This was our second season with our above ground pool. Last winter, we decided not to cover the pool and just leave it open since we're in southern Louisiana and our winters here are not bad. We may get a rare night below freezing but temps always rebound during the day.
Well it was an experiment that made me decide we needed to do some kind of cover. We're surrounded by trees and when the leaves dropped in the fall, we had to keep vacuuming the pool to attempt to keep it clean. I tested my water weekly to maintain FC levels and ran the pump for an hour a day. Having to vacuum the leaves was annoying, but when spring came, it got crazy with the oak trees dropping their catkins. It was so bad that for a few days I had to manually manage scooping them off the surface of the water and running the pump because they would have clogged the skimmer in no time.
After switching to BBB, I've had a trouble free summer, so I really want a trouble free winter as well. I've been searching here a lot and looking at a lot of cover threads and came to the following conclusions:
Solid covers are good but you have to drain them occasionally and with all the leaves and catkins, it could get pretty bad on the cover.
Leaf nets are good but only on top of a solid cover. With the catkins, I doubt the larger hole size of a leaf net would help with that.
Micro Mesh covers seem to be a good compromise as they allow water through meaning you don't have to drain the top, and they don't allow much sunlight in keeping chlorine from burning off as much.
However, some of the micro mesh cover threads have me confused. I'm not sure if they're meant to be pulled tight to where they're not touching the water. If it has water staying on top, I'm thinking that I'll have a soup of junk in the middle if the micro mesh is sitting in the water. Also, I won't be lowering my water level and I'll be running the pump, so I'm worried about the force of the moving water under the micro mesh cover. I've seen one thread where the cover was sagging in the water, and another where pillows or rafts were left in the middle to prevent the cover from sagging into the pool. I also read that you're not supposed to use pillows with micro mesh, but I never found an answer as to why.
Does anyone else have any experience with using micro mesh covers in a climate where you don't close your pool and is that a good idea for the situation I'm in?
Well it was an experiment that made me decide we needed to do some kind of cover. We're surrounded by trees and when the leaves dropped in the fall, we had to keep vacuuming the pool to attempt to keep it clean. I tested my water weekly to maintain FC levels and ran the pump for an hour a day. Having to vacuum the leaves was annoying, but when spring came, it got crazy with the oak trees dropping their catkins. It was so bad that for a few days I had to manually manage scooping them off the surface of the water and running the pump because they would have clogged the skimmer in no time.
After switching to BBB, I've had a trouble free summer, so I really want a trouble free winter as well. I've been searching here a lot and looking at a lot of cover threads and came to the following conclusions:
Solid covers are good but you have to drain them occasionally and with all the leaves and catkins, it could get pretty bad on the cover.
Leaf nets are good but only on top of a solid cover. With the catkins, I doubt the larger hole size of a leaf net would help with that.
Micro Mesh covers seem to be a good compromise as they allow water through meaning you don't have to drain the top, and they don't allow much sunlight in keeping chlorine from burning off as much.
However, some of the micro mesh cover threads have me confused. I'm not sure if they're meant to be pulled tight to where they're not touching the water. If it has water staying on top, I'm thinking that I'll have a soup of junk in the middle if the micro mesh is sitting in the water. Also, I won't be lowering my water level and I'll be running the pump, so I'm worried about the force of the moving water under the micro mesh cover. I've seen one thread where the cover was sagging in the water, and another where pillows or rafts were left in the middle to prevent the cover from sagging into the pool. I also read that you're not supposed to use pillows with micro mesh, but I never found an answer as to why.
Does anyone else have any experience with using micro mesh covers in a climate where you don't close your pool and is that a good idea for the situation I'm in?