Recycle water on cover

[Teald024]

With all the rain over the last couple of months, I probably have 2,000 gallons of rain water on my cover. It isn't causing any harm and isn't at risk of falling in the pool. I've purposely not drained it in hopes that I might use it. Just pump the water into the pool to recycle it instead of dumping it to drain and then paying to use my hard city water. This sounds good, but the cover does have a bunch of leaves and crud in the water. The water itself looks clear though at this point.

I was thinking, has anyone removed the junk and basically done a SLAM to the cover water in order to clean it up? Is it more trouble than it's worth? It is free, soft water and all. Opinions?

 

[Patrick_B]

If you could get all the leaves out, or enough of them and all else that it wouldn't cause a huge pain to clean, go for it. It wouldn't necessarily deem a SLAM either unless its already got Algae. Even if it did, it might be worth the hardness reduction. I'd take 2000 gallons of semi dirty water any day at my hardness levels.

 

[samt]

I have been basically doing something similar. I try to only use rain and snow melt to replace the water in my pool over the last 3 yrs. My city water has iron and causes staining. It's been working pretty good, each yr my stains are getting harder to see. I have a mesh cover so it's easy.

 

[Donldson]

It's not really free if you have to dump a ton of chlorine in to make it usable. Plus the trouble of getting all the leaves and gunk out. Really depends on how well you can mechanically clean it (netting) and then comparing the chlorine cost to what you would have to pay the city, while also weighing in the benefit of using soft water.

 

[Leebo]

I'm in the same boat as samt in that our water has very high iron levels that we try to avoid in any way possible. Each year we dump all the water into the pool from the cover knowing we'll need to SLAM. If you drain it frequently enough there's usually very little organic growth just some dirt that needs to be vacuumed. For us, it's worth it. If our fill water was iron free, I'm not sure.

 

[Teald024]

So I decided to forgo the recycling water plan and I just pumped it to waste. I did a preliminary CH test on the pool and it was ~200ppm. I decided it wasn't worth the potential extra effort of putting rather dirty water into the clean pool. Any potential cost savings would likely be offset by the additional chlorine use. And what's a little extra CH between friends?