Keep your pool and your loved ones safe while your pool is shut down for the season with a winter cover for your pool. Pool covers are common accessories during the swimming season when pool owners know how much more work an uncovered pool is to maintain. During the winter months, too often, your pool is “out of sight, out of mind,” but that doesn’t mean winter pool covers don’t offer significant benefits for your loved ones, property, and the investment you’ve made in creating the perfect backyard oasis for your family. Winter pool covers are a great idea for any pool owner when temperatures start to drop.
A Winter Cover For Pool Protection
Winter covers are not the same as leaf covers or standard mesh swimming pool safety covers. Made from a durable, heavy-duty mesh that is resistant to rips, tears, bacteria, chemicals, and UV light, winter covers are designed to stand up to the extended use that comes along with protecting a part of your property that’s going to go months without use thanks to the weather. Supported by straps and springs fixed to anchor points around your pool’s deck, it can support up to 485 pounds, although it isn’t designed to be walked on or to bear weight for extended periods of time.
Combined, these properties give you the protection you want for your pool when you won’t be regularly supervising it. During the winter months, your pool faces many of the same risks it does during swim season, and likewise, it can still far too easily become the sight of a tragedy, as accidental drownings are a year-round concern. Installing a winter cover for your pool comes with key benefits that protect your money and your peace of mind.
Keep Freezing Temperatures At Bay
We’ve talked about our top tips for avoiding winter pool problems, and a winter pool cover factor heavily into them. Freezing temperatures put pools at risk, whatever the pool is constructed from. Large temperature swings cause materials to shrink and swell, putting stress on materials and joints. Freezing water also expands, potentially damaging your pool’s structure, even if it’s been winterized. A winter cover for your pool helps keep freezing temperatures at bay by trapping the heat from the sun and creating an insulating layer of warm air between the cover and the pool’s surface.
Prevent Contamination
Like leaf and safety covers, your winter cover helps keep debris out of your pool. From dead leaves the neighbor couldn’t be bothered to bag up to trash that’s blown in on the wind, keeping your pool clean through the winter means an easier time opening it up come spring. Aside from an unsightly mess that is labor intensive to clean up, debris and detritus like this can carry bacteria and other biological contaminants you don’t want to be introduced to your pool water. The cover serves as a barrier to your pool, letting you gently sweep it away from your pool, pick up the debris, and dispose of it properly.
Maintain Your Chemical Balance
Preventing contamination from entering your pool helps keep your water’s chemistry on point, but that’s not the only way a winter cover for pools can help you save money on chemicals. When you winterized your pool, you tested, re-tested, and adjusted the chemical balance in a set volume of water, but even under ideal conditions, these concentrations will lower as they do their job conditioning the water and protecting your pool. The cover creates a more stable environment for these chemicals, meaning their active properties are used up at a slower pace. It does this by helping to limit evaporation, causing water to condense on the cooler underside of the cover where it can drop back into the pool, and by maintaining a more stable temperature range that prevents spiking temperatures from either encouraging increased algae growth and chemical usage or temperature drops that rob the chemical reactions of the proper range they need to work.
Deter Unsupervised Access
You may use your pool a lot in the summer, and you probably find yourself glancing out the windows and doors overlooking it, anticipating when you can sneak away for a dip in its cool waters. In the winter, cool waters are the last things on your mind, so it’s not uncommon for your pool area to be out of sight and out of mind. Winter covers for pools are designed to be in place through months of non-use, during which they are meant to be secured to keep your pool safer. Installed winter pool covers are difficult for curious or impatient children to remove, helping to keep them safer by keeping them away from and out of the frigid waters.
Protecting Your Property With a Winter Cover
Winter pool covers are custom fit to individual pools. In order to provide the level of security and protection your property and loved ones need, the cover has to be anchored properly and tensioned to create a tight fit that can support its full load rating without ripping or tearing. Your pool professional will take precise measurements. Anchors will be installed around the pool’s edge to secure the cover. These are designed to hold your cover firmly when it’s in place without creating a tripping hazard when the pool is opened up and the anchors aren’t in use.
Your pro will ensure a cover is ordered that fits your pool dimensions. The cover is secured to the installed anchor points by metal clips that provide a firm hold that isn’t easy to dislodge when the cover is under tension. The final straps secure your cover in place, creating a safe barrier that mitigates the risk of debris, unsupervised access, and plummeting temperatures in your pool area.
No-Cost, No-Obligation Estimates
When you schedule an appointment with your local pro, they’ll put together a free quote that lays out your options for a winter cover fit to your pool. That way, you have the actionable information you need to make the best decision for your property. Call Lifeguard on Duty for your free quote today.
