Fall is coming- what is best practice?

[Notri4MeBikeSwim]

Climate: very moderate, maybe 3-4 mild freeze days, temps in the upper 20's. It's too cold to swim, so what is the most cost effective approach.

Changes this year: replaced single speed, 3500 rpm pool motor with variable. During the swimming season can only dial it back to 2500 as we have a solar heater. Plans were to save some money this year by turrning the value on the solar and reducing the speed to about 1200 rpm for 1 turn/day.

We looked at pool covers, but they are so expensive and hard to manage, we decided not now.

Questions:
1- if drain the solar heater, in the spring will the pump fill the tubes back up in the spring?
2- Why bother, why not just turn off for offseason and shock in the late spring?
3- In ground concrete pool, would it hurt anything if the water evaporates duing the off time?
4- is there a better approach?

Thank you in advance for your ideas. This is not urgent as we have a good month to month and half of
swimming left, but trying to think ahead.

[Haven't run full numbers in a bit. Chlorine is kept between 5 and 7 ppm by using the 10% bleach solution. My testing chems must be getting old. Test yesterday morning was 1.5 FC and so added 2 gallons Normally that would boast about 2 to 2.5/gallon. Today it was high at 10.5. I lose about 1.5 to 2.0/ day. We have much scaling on tiles, so not paranoid about PH. Last week it was 7.4, guess now is about 7.8. CYA is about 60. Other numbers were not out of balance, so stopped testing.]

 

[Bama Rambler]

1. The solar panels will refill as soon as the valve opens to solar. You may get some air out of the returns but that's perfectly normal.

2. If you don't either run the system or winterize you stand the chance that it will get cold enough to freeze something. If you're talking about not maintaining it this winter. It's easier to maintain it during the winter than to go through the whole cleanup and SLAM process in the spring. A little chlorine every couple of days is a lot easier than a ton of it for several days in the spring.

3. If the plaster gets exposed when it's uncovered it's bad for it.

4. Follow the recommendations here for either winterizing it or just run it some during the off season and maintain it properly.

You should run a full set of test about once a month anyway. I recommend that you do that.

 

[mas985]

In Sacramento, I definitely would not "close" the pool. Our climates are similar and I have never closed our pool although I change the way I run the pool.

During the winter, I run my pump about 1-2 hours per day and if it gets cold enough where the SWG turns off, I will leave the pump off for a few of days until the water warms up. Algae grows much slower when the water temp gets below 40 but keeping the pool chlorinated is important too so you don't have a mess to clean up in the spring.

 

[Notri4MeBikeSwim]

Ok, thank you all.