Leaving for the summer : my best options?

[Paxcou]

From June 28 to August 10 I will no need my pool as I will traveling the water of Indonesia. I am living in New jersey, Jersey shore. I have an inground pool, and I am using a pump to send daily the right quantity of liquid chlorine.
What should I do this summer:
- forget about the pool and roll-up my sleeves back in August to clean it up.
- use tablets and have someone on a weekly basis come home to check the pool, empty the baskets, clean up the robot, test the water ?
- use my pump system (in house design) hoping it will work through the month, have someone coming on a weekly basis controlling everything and if the level are not good, adding liquid chlorine etc...

Thanks for your advices !

 

[ajw22]

Any of those will work. Each of them have risks. I would want someone checking on the pool at least weekly.

Last year I was in Europe for a few weeks and we had a big lightning storm in NJ that fried my IntelliCenter. So any automated system is not 100% guaranteed to keep running while you are away.

I had liquid chlorine I always keep as backup and had the person checking on my house pour some in the pool weekly when my IntelliCenter fried. It is good to have a Plan B. and even C as fallback.

 

[mgtfp]

We've been away for 4 weeks recently. Had the neighbour's teenagers to water the plants and look after the pool and use the pool while we were away. With an SWG, there was nothing to worry about chlorine-wise, and I knew that pH would also be fine for 4 weeks if I brought pH and TA into the right starting conditions. They weren't keen on testing and I didn't see a need to push it in my case. I considered having a regular look at the SWG, checking that there are bubbles (clear cell housing), no warning lights, and the system actually running, enough to assume that things wouldn't go too pear-shaped.

Had they not wanted to use the pool, I would have installed my skimmer guard so I wouldn't have to worry about the skimmer basket, and all that would have been left to do was top up the water every couple of days when coming to water the plants. I don't have a fixed autofill, just a garden hose connected to an auto-leveler. I don't trust the garden hose enough to keep it on unsupervised, but it makes it easy to top up water while doing other things.

Since they thought using the pool was a good idea, I didn't install the skimmer guard to keep the pool skimmed, and they had to check the skimmer basket regularly. Also showed how to hook up the suction side cleaner.

At one point there was an issue with the skimmer basket not being installed after hooking up the cleaner (which connects in my case through a skimmer plate), so leaves ended up in the pump strainer basket, which they realised pretty much immediately and checked with me what to do. Was easy to talk them through how to empty that in a video call.

My recommendation:

Have a WhatsApp chat (or similar) setup with the pool caretaker before you leave so you don't have to worry about expensive text messages when roaming. Also makes video calls easy should that become necessary.

Target a higher FC level than you usually would, so you have some buffer should the care taker have to turn off the system, until a potential problem can get fixed.

I would start with plan A (chlorine dosing). If that fails, caretaker should change to plan B (tabs), and if everything fails, turn to plan C (you deal with the mess when you get back). It's certainly nice not having to deal with a mess when coming home, so I think it's worth having a go with plan A or B.

 

[Paxcou]

Very helpful thank you