Winter cover issue

[mithesaint]

This is my first winter with my 18x33 above ground pool. Had a great summer with it, and everything went well.

It's rather windy where I live, and I'm out in the country with little to block the wind. I've had more than one person tell me not to even bother with a cover in the winter time, but I'm stubborn, and not good at taking advice sometimes.

I closed it this past weekend, and put the winter cover on it. The winter cover is tightened by a cable, and that part worked well. It also came with plastic clips, and those are worthless. I've put them on twice, and they've popped off twice. I also bought a roll of the industrial plastic wrap, and that lasted one day before it blew off. The cover is permeable to water, and any water I put on top of the cover either soaks through, or blows away.

Anytime the wind kicks up, the cover billows up like the parachute in gym class. At this rate, there's no way this cover makes it to April/May when I can open the pool again.

Suggestions? Let the cover stay as long as possible, and give up when it's done? We don't have a ton of trees, but there are enough to make a mess if there is no cover.

 

[DianeF1]

We too have the "jiffy pop popcorn" cover. Fortunately our pool is surrounded by rail road ties. So we screwed some heavy duty eye hooks into the ties and then looped rope through it making a grid and pulled it pretty tight. It's windy in Kansas and our pool is fully exposed. The grid helped contain the top and it didn't fly off like it did in prior years. You do have to put something between the rope and the edge of the pool if you want to reuse the cover next year as the rope did a number to the edges of the cover where it had rubbed all winter. We use a cheapo tarp from Harbor Freight so we had planned on tossing it anyway. The pool was clean when we uncovered it unlike the prior uncovered years where the months of dirt from our dirt road were in the pool.

 

[richierich]

Use these, works awesome HDX 2 in. Spring Clamp-80002 - The Home Depot