Day one: cover, water, equipment
Pump the cover dry before you touch it. Rolling a cover with fifty gallons of black water sitting on it tips all of that into the pool, which turns a two-day opening into a five-day one. Then sweep the debris off, roll from the shallow end, and wash and dry the cover before it goes into storage — a wet cover put away in May is a rotten cover in October.
Refit the return eyeballs, take the winter plugs out, put the drain plugs back into the pump, filter and heater, and bring the water up to the middle of the skimmer mouth before anything is switched on. Prime the pump by hand and watch the trap fill before you walk away.
The plug that floods the pad
Every tech has primed a pump with the drain plug still in a pocket. Count them out at closing, count them back in at opening; keep them in the pump basket over winter.
Day two: the first honest test
Let the pool circulate for at least four hours before you test, or you are sampling a layer rather than a pool. Then work the order: total alkalinity, pH into the WHO band of 7.2 to 7.8, cyanuric acid, and only then chlorine.
Winter rain dilutes stabiliser, so a pool that closed at 50 ppm often opens near 25. Fixing that before the first shock is what stops the chlorine burning off by lunchtime — the stabiliser calculator gives the dose, and it takes a week to read true, so add it early.
Days two to three: shock and circulate
Brush the entire shell first — behind the ladder, under the steps, along the waterline — because that is where anything that survived the winter is living. Then shock at dusk with the pump running overnight. Sunlight destroys unstabilised chlorine fast enough that a midday dose is half wasted.
If the floor carries silt rather than dust, vacuum to waste instead of through the filter and top the water back up as you go.
Days four to five: clear and hand over
Clean or backwash the filter once the water clears — it has just done a season’s work in three days. Re-test everything, record the readings, set the timer for two turnovers a day using the turnover calculator, and check the cell or feeder is actually producing before you leave.
Do not swim
The pool opens when free chlorine has fallen back under 3 ppm on a test, not when it looks blue. Tell the client that in those words.
The five mistakes
- Rolling a wet cover into the pool.
- Priming a pump below the skimmer, or with a plug missing.
- Testing before the water has circulated.
- Shocking before stabiliser is corrected.
- Handing the pool over at shock level because it looked fine.