Should I Vacuum My Pool If I Can’t See The Bottom? Inevitably, dust, leaves, and other debris drop into your pool so that you can either maintain it or watch it bloom with biodiversity(algae, chiefly). Maintaining your swimming pool shouldn’t take a lot of effort as long as you have the right equipment. It only becomes a pain in the behind if the water is cloudy to start with, because then, how can you see the bottom to vacuum correctly?
If you attempt to vacuum your pool without being able to see the bottom, that would prove to be a difficult task. While your vacuum cleaner can easily suck in the bigger debris, the finer, more elusive debris will hardly get in. You’re more likely, even, to agitate them, making the pool water murkier.
If you’re desperate to vacuum your swimming pool so that it’s free of debris that mess with your chlorine levels or even stain your pool walls, perhaps the better question to ask in the first place is ‘how can I clear up cloudy pool water?’
How Can You Clear Up A Cloudy Pool?
First and foremost, you may need to consider environmental factors. Is your pool under direct sunlight? Then the free chlorine levels in your pool will reduce at a much faster rate. In that case, you may want to use a good chlorine stabilizer. Also, when rain falls in your open pool, it dilutes your pool water and causes free chlorine to reduce. Using a pool cover when your pool is not in use also helps to conserve free chlorine in the pool.
Washed off sunscreen and body oils from swimmers may contribute to the cloudiness. You could try your hands on a pool flocculant. They can greatly help to recombine all the floating debris so that they’re heavy enough to sink to the bottom of your pool. Although flocculants may not work for every cloudy pool situation, they’re a good shot.
If you have trees around the corner, for example, you might find leaves, insects, and other foreign objects in the water from time to time. First off, you need to remove the floating particles with a net. Then use a pool clarifier to clear up the cloudiness. If you want a great pool clarifier, we recommend you go for Tidal Vision Crystal Clarity pool clarifier.
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Is Chlorine Enough To Keep Pool Water Clean?
The chemical balance of your pool is critical to its hygiene, and that’s where chlorine comes in. Chlorine prevents algae growth in your pool by stopping the growth and multiplication of dangerous microorganisms and bacteria.
It all boils down to simple chemistry. As soon as chlorine enters your pool, it dissociates into two molecules: hypochlorous acid and hypochlorite ion. They work hand-in-hand to weaken the cell walls of the harmful microorganisms, eventually killing them. While hypochlorous acid works at a fast pace, disarming microorganisms in seconds, hypochlorite ions like to take their time(as long as 30 mins).
To maintain crystal clear pool water, the PH of the pool must be considered. The pool’s PH is a measure of how acidic or alkaline your pool is. The ideal PH level should be between 7.2 and 7.8. Any reading above or below these values simply means that the water is too basic or too acidic(respectively) and may cause skin or eye irritation.
Maintaining proper PH balance is critical to keeping proper chlorine balance in a pool. The conducive PH level for chlorine is also 7.2 to 7.8. If the PH goes beyond 7.8, for example, the hypochlorous acid concentration will reduce. As a result, a pool with high PH will take longer to clear. Depending on the PH reading, you may add sodium bisulfate or muriatic acid to lower pool water PH or sodium bicarbonate(alkali) if your pool is too acidic.
Should You Brush a Pool Before Vacuuming?
Yes! Absolutely! Brushing your pool kicks up particles that may have long settled down since your last pool cleaning. It also makes the water momentarily cloudy- which might seem counterproductive- but inevitably allows you to vacuum more efficiently. Brushing is an important step in your pool cleaning endeavor because it allows the drain and skimmer to collect dirt more effectively.
However, before you go on, make sure you have all the right tools. Here’s a checklist:
- Telescopic Pole: Most T-poles come in standard sizes and can easily be used to attach a brush, skimmer net, and other pool cleaning accessories.
- Skimmer Net or Leaf Skimmer: This is a small net apparatus that attaches to the T-poles and is used to remove floating debris(like leaves) from the surface of the pool.
- Pool Brush: A pool brush can be used to clean the walls and bottom of the pool by brushing the surfaces.
Note: It is good practice to clean out your pool brush after every cleaning session. This helps to remove any clogged dirt in the brush’s crevices so it gives you nice, efficient cleaning on your next use.
How To Clean The Bottom Of a Pool With a Vacuum?
Your pool water may be sparkling clean, but if you’ve got solid particles at the bottom of the pool, it’s not a pleasant sight and nobody would want to swim in that. It doesn’t matter how the dirt got into your pool, one thing is certain: you’ve got to get it out. Here’s how you clean the bottom of your pool in a few simple steps:
Step 1 – Brush The Sides
It’s always a good idea to brush the sides of your pool before paying any attention to the bottom. By cleaning the sides first, you ensure that any dirt clinging to the sides falls to the bottom of the pool before you proceed with the other steps.
Step 2 – Use a Skimmer Net
Now that you’ve brushed off the dirt on the sidewalls, use a skimmer net to go about the pool, carefully capturing floating debris as much as you can. The debris may include small stones and leaves- basically anything that would be difficult for the vacuum to suck up. However, try to do this as slowly as possible so that the dirt doesn’t get agitated.
Step 3 – Choose Vacuum Settings
How dirty is the pool in question? If you have a lot of dirt on the floor of the pool, then you should set the vacuum to multiport valve waste setting. For routine vacuum cleaning, you probably don’t need all that rigor; set the vacuum to multiport valve filter setting and head over to step 5.
Step 4 – Top The Pool Water
When in a multiport valve waste setting, the vacuum cleaner sucks up water through a vacuum hose and disposes of it at the designated sewer system. Hence, the water level in the pool will reduce. And that, at a fast rate.
So before you start, top up the pool just before you start vacuuming. This way, you would be able to vacuum the pool at one go without stopping.
Step 5 – Connect Hose To Vacuum Head
Connect the vacuum head to one end of the vacuum hose and lower the head into the pool. Next, put the other end of the hose into the water to purge the air out of it.
After purging the air out, connect the skimmer to the vacuum hose or skimmer vacuum plate, then to the vacuuming inlet at the poolside.
Step 6 – Turn On The Pump
When you turn on the pump to vacuum, you must do so very gently. While vacuuming to waste, you might be tempted to get on with it as fast as you can so that you can see the water level dropping fast. Doing so will only agitate the dirt and you may wind up repeating the whole process.
In multiport valve filter mode, however, you may notice a substantial decrease in suction. If so, you might have a clogged filter on your hands. Backwashing the filter should quickly solve this issue and return the vacuum to normal working order.
Note: If you’re using a cartridge filter, they were not designed for backwashing. You would have to clean the filter manually.
Do I Still Need To Vacuum Manually When I Have a Robotic Vacuum?
Robotic pool cleaners are pretty efficient and can help you clean your pool with ease, saving you the stress of cleaning manually. However, they come with their limitations; If you’ve seen robotic vacuum cleaners cough up debris as it cleans a pool full of debris, you would know what we’re saying.
Another form of debris may just be too difficult for your robot to pick up, so it merely pushes it from one end of the pool to the next. The bottom line is: there’s no denying the fact that these helpful machines are effective, you still need to be ready to do a manual clean-up from time to time, especially when it comes to cleaning difficult-to-reach corners and the more demanding algae cleaning up.
How To Remove Stones From Pool Floor
If stones that are large enough to cause trouble for your Vacuum cleaner somehow get into your pool, you should try to remove them with a net before you start to vacuum.
This is because your vacuum cleaner may not be strong enough to pick them up. And even if they did, the stones could cause some demand to parts of your pool system. So it’s better to be on the safe side and pick it with a net.
When I Vacuum My Pool, Dirt Re-enter Through My Jets. Any Help?
If the dirt keeps getting back into your pool while you’re in the process of vacuuming, there’s a problem somewhere. Well, here are a few reasons why the dirt keeps coming right back in:
Filter Backwashing
The debris that gets into your: hair, dust, bird dropping, or even algae, turn into particulate matter. That’s exactly why you need a filter to capture all the tiny particles. Unfortunately, you would have to manually clean out your pool filter or backwash it to get that dirt out. However, if
The filter is backwashed, it will send the dirt right back into your pool. This might be an explanation. Let’s examine the next.
Faulty Filter
If you notice that the dirt reappears on your pool floor right after you’ve vacuumed, it may be an indication that your pool’s filtration system is bad and requires a replacement.
Most times, i little filter cleaning may be all there is to get it back in shape. If you’re using a sand filter in your pool, you want to make sure that the sand is kept clean and sharp so that it can filter out the dirt effectively. In that case, you may use a commercially available pool filter cleaner periodically. Backwashing your pool at least once a month would also prove to be helpful to your filter.
For Your Consideration
If your pool is under assault from winds that blow everything into it, you might find using a pool cover to be a great relief.
Also, set your filter mode to vacuum to waste if you’re trying to clean a pool with a lot of dirt in the bottom. This enables the vacuum mechanism to circumvent the filtration system and send the water straight into the waste.
Lastly, the longer you run your pool’s filtration system, the better you. Between 6 to 8 hours every day should do a great job of cleaning out your pool water. However, you mustn’t let all that effort go to waste by not using a pool cover. In essence, if you clean up your pool in the morning and it’s already packed with dirt in the afternoon, you most definitely need a pool cover.
Wrapping Up on Should I Vacuum My Pool If I Can’t See The Bottom?
If you come across a crystal clear pool, you will probably think it took a lot of work to achieve. And while you may be right, knowing the right steps to take can greatly reduce your pool cleaning efforts. For example, cleaning your pool especially if you can’t see the bottom will not yield pretty results; you will need to clear out the cloudiness first.
