Why You Need A Pool Cover Pump For Your Winter Pool Cover

Why You Need a Pool Cover Pump for Your Winter Pool Cover

Since it’s November, we can safely assume you’ve winterized and closed your inground pool. Either you did it yourself or you hired pool care pros to do it. Protecting your pool during a Maryland winter means keeping the water clean is having a winter pool cover, and, if this is your first year with a pool, you may not realize that you need a pool cover pump.

Pool maintenance tasks certainly decrease when you’ve closed your pool for the season, but you can’t exactly sit back and forget about your pool until springtime.

Weight Matters

Winter pool covers keep leaves, branches, migratory birds, and more out of your pool. Since most winter pool covers are solid, that means that rain, melting snow, and ice will also accumulate on top of the pool cover.

Let’s look at the science and the math. As water accumulates on your pool cover, it will begin to flow down to the center of the cover, weighing it down. Just one inch of rain on a square foot of land or pool cover weighs 5.2 pounds. Therefore, if your pool cover has a surface of approximately 240 square feet (a 12 x 20 foot pool), one inch of rain can put 1,248 pounds of water on your pool cover!

Standing water weight can cause damage to your pool cover, and can stretch it away from the edges of the pool. This allows debris and even a pet to gain access to your pool.

Enter the Pool Cover Pump

As the math shows, you will want to keep rain water and melting snow from accumulating on your pool cover. That’s where the pool cover pump comes in. A pool cover pump is an external pump that sits on the top of your pool cover. You can connect it to a garden hose, to direct the water away from the pool area.

Most pool cover pumps are designed to come on automatically. They start up when they sense a certain water level – sort of like your sump pump does. Manual pool cover pumps do exist, but with these pumps, you have to turn them on and off when you think it should run. We prefer the automatic pumps, because heavy rain can happen overnight, or while you’re out of town for the holidays. Who will turn the pump on then?

Hire a Winter Pool Care Pro to Monitor Your Pool Cover Pump

If you don’t want to be the one to venture out to check on your pool cover pump, consider calling the pool care pros. Many of us have Winter Pool Watch programs where we will:

• Check equipment
• Check water levels of the pool
• Lower water levels if needed

Beware the woes of improper winter pool maintenance! Pool care duties don’t stop just because your pool is closed.