Eric goes in depth on closing the pool for the winter (winterization), what the fundamental objectives are, and why.
00:00 - Introduction
05:09 - Previous winterization podcast episodes
06:22 - WHY do we winterize the Orenda way?
07:44 - Three winterization fundamentals
08:16 - Mechanical and physical closing processes
11:18 - Water quality over winter
14:14 - Closing kits
16:26 - Our recommended closing chemicals
18:24 - Water balance over winter
24:15 - Vinyl liner and fiberglass winter damage
25:35 - Pool cover types matter
27:13 - Closing
[00:00:00] Welcome back to the Rule, Your Pool podcast. I hope you enjoyed that one, I enjoyed making it. This is episode 156, and the sixth time that we are going to be talking about a subject on this podcast that we continue to get a ton of questions about. So it tells me it's still misunderstood, and maybe people have not gone back and listened to the previous five episodes that we've discussed about this.
[00:04:29] This topic is about closing your pool in the winter. Winterization. Whatever you want to call it. It's really not that complicated when you think about what we're trying to accomplish.
[00:04:38] And what I'm going to try to do in this episode is glean a little bit from the previous five, but just try to simplify this whole thing. We just want to understand why we're winterizing the way that we recommend it.
[00:04:50] And when you understand the why, there are a lot of different ways to do it. You can figure out the how. But I think what we have failed to do so far is explain why we winterize the Orenda way. I'm your host Eric Knight with Orenda and HASA and, uh, doing this one alone. So let's get right into it because we already did the intro here.
[00:05:09] The previous five episodes that we've talked about, this are episode five, where we first introduced water temperature and the LSI. That's way back at the beginning when we started this podcast. And if you go back and you listen to that, it's still fundamentally true today. The temperature is a very important aspect of water balance.
[00:05:29] It can not be ignored, in fact, it's arguably the most important thing that you need to think about with winterization. Because the main thing that is different is the temperature is going to drop. So that's episode five.
[00:05:40] Then there's episode 11, called Winter is Coming, where we first introduced closing. And then there's episode 39, Closing your Pool the Orenda Way. That's where we went through the whole procedure of what to do. It's pretty simple. Then the next episode, right after that was episode 40, where we talked about pool covers and winterization, and how the type of pool cover matters more than the type of pool surface. Yes, it does. And we'll explain why, again, we'll recap that in this episode.
[00:06:10] And then we did it again, episode 86, it's called Winter is Coming Again. Well, I don't know what exactly to call this episode. Maybe it's one last call for calcium. I dunno, but we'll see.
[00:06:22] I guess we can summarize with this winterize with the spring in mind. Close your pool based on what's going to happen over the next five or six months, or whatever it is where you are. A quarterback does not throw the ball to where the wide receiver is. They throw the ball to where the wide receiver is going.
[00:06:42] That's what we should be doing. We should be predicting the winter. We should be predicting that the water temperature is going to drop. And it's true. We don't know how fast that's going to happen. And it doesn't really necessarily matter if we winterized properly. It doesn't matter if it freezes on December 1st or February 1st What we do know is that water is going to get colder.
[00:07:03] The places in the Northeast and the Midwest where it's pretty much guaranteed to freeze, I would say you have a distinct advantage over those who don't know how cold it's going to be. And I'm thinking areas like Tennessee, and Georgia, and Alabama, where it gets cold. But it doesn't necessarily freeze.
[00:07:20] Yes, pools can freeze and Georgia. I mean, mine in Charlotte, North Carolina mind froze last year. I wasn't expecting that, but it did. It froze. And I didn't shut down the pool, so to speak. But I did load up the pool with calcium. Because I knew the temperature was going to drop. I just didn't expect it to freeze, but I was prepared for it if it did. And thankfully I was prepared. So when it happened, I didn't have any issues.
[00:07:44] When I boil down all of the variables that go into properly closing a pool in the winter, there are just three fundamental aspects to winterization. There's the mechanical aspect, like physically, what do you do to this pool? What do you do to the equipment? What do you do to the plumbing lines? How do you cover it? That sort of thing.
[00:08:04] Then, in the water chemistry category, we're going to split that into two. There's water quality, and there's water balance. And if you've ever listened to this podcast, you know that we're going to spend our time on those two things.
[00:08:16] But first, let's just knock out the mechanical. We are not in the business of telling anybody how to run theirs. I know that many people winterize their own ways and they have their own processes. What we encourage you to do, pool professionals, is get trained by the equipment manufacturers that you're dealing with. If you've got an equipment pad with Pentair on it, be trained by Pentair on how to winterize that equipment. Same goes for Hayward, Jandy, Aquastar, whatever you're using. You need to know from them what they recommend for their equipment. That's not just to protect the equipment it's to protect you too. You don't want to do something wrong.
[00:08:52] We are not qualified to give you any of that advice on this podcast. So you're not going to get it here. But you should know where to go. Talk to your supervisor, and if you don't have a supervisor, talk to other people that have mechanical experience who have been doing repairs, and they've been doing this for a while. Do everything you can to learn how to physically winterize a pool.
[00:09:11] I know a lot of people will blow out the lines. They'll clear the water out of the lines with like a, a shop vac or an air compressor or something like that. I've never done it myself. So I can't speak intelligently to this. But obviously we don't want lines to freeze because water expands when it freezes and it can crack pipes, it can crack fittings. It can crack pumps. It can crack filters. I don't know if any of you remember a certain freeze that may or may not have hit Texas in 2021? That possibly threw the entire swimming pool industry into chaos for a year and a half? I don't, I don't know. Maybe that's just my own memory, but. Things break. Water expands when it freezes. We saw pictures of filters that had cracked open, pumps that were destroyed, heat exchangers, pipes, you name it. It was bad. It was really bad.
[00:10:01] If you don't know what you're doing, learn. Get trained. There's nothing wrong with it. Everybody has to learn some time and there are plenty of people in your market that probably know how to do it. But again, we defer to the manufacturers on how to winterize their equipment.
[00:10:15] So those are the mechanical things. I do want to make a note that's a little bit of a chemistry overlap with mechanical. We have noticed a lot of problems with pools that are closed using antifreeze products. Specifically when you put antifreeze in the pipes. Like propylene glycol or ethylene glycol. It's not that they don't work, that they do a pretty good job. It's that you got to deal with them in the spring.
[00:10:39] And that can take a lot. And the byproducts of that is not the best thing that you want to deal with. I know from experience, quite a bit of it, that our enzymes CV-600 and CV-700, they go nuts if you have antifreeze in your pipes. And we see bubble baths quite a bit because the enzymes are going after that and they're trying to break it down and remove it.
[00:10:59] So, if you want to avoid that problem, you would probably be better off blowing out the lines, but again, I'm not here to tell you how to do your job. Just be cognizant that if you're going to go that path, you're going to have to deal with the baggage in the spring. And it's going to be a lot more work when you open that pool up. So be aware of it.
[00:11:18] Okay, now. Let's get into our bread and butter. Most of winterization, in the Orenda method, is going to be focused on water balance. That's because you're not having to disinfect the pool because nobody's swimming. It's under a cover. It's too cold. We're not really disinfecting the pool long-term if you think about it.
[00:11:36] You might chlorinate at the end, but how long does that chlorine stay in there? A few days? A week? Hopefully? As the temperature drops, the reproducing contaminants can't really reproduce. Or if they do, it's a very slow rate until that temperature gets to a point where they can't reproduce it all. So you don't really need to be chlorinating under the cover of a closed pool. Because nobody's using it. Now, if people are using it, that's a different story. But generally speaking, we're closing this pool for a reason.
[00:12:04] What is that water going to be doing for the next six months? It's going to be sitting there. Big question we get. To shock or not to shock? Well, in this case, shock is a verb, and the product would be either chlorine or non chlorine shock, like potassium monopersulfate, which Terry and I just discussed in the last episode.
[00:12:24] It really depends. It depends on what's in your water. If you're a pool pro listening to this and you didn't service the pool all year long. The only service you provided is you opened it in the spring, the homeowner takes care of it, and then they hire you to close it in the fall.
[00:12:38] I know a lot of companies that do this. You just show up basically twice a year. Not a bad business. But you have no control over what goes in that pool all summer long. In that case, you might need to. You just don't know what you're walking into. You show up to that pool and it could be a total mess. And you're trying to do something before you close that pool.
[00:12:59] Regardless of what you choose to do, whether you decide to super chlorinate or just normally chlorinate or not chlorinate, that chlorine is not going to last that long. A few days, a week, maybe two? But it's not going to last the whole winter. And if you have a salt system as the temperature drops, it's going to be too cold to chlorinate.
[00:13:19] You know, especially if you blow out the lines, you don't have circulation to begin with, so you can't use a salt system. So anyway, I'm a getting distracted here. What about algaecides? As you know, if you've been listening to the Rule Your Pool podcast, I don't like algaecides. If it's not called chlorine, it's going to conflict with chlorine in some way or another. Algaecides just introduce complexity and you're going to have to deal with those byproducts in the spring. And almost all of them conflict with chlorine to the point where it's going to reduce your chlorine level, because chlorine now has to attack that product that you put in that pool. That will make it more difficult in the spring.
[00:13:55] Why introduce complexity? And what are you doing it for? Chlorine is the best algaecide to begin with. What are you trying to get ahead of in the fall? As the temperature drops, was that going to be a concern to begin with? And could you have been more proactive to take that out of the equation to begin with? You probably could.
[00:14:14] And it gets me thinking, like, what else is in a closing kit? Closing kits usually have nothing to do with water balance. And to me, that's a problem. Because water balance is the main thing. And the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing. Stay focused on it. It is the most important thing, keeping your water balanced. Because nobody's using the pool. Nobody's under that cover. Hopefully.
[00:14:43] If a closing kit does all this stuff to keep your water clean and clear, how come so many pools open up a disaster. And usually, when I speak to customers that used a closing kit or homeowners that did, and they open up their pool and it's just a murky mess. Usually it's because that kit itself caused a lot of those problems. It created complexity. And now you have all that garbage in the water that you got to now get out somehow. If you even can.
[00:15:11] I know there are some other products that go in there. There's usually a phosphate remover, which is a good idea. We make PR-10,000, but any of them are going to remove phosphates. So you can do that. But one note about phosphate remover, you're going to need to clean up the dust. So whether that's cleaning out the filter or vacuuming it off the floor, you don't just want dust sitting on the floor all winter long. Because it's going to be a mess. And it could stick to the floor and it's going to be harder to clean up.
[00:15:34] One thing that we do recommend is, when you're reducing phosphates, do it a week or so before closing day. Maybe give it to the homeowner in advance, treat it ahead of time so that you can clean it on closing day or the day before so it's a lot less work.
[00:15:49] Another thing that's talked about is sequestering agents. We hear this a lot. They say, Hey, we want to put SC-1000 in for the winter. Well, first of all, thank you for wanting to use SC-1000, but now's not really the time. You don't want to be just putting this into the pool as the temperature's dropping. The exception to that is when we're adding calcium. You are going to want to chelate calcium as you're adding it in the fall.
[00:16:13] So it's not that you're adding it to the pool. You're adding it to the calcium that you're pre desolving and putting into the pool. Every closing kit seems to be a little bit different. But. We don't have one.
[00:16:26] Here's what we recommend. Chlorinate normally. Make sure you have a residual of enzymes in there. If you have been maintaining all summer long, you don't need any more. You have the residual because you maintained it from the spring. That's great. Leave it.
[00:16:40] Normally, as you know, we recommend purging in the spring as the temperature is rising past 60 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit. There's a reason for that. You're getting ready for the season. But just like the song, every spring opening starts with the last season's end. Get ahead of it. You're going to want something helping you out in the fall. And by the way, they seem to do a pretty good job keeping that pool clean. So when people open up after they purged and they remove phosphates in the fall. The water is pretty clear. It may not be an A-plus. But it's certainly not an F. It's not a swamp. It's usually like a B or an A. You can see the main drain, the water still blue.
[00:17:22] That's a huge difference from the way so many pools open up. And I've opened up a lot of pools with customers. And they're just ponds. And, you know, you find out pine needles and leaves were sitting on the mesh cover all winter long. And there's proactive things like using a leaf blower to get these things off and recommending to the homeowners hey, you know, we can come by once a month with a leaf blower and we can test your water and grab a sample. That's a great way to be proactive. Blow that stuff off the covers. The less crud introduced into that water, the easier the spring opening's going to be.
[00:17:57] So that's what we do. Were proactive. We want to take these things out of the water. Get phosphates out, get non-living organics out, and chlorinate normally. There's really no reason to shock in my opinion. Unless, like I said, there's a big mess on your hands and you need to overcome something. Maybe there's a lot of combined chlorine, for instance, who knows. That would be an exception. That's water quality. Pretty simple. Okay, remove variables. Keep it clean.
[00:18:24] Now let's talk about water balance. The main thing is keeping your LSI balanced when the temperature gets to its coldest point. For most of the people that are listening to this lesson, that coldest point is freezing. I may not stay frozen for more than a day, but if you get ice in that pool, It reached 32 degrees somewhere in that pool. I understand the entire pool is not 32 degrees because that would be a block of ice. But I think you get my point.
[00:18:53] Prepare for the worst. Now even if you don't expect it to freeze, like I did not expect it to freeze in Charlotte last year. But my pool did freeze. But I was prepared. I prepared for 32. I was ready. I loaded my pool up with 550 calcium hardness in Charlotte. Because I was going to get a lot of rain, which would lower my levels. And I also knew that that temperature was going to get somewhere in the forties. Maybe the high thirties. Well, I was wrong about that, it actually got colder. But it didn't matter because I didn't plan for 45. I planned for 32.
[00:19:29] It made it much easier so that when it did freeze. I was fine. I cracked that ice a little bit with a hammer. Got a sample, warmed it up, found out my LSI was perfectly balanced. pH was right where it needed to be at its ceiling. And the calcium had dropped like a hundred parts per million. So I was at like 450. My chemistry was there. It was ready. I had insulated it properly. That's really all you're trying to do with water balance.
[00:19:55] The main product that accomplishes this is calcium. If you just add enough calcium to get ready for 32 degrees and you add it in September when the water is, say, 78 degrees Fahrenheit, it could form a purple LSI violation, if you're using the calculator, and not stay in solution. It could cloud up the water and fall out. Yes, as the temperature drops down, a lot of that will come back into solution, but it still makes a big mess. Why risk it? You could open up the pool in the spring and have a disaster on your hands because maybe it adhered to the floor. I don't know. It's just not worth the risk.
[00:20:33] So, what we recommend doing is use the Orenda calculator, find out how much calcium this pool actually needs, and then chelate it in a bucket or the startup barrel before you put it in. We don't know an exact number, but we found a lot of success with using one ounce of SC-1000 per five pounds of calcium chloride. If I'm adding a 50 pound bag of calcium chloride, that's 10 ounces of SC-1000.
[00:20:59] Now if I've got the startup barrel, which many of you do have, put a inch and a half ball valve on the bottom of it. Put it right on the edge of the pool. Fill that up. You could take multiple buckets of pool water to do it really quickly. Put all the calcium in there at once so that you're not dealing with seven or eight buckets and a lot more time. Get it all in there, put the SC-1000 in there. If you need to put a little bit of acid in, you can do that too. Only a couple ounces, you won't need a lot. And then do all your other stuff.
[00:21:27] Let that fester. Go out, blow out your lines. Do whatever else it is that you do when you close. And by the time you come back to that barrel, it should be cleared. Open that ball valve at the bottom, dump in that calcium. That calcium has been chelated. That calcium's not going to form scale.
[00:21:44] And so you eliminate that concern that I just mentioned. If you just add calcium to the pool and it's too warm, well, you could have a high LSI violation and that water can't hold it. It's like adding too much sugar to your drink. You can stir it all you want, but it's still going to the bottom of the glass. Chelate it first. Bind it up. Make sure that that doesn't fall out of solution. And you should be able to keep that pool clean as you cover it up and it'll stay in solution. We've had a lot of success with this.
[00:22:12] But we've learned this the hard way. Every single time that someone had that issue, they did not chelate the calcium first, and that was the problem. So it rules that out. It's a very cheap insurance policy. We know you're going to need calcium to get through the winter because that's what water wants and that doesn't change much.
[00:22:29] Alkalinity changes. pH changes. Calcium, other than dilution and removal of whole water, it doesn't change. Not much anyway. It's going to get you through the winter. It is the rock. It is the foundation that you want. To carry you through the winter.
[00:22:44] For the most part. Outside of a plaster startup, most damage that happens to a swimming pool surface happens in the winter. It's when it's cold, when water is aggressive. That's when most of the damage happens. Think about that. The water is stagnant, it's not moving. If that water's aggressive when it's cold, it's going to be hungry. It's looking for calcium. We know what this does in a cement based pool. Plaster, pebble, quartz. It etches and it pulls it out. And some of that damage looks like winter dust. Uh, some people call it ghosting where you get white rings around the pebbles, which we've explained is the loss of calcium hydroxide in those little zones called the interfacial transition zones. Which is where the cement meets the pebble because it's a different material.
[00:23:32] And that's where the highest concentration of calcium hydroxide is. That's why it's a little white rings. So if you ever look at your pebble pool or your quartz pool and you see little white halo rings around your aggregate, that water stole calcium from that cement. Guaranteed. They call them the ITZ's. Look it up, we have it all over our website. When that happens enough, it can change a dark pool into a gray pool or a lighter pool. Some people call that ghosting.
[00:23:58] You may have white dust everywhere. We call that winter dust. Uh, it looks a lot like plaster dust, but it's not. It is calcium carbonate though. And then of course you have the crystals. Calcite crystals. We've talked about this ad nauseum. Search the word crystal on our website. You'll find it.
[00:24:15] A vinyl liner pool, on the other hand, tends to fade. And over time as it becomes weaker and more porous, with these differences in water temperature. It can start to wrinkle as well.
[00:24:26] And then there's fiberglass. Now fiberglass is an interesting one because just before I sat down to record this, I was speaking to the president of one of the major fiberglass pool manufacturers. And they're doing a bunch of research on the chalking issue.
[00:24:38] And we've talked about the chalking issue that it appears to happen with low LSI. It seems to be more of an oxidation reaction because when you put muriatic acid on the surface, normally if it was scale, it would clean right up and it doesn't. Well that's because it's not scale. They're doing some research right now and we don't have answers yet. But there seems to be some form of calcium involved. It's just not calcium carbonate because it doesn't react with acid.
[00:25:04] So I'm getting them connected with the lab that we used actually to find out what the crystals were. And I'm very much looking forward to seeing what that research shows up, because we're going to learn a lot more about the chalking problem. And so I want to hold off on giving specific instructions for winterizing a fiberglass pool until we know more. Generally speaking though, winterize for cold water. I don't think that's controversial at all. We want that water to be happy. If the water is unhappy, low or high, it's going to do something you don't want it to do.
[00:25:35] Now the type of cover, as I mentioned a little earlier, does change things. A mesh cover allows for dilution in, and it also lets CO2 out, which allows your pH to rise up to its ceiling. A solid cover, like an auto cover or just a solid safety cover, allows for neither of those two things. Now I have seen one that seemed to have like a hatch in the middle of it, that was a solid cover, but it allowed dilution in. I don't exactly know how it works.
[00:26:03] By the way, if you are a cover manufacturer listening to this, I know several of you do. Reach out to me and explain to me how that works because I don't know, and I don't want to be giving bad advice. But I think it allows dilution in. But it's unlikely to let significant CO2 out. So maybe the pH stay suppressed a little bit. And in that case, a solid cover should have a little more alkalinity, and you don't need quite as much calcium because you're not getting the dilution.
[00:26:29] Whereas a mesh cover, you need a lot more calcium. And you don't need as much alkalinity. And the reason for that is the calcium is going to dilute down. But because the CO2 can leave, you're going to have a much higher pH. And that higher pH helps with the LSI.
[00:26:44] Stay focused on what really matters to water. Not so much what matters to us. What matters to water? Remember I've said it a hundred times if I've said it once. Water didn't read the textbooks. Water cares about physical balance. It cares about equilibrium. Give it that. Closing kits do nothing for that. They try to keep it clean, I guess, but they don't do anything for the LSI.
[00:27:13] Envision your water as a grizzly bear. When you winterize, you need to feed that bear before it hibernates. Because as that temperature drops, if there's not enough calcium in that pool, and that LSI goes red, that bear wakes up from hibernation and it ain't happy. That bears waking up hangry.
[00:27:38] This is what leads to calcium crystals. This is what leads to winter dust. This is what leads to fading vinyl liners. It's water that didn't have enough saturation of calcium going into the winter.
[00:27:53] Remember. Every spring opening starts with the last season's end. How you put this pool to bed is your choice. And it's going to determine how easy it is to wake it up in the spring. If you winterize properly, you take variables out. Get those organics and oils out. Get the phosphates out. Chlorinate normally. And then manage the LSI by getting the proper amount of calcium and alkalinity in that pool. You have better than good odds of showing up in the spring to a pretty clean pool. That's not going to take a lot of work to get going. And that's the goal. Be proactive, not reactive.
[00:28:33] I know this is the sixth episode talking about winterization. And I hope now you have more of a sense of the why. And if you understand that, you can adjust this procedure to what works for you. Just be thinking about how you can get ahead of things. We want you to rule your pool. I would argue it's among the most important procedures that you can do in swimming pool care. Half the year is based on one day's work. Think about that. Spring opening is not nearly as consequential as winterizing. If you winterize right, spring opening is easy. And I hope that it's easy for you.
[00:29:12] Anyway, this has been episode 156 of the Rule Your Pool podcast. I'm your host Eric Knight with Orenda and HASA. And I'm not sure what we're talking about next time, but I think we're going to be talking something about testing because I have Joe Sweazy booked. And hopefully that'll be a good episode. Thanks for listening as always.
[00:29:32] And if you have questions podcast@orendatech.com is the email. Take care, everybody.