How To Clear A Green Pool Fast In South Africa

Green pool? What’s best? Should I clean my own pool, or should I pay a pool cleaning service to do it for me?

Cleaning your own pool has its advantages. For example, you can save money if you’re only paying for chemicals, and you are the labour.

Below is How To Clear A Green Pool Fast In South Africa

If your pool is light green, you can follow these simple DIY steps and tips:

Stock It!

Add a shock treatment to the pool water. This will rapidly increase the chlorine levels and kill the algae in the water, and stop it from growing and spreading.

Brush it!

Using a pool brush, clean all the green algae from the walls and floor of your pool. This will require some elbow grease, and is made easier by letting specialized pool cleaner equipment, like Kreepy Krauly, run while you do it, so that it can pull up all the bits you’re brushing off. 

3. Let it run!

Let your pool pump run for 24 hours. This will give it enough time to filter all the water through the filter sand, and clear up any cloudiness in your pool. Remember to also backwash and rinse a few times to get rid of all the particle’s build-up. 

Test it !

A pool testing kit will help you assess if your water has the right level of chlorine. Add chlorine or throw in a floater, and keep testing your water until the levels are right. 

Maintain it !

Cleaning your pool regularly is of utmost importance. A well-maintained pool that has balanced water and is cleaned regularly won’t go green and is a joy to have and a great place for social summer activities.

Cleaning the swimming pool is a relatively easy task. Scoop the leaves, brush the walls, backwash the filter, etc., etc.

Swimming pool chemistry (although not everyone’s favorite topic) is also quite easy when you know how.

When training our teams up in ‘pool maintenance’, we like to split the service into sections or phases.

  1. Inspect
  2. Clean
  3. Test
  4. Dose
  5. Record

Inspect

The first thing we do when arriving at the swimming pool is to inspect the pool and collect data.

Is the Kreepy working? If not what’s caused the automatic pool cleaner to stop working? Leaves stuck in the throat? Not enough suction power? Has the vacuum lid come off? Is the pool green? Why has the swimming pool turned green? Is the swimming pool pump making noise? Has it been switched off? Why is it off, because of the timer switch?

It’s important to make notes of these things because they can tell us a story about the pool.

Clean

Clean the swimming pool. Using a leaf rake (as opposed to a leaf net) makes the pool much quicker to clean. A rake can hold more leaves than a net.

Always brush the walls and the steps (at least once a week). This helps prevent algae growth on the pool walls and steps.

Remove all the leaf traps, in the pump and in the weir, and make sure there is nothing obstructing or restricting the water flow.

Backwash the filter. Tens of thousands of liters of water pass through the filter tank during the week. So it’s very important to backwash the filter periodically. Backwashing reverses the water flow through the filter, loosening the trapped dirt and sending it out to waste.

One can never get the filter sand back to its original clean state with a backwash, so there will come a time when the sand needs to be changed. (There are products available that can chemically clean the sand filter, and this usually extends the life span of the filter sand). Every swimming pool is different, so there’s no set time limit to changing sand – the industry norm, however, is 1 – 2 years.

Test Your Green Pool

Even if the swimming pool water is crystal clear, the pool pH and chlorine residual should be checked once a week – and even more often if the pool is undergoing treatment of some sort.

Testing the water helps us identify problems before they happen. A new test kit (or refill reagents) every season is worth the money. The booklet inside should clearly explain how to test, and how to resolve certain water balance and sanitizer situations.

The basic pH and chlorine tests are sufficient to perform once a week, however, there are other aspects of water balance which are equally important. (Stabiliser, Calcium Hardness, Total Alkalinity, etc) It’s often best to leave these tests up to a professional pool company to do.

If you can find a pool company that is registered with the National Spa and Pool Institute of South Africa (NSPI), they should have a sophisticated water testing lab. If they’ve done the training, they should be able to explain exactly what to do to keep the rest of the water balance in check. This will make your pool maintenance even easier and cheaper.

Dose a Green Pool

Dosing the swimming pool is an important function. Our test results tell us what the water needs, and then we add it to the swimming pool as per the instructions on the label.

Some pool experts tend to confuse their customers by changing the instructions that come on the packaging. But if we keep it basic, then it’s easy for everyone to follow. Largely, we’ve found that we get the best results when we dose our pools bearing the following in mind:

Clean the media (filter sand) leaf traps out first.

Balance the water. (pH especially)

Oxidise the water (shock the pool if necessary).

Sanitize, making sure there is a continuous feed of sanitizer entering the pool for enough days between the testing and dosing.

Use algaecides if necessary. Some bacteria and algae strains are resistant to very high levels of chlorine, so it could become necessary to use an algaecide from time to time.

Clarifiers. Often, the suspended dirt particles in water are too fine to be trapped in the filter sand. There are swimming pool water clarifiers available that bind the fine dirt particles together so they become big enough to get trapped in the sand filter.


How do you fix a green pool in South Africa?

Ninety percent of green water in a swimming pool can be sorted by shock treatment. Before treating your pool with any algaecide products it is recommended that you undertake a shock treatment.

Clean out the pump and weir baskets, backwash for 2 minutes, and rinse for 20 seconds. Test and correct the pH level.