Pool Dirty After the Rain?
Pool dirty after the rain? After heavy rainfall, your swimming pool may go brown from surrounding garden sand being washed into the pool. This could take days to clear by running the water through the sand filter. Sometimes the sand filter clogs up within hours, and the circulation is then so poor, that the pool remains dirty.
A quick fix to this problem is to flocculate (cause the dirt to form clumps and settle at the bottom of) the pool.
Use about 2kg’s of alum powder per 50kl of pool water. Always add alum to the pool with the filter set to ‘circulate’ so the alum bypasses the filter sand.
Brush the entire pool walls and floor while the pool is circulating.
Once the alum is mixed in with the pool water (1 – 2 hours), switch the pump off. As the alum starts to settle, so does the rest of the dirt in the swimming pool. This usually solves the problem 1st time round.
When all the dirt has settled on the floor (approximately 24 hours later), be sure to vacuum it to waste (not through the filter). Vacuuming on the ‘filter’ setting will clog it up within minutes. This will most likely blow the dirt back into the pool, leaving you at square one!
Make sure the swimming pool is topped up to the brim before starting to vacuum. If you don’t, you could run out of water halfway through the process.
Once the pool is clean, take a sample of water done to a pool shop to get it tested and balanced.
There will probably be other occasions that you’ll need to flocculate your pool water, not only when your pool is dirty after the rain. You could keep an extra packet of alum powder, however, after a while, these products do tend to get hard and clumpy.
