Top Five Winter Swimming Pool Cover Care Tips

If you have any type of swimming pool you will need to protect your swimming pool cover from the winter elements otherwise it could be damaged or possibly even destroyed. In some areas where the temperature drops below freezing your pool cover is prone to more damage because of ice and other conditions cause by this type of weather.

There are many ways to avoid these types of things from happening by simply just learning how to properly take care of your pool cover after it is installed by you or a swimming pool service professional. The most common mistake is that pool owners will think that once the cover is installed that is it for the season until spring comes around again. What they fail to realize is that this is completely false and in fact there is a lot more to do to your pool cover during the winter.

How To Protect Your Swimming Pool Cover From Winter
These are what we call the ” top five winter pool cover care tips”. These five tips will hep you protect the swimming pool cover from the elements as we described above. If you feel that you can not do the work described below it may be best of you sign a service contract with a local pool company so that they can come and take care of you cover in the winter.

These tips will be for above ground pools as well as in ground pools. If you have a “portable pool” you may be able to follow some of the above ground pool tips and apply or adapt them to your situation.
How To Remove Ice and Water From A Pool Cover
The best way to remove ice and water from the swimming pool cover is to use a pump. You will have to wait for a warm day when the ice melts and then pump off the cover. It is never a good idea to try to remove ice from the pool cover because it has sharp edges and if you drop the ice, it will cut a whole or gash though the cover.

The best way to prevent large build ups of ice is to keep the water level on top of the pool cover to a minimum. You will want to keep an inch of water on top of the pool cover to keep it from blowing during heavy winds.
How To Protect Your Pool Cover From Wind Damage
Heavy winds and rain can blow the pool cover around and even completely off of the swimming pool. When this happens the cover could tear, rip or possibly even be shredded into pieces if it is windy enough. You can protect this from happening by taking a few easy steps. We will first explain how to secure an Above ground swimming pool.

You will want to do three things to totally protect your above ground swimming pool cover from the wind.The first thing you will want to do is make sure the cable and the winch are totally tight and secure. The second thing you will want to do is to use either pool clips that clip onto the railing of the pool or use bleach bottles full of sand and hand them from several places on the pool cover, some may say this is not professional but it actually works way better then pool clips. If you have a deck around your above ground pool with water bags and you are just plain old tired of replacing them you can instead fill coffee can containers with sand and place them on top of the cover instead of water bags. The third thing you will want do to protect the cover from wind is to add a few hundred gallons of water on top of the cover. That may sound like a lot of water but its only about 10 minutes or less of running the garden hose,. You also have to remember that the pool cover is large and this water will spread out, so a hundred gallons won’t seem like much after you ad it but will be enough to hold the cover in place.
Protecting you in-ground pool cover from wind
If you have an in-ground pool cover you can follow most of the steps that we had mentioned on the above ground how to. You will not need a cable or winch but you will be able to use coffee cans, bricks, boards and much more to hold down your pool cover then water bags that pop and rip year after year.

You will also just want to keep a small amount of water on top of the in-ground pool cover as well to make sure that the pool cover stays on place and does not lift off on windy days.
How To Protect Your Pool Cover From Leaves & Tree Branches
Every year when the pool guys go to take off the pool cover the cover has holes in it because of some type of tree branch or leaves that have destroyed the cover. There is two things that you can do to protect your pool from being damaged by the winter and the trees.

The first thing you will want to do is hire a professional tree specialist to remove any overhanging tree limbs that may land in your pool of they were to somehow break off the tree. Dead tree limbs are a #1 cause to holes in swimming pool covers during the course of the winter, closely followed by seam rips. The second thing you can do is to buy a swimming pool leaf net that installs right on top of the pool cover. This leaf net is made from mess so the water drains right through but the leaves get stuck, once the leaves all fall you can just pull off the net.
How To Make Sure Your Pool Cover Doesn’t Blow Off The Pool
The number one thing that happens to all new swimming pool owners during their first winter season is that the pool cover blows off of the pool. Now, this also happens to a lot of seasoned pool owners as well as professional swimming pool companies. This can all be avoided by simply just making sure to tuck of of your straight edge corners under the cover making all the edges round in a sense. After you do that you will want to make sure that the corners are all weighed down worth water bags or objects heavy enough. If you have a swimming pool cover pump you will want to drain the pool cover as we mentioned in the steps above, but it’s not that easy to drain the pool cover off if you have leaves and other debris on the cover. What usually happens is that the pump impeller or the pump filter will get clogged and the pump will stop pumping. This can happen over and over again until the pool owner gets frustrated enough and just gives up.

The best way not to get frustrated and keep that pump pumping with out getting clogged is to take the pump and place it inside of a 5 gallon bucket that has a few holes drilled into it. You will then take this bucket with the pump in it and place it on the pool cover. This will stop the big leaves and other debris from clogging your pump.
Bonus Protection Tips For Safety Swimming Pool Cover Owners
If you have a loop-loc, Meyco, Merlin or any other type of safety pool cover you will want to know about these three top tips to protect the cover from damage which could result in an expensive repair bill. Here is what you want to do to protect your swimming pool safety cover during the winter.

The first thing you will want to do is to make sure that are the safety cover springs are tight and the cover is not sagging. If the cover springs are loose that could cause them to pop off and then one by one the cover will have less support and that will eventually lead to tears or rips in the seams of the cover. The second thing you will want to do to protect your safety pool cover is to make sure that you don’t lower the water to much on the pool when you are closing it. Many pool guys will tell you to lower the water and then you will wind up stretching the cover out when large amounts of ice and snow sit on top of the cover. Just lower the water a few inches below the skimmer and keep an eye on it.

The third thing you will want to do is to make sure that your water level in your swimming pool stays at a safe height. Like we mentioned above, if you remove to much water from your swimming pool cover you will wind up stretching it out and then it can be damaged. If you live in an area where there is heavy rains, you will just have to set a pump on the step of the pool before closing it and when you feel the water level is to high you can just turn the pump on to remove some excess water. Now that you know how to protect your above ground or in-ground swimming pool cover from the winter elements you can and will save hundreds if not thousands of dollars on costly swimming pool covers and safety swimming pool cover repair.