I live in Virginia Beach and I opened last week.
Reason -
Last spring I spent a TON of time and energy getting my filthy pool clean. Even though I opened it fairly early, it took me forever to get it clean as a thick film of crud needed to be scraped off the liner. It was a pain. I decided that there had to be a better way.
So last fall, even though the temps were too cool for swimming, I left the filter running. I backed off the duration to about 4 hours per day. What did that cost me? 50 cents per day? Then when the water got too cold for salt-chlor, I put a chlorine puck in the skimmer and ran it another week or three. I finally drained a foot of water out, cleaned the filter and covered it. This was probably in early November. Then, on two occasions this winter I added 2 gallons of bleach. Once I added a small puck to each end of the pool (on the white plastic step).
I took the cover off the last day of Feb and found perfectly clean water, no algae and only needed to skim out the pine needles that snuck under the cover. EASY. I added some pucks since the water is too cold for the salt chlorinator to function.
So, this is my new routine (unless someone tells me that I am really dicking things up by using this method). EASY. Plus, I hate looking at the cover. Even though its too cold to swim, I love seeing that gorgeous blue pool as opposed to the cover.