50 hours, but lets say three years instead which is 75 hours.
The cost of the automatic pool cleaner works out to be about $4 per hour over the three years. In short, by doing it myself I am saving about $4 per hour. Not a great return really.
I think I am going back to the swimming pool shop to buy an automatic pool cleaner sometime soon!
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