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You’ve spent an afternoon scooping dead leaves and debris from your swimming pool with a net. You’ve brushed the inner walls, vacuumed the bottom, and bought expensive chemicals to shock the pool. At the end of the day, your pool’s water is a perfect sheet of shimmering crystal.
But there was a storm last night. In the morning, you see that it’s right back to being a disgusting swamp. With nothing covering it, you have to do that work all over again.
A lot of false rumors out there give pool covers a bad rap – many pool owners falsely believe tarps are expensive, useless waste of money; that they’re ugly, or that they’ll tear under the weight of rain, snow, and debris. You believed them, and now you’re the bigger fool for it.
Maybe you could have spent the extra money for a pool cover, after all. Soon, you’ll learn that keeping your swimming pool clean and presentable is only one reason among many for investing in a pool cover.
1. Keeps Pool Water Warmer for Longer
For many pool owners, the last thing you’d enjoy is jumping into a pool that turns your toes into ice cubes and stops your heart. Covering a heated pool will retain more of its warmth throughout the night. Even if your pool is not heated, the warmth the water collects from the sun through the day won’t cool down as quickly with a pool cover overnight. Everyone wants a cool, refreshing dip on a hot summer’s day, but plunging into hypothermic waters is very unpleasant.
No need to purchase a special pool cover to keep your water warm – solar covers and your conventional vinyl shield heat in just as effectively.
2. A Safe, Cheap Alternative to Chemicals
By covering your water, a pool tarp acts by both reducing the foreign objects can fall in and pollute the waters, and keeps chemicals that are in the water from evaporating with it. The pool cover keeps your pool cleaner, so you don’t have to add chemicals nearly so often.
While chemicals in your water keep it safe and clean, many chemicals also have side effects of irritation, redness, asthma, allergies, and watery eyes that can ruin pool fun. Covering your pool allows you to decrease the need for chemicals from 35 to 60 percent.
3. Simple to Cover and Remove
A lot of pool owners pass up on buying a cover because they think they’re a big hassle to pull over and secure. You might think differently once you find out the bigger hassle of cleaning out your pool every day, and shocking it with expensive chemicals constantly.
Avoid the wrestling match with your tarp and buy an automatic pool cover – just push a button, and the device rolls the tarp over the pool for you. But if you can’t fit an automatic pool cover in your budget, by following the right instructions, pulling a cover over or off your pool should be an easy process.
4. Saves Time and Energy from Constant Cleaning
You probably don’t enjoy vacuuming your pool bottom or running the net through the water every day, or know anybody else who does. You bought a pool to relax and spend time swimming in – not to clean and maintain it most of the time. By just taking two minutes to pull the cover over the water every night, you keep twigs and debris out and spare yourself the trouble.
Plus, when you save on energy, you’re keeping more of those resources in nature – pool tarps are perfect for those with hearts for the environment.
5. Conserves and Prevents Water from Evaporating
A special note for the economic and environmentally-minded – if you keep your pool covered with a tarp during the days you don’t use it, it prevents the sun from evaporating the water out from it. That leads to less frequent refills, a cheaper water bill and less water extracted from nature.
For pool owners in a dry region with many droughts, having a pool covered on sunny days when it’s not in use is the smartest move you can make.
6. Makes Your Pool Safer
Thanks to the strong, fiberglass mesh pool tarps are manufactured with, they can catch children or people from falling into the water as long as you’ve secured the cover properly. Heavy-duty tarps can hold more than 400 pounds, but most often require an automatic tracker to support.
Be warned: solar covers are made from lighter material, and don’t work as efficiently as a safety net. Anyone attempting to brand a tarp as both durable and solar-powered is probably trying to dupe you!
7. Keep More of Your Money
By cutting the amount of energy you use heating the pool, the number of water refills, chemicals applied, and other cleaning supplies, a pool cover is a surprising investment that pays for itself in little time. If time is money, then pool covers let you keep cash in your pocket and your time to relax. In every area, you can’t go wrong when you buy a pool tarp!