You’re going to find that there will be an ongoing battle to maintain an ideal balance in the water of your pool. Chucking a cupful of chlorine in every day will work for a while but there will be more factors that will have to be monitored on a regular basis. Details such as the water’s pH level are going to have to be checked and dealt with. You may also start to wonder why the water is beginning to go cloudy or green, you may need to check for algae.
Here is a check list of the pool chemicals you will need at some stage in your above ground pools life to ensure it not only looks good but isn’t hiding any nasty surprises.
Chlorine
The traditional method of keeping your pool clean and bacteria free is with chlorine. There are a number of ways of adding chlorine to the pool from adding it in granular form to putting chlorine tablets in a pool floater of the skimmer box and letting them dissolve slowly.
Stabilizer
In order to help your chlorine to last longer once it’s in the pool you can add stabilizer which will form a barrier on the pool surface and stop the sun from breaking the chlorine down as quickly.
Clarifier
If the pool has gone cloudy a treatment of clarifier will clear it right up. Cloudy pools are usually caused by fine debris particles suspended in the water that are too small to be picked up by your pool filter. The pool clarifier will clump these fine particles together to form larger particles which will then be caught by the filter.
Algaecide
An algaecide is really only needed as a preventative measure to be added to the pool on a weekly basis. If you’ve already got a pool that has gone green from algae growth you’ll need a chlorine-based pool shock to remove it. There are a couple of different types of algaecide available. The first is a copper based algaecide which uses copper to treat the algae growth. The only real problem with copper-based algaecides is that they can cause stains in the pool if they’re not used properly. The second type of algaecide are quaternary ammonium compounds (or “quat”) which are very effective at preventing or treating algae growth and don’t stain the pool. They can cause foaming though if not used properly. The quat algaecides are generally more expensive than the copper-based algaecides.
pH Buffer
Used to increase the alkalinity of your pool
Winteriser
This is a great way to prevent algae growth over the winter months and reduces the amount of chlorine you will have to put in.
Believe it or not, after chucking all of these chemicals in the pool, you can also buy another chemical – a stain remover - to clean up the mess that their residue makes.
Pool Chemicals
