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You wake up in the morning, stretch, and look out to see your beautiful, crystal clear pool. Uh-oh. What is that yellowish tinge floating in the water? You guessed it—pollen.
In addition to regular cleaning, you’ll need to take a few extra steps to fight pollen in your pool, especially during the spring and summer months when it’s heavier. Luckily, getting rid of pollen is actually quite easy and won’t take very long, either.
Do you have plants in your backyard? Flowers? Trees? If so, there’s no avoiding getting pollen in your pool. In fact, even if you don’t have a lot of plants in your back yard, it can still blow in from your neighbors’ yards, and if the wind is strong, from even farther away than that.
The point is, there’s no avoiding it. You just need to be ready for when it happens. And it will happen.
If you’ve never seen pollen in your pool, it can look an awful lot like mustard algae, or yellow algae. So before you begin the cleaning process, you need to make sure you are, in fact, dealing with pollen. The difference is in where it collects.
Algae will often stick to the sides and even the bottom of the pool and won’t be easily filtered by your pool’s filtration system. But if it’s floating at the top of the pool, and you notice some of it has been picked up by your pool’s filtration system, chances are, you have a pollen problem.
Getting rid of it isn’t difficult. But you’ll need to be diligent to keep up with it. The sooner you get pollen out of your pool, the less of a mess you’ll have to deal with. And you can do it in just five steps.
You probably don’t keep your pool filter running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But if you have pollen in your pool, the filtration system is your first line of defense. It won’t get rid of it completely, but it’s the best place to start.
At the very least, it will reduce the amount of manual labor you’ll have to do to get rid of the pollen. While it will cause your energy bills to go up a little, in the end, having less pollen to scoop out yourself makes it well worth the expense.
Every morning use a skimmer with a very fine mesh head to pick up any pollen that’s collected overnight. You may have to repeat this process more than once a day during the heavy pollen season.
It's a deep and durable leaf net pool skimmer that can collect a lot of debris all in one skimming. It also includes a lifetime guarantee. This is what the pros use!
Some pollen in your pool will simply be too small to be picked up by a skimmer, and may even pass right through the filter like it wasn’t even there.
To get rid of this tiny pollen, add aluminum sulfate to the water. It will bind with the pollen causing it to clump together, and making it easier for the skimmer and filter to grab it.
Is there anything a good shock can’t fix? Well, pool shock won’t actually get rid of pollen. But it will kill anything that’s decided to get comfy in your pool because of all that lovely pollen floating around in the water.
Shock the pool in the evening, and the next morning, give it a good skim to get rid of the pollen and anything else left in the water.
This fast-acting, quick-dissolving swimming pool shock kills bacteria, controls algae, and destroys organic contaminants in pools.
If you want to learn how to shock your swimming pool, click here.
Sometimes skimming and filtering just won’t be enough to completely remove the pollen in your pool. If that’s the case, you may have to vacuum the pool manually.
This is the last resort as it will cause both your electric and water bills to go up. You’ll use more electricity to run the vacuum, and you’ll need to replace the water removed from the pool in the process.
The weighted triangle pool vacuum head is a great way to clean your pool. The weights on the bottom of the vacuum head help to keep it in place while vacuuming.
Never dive into a pool full of pollen again. Be ready when the season starts, and that pollen in your pool won’t stand a chance against you, your skimmer, and your filter. Now if only preventing those pollen allergies were as easy!
Happy Swimming!
Matt is the founder of Swim University. He's been in the pool industry since 1993. His mission is to make pool care easy for everyone. Each year, he continues to help more people with water chemistry, cleaning, and troubleshooting.
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