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No-nonsense strategies to fix your sagging pool cover, keep it snug, and ensure it doesn't get destroyed over the winter months.
Creators & Guests
What is Pool School?
A podcast for pool owners covering pool maintenance and water chemistry.
Hey, everyone, and welcome to Pool School by Swim University, where we help keep your pool clean and clear all year. My name is Matt, the founder of swimuniversity.com. And on this episode, we're talking about how to keep your pool cover from sagging. Let's dive in. Real quick.
Matt Giovanisci:If you want more help taking care of your pool, be sure to grab our free pool care cheat sheet at swimu.com/cheat. So we share some no nonsense DIY strategies to fix your sagging pool cover, keep it snug, and ensure it doesn't get destroyed over the winter months. So we're gonna cover how to quickly drain off the water off the cover, how to blow debris off the cover with ease, how to fix a sagging in ground pool cover, how to fix a sagging above ground pool cover, and how to protect your pool cover from future damage. So how to quickly drain water off your pool cover? Well, the fastest way is to use an electric pump.
Matt Giovanisci:For an in ground pool with a safety cover, you can use an automatic submersible pump, which we, you know, sometimes refer to as a sump pump. Here is our favorite one that we use. You can go to our website. If you go to swimuniversity.com/pooldash cover dash sagging, you can find our favorite one. All you do is connect it to your garden hose or sorry.
Matt Giovanisci:You connect your garden hose to the pump. You place your pump in any area where most of the water collects. This will probably be, the center of the cover, and you wanna place your garden hose, in this in an area that has good draining drainage. Sorry. Plug in the pump and activate switch to enable its automatic water detection function if you get the one that we recommend.
Matt Giovanisci:The pump will start removing water, expelling it, to the designated draining area effectively. Now an automatic cover pump is a significant time saver, ensuring your cover remains clear of water even when unattended. However, these units are not cheap. So for pool owners where cost is prohibitive, you can use a manual pump which offers a budget conscious solution. So if you have a tarp cover, so not a safety cover, but a tarp cover, and this is very common in above ground pools, you wanna invest in a specialized pool cover pump.
Matt Giovanisci:Now we recommend one from Little Giant. It is an automatic swimming pool cover pump and it's very lightweight. All you do is hook it up to your garden hose, you put the pump in the spot where the cover is the highest water act you know, where the where the water is, lay out the discharge hose, which is your garden hose so that it drains where you want it to, plug in the pump to an outlet, and start draining water off the cover. The thing is, there's no on off switch. So you have to plug it in when you when it's already submerged, and then unplug it when it's done.
Matt Giovanisci:So you're gonna have to stand out there and wait for it, which is sort of the downside of of getting a cover pump like this, but it may be the only solution, and it's certainly cheaper. So finally, you can use a siphon, good old fashioned manual siphon. It's the cheapest option. It works best if you have an above ground pool because the gravity, meaning because your pool's above ground, you'll need that gravity to keep the siphon flowing. You can use a short garden hose or a PVC pipe, and you can create the siphon yourself.
Matt Giovanisci:Just like, I don't know if you've ever seen this before, but sucking gas out of a car, I would not advise anyone do this. But, yes, you can take a very, very small hose and just suck on one end of it and create the siphon, especially on an above ground pool where you have gravity working for you. But I recommend investing in a cheap pool cover siphon that lays in the middle of the cover. So these are lightweight, flat discs with a bunch of holes in it that you can put in the middle of the cover, and it has a long PVC clear PVC tube that's that's flexible. And it comes with a hand pump, so you start hand pumping it.
Matt Giovanisci:And then once you get it flowing, you're good to go. So how do you get debris and leaves off your pool cover without ripping it? Well, the best way that I found is to use a leaf blower. And this will only work if you've already removed all the water from the cover and the debris is dry. So I recommend using one of the siphon techniques to get the water off first, and hopefully, you have a couple of days where you're not getting a lot of rain or you're not getting a lot of snow, and you can allow the leaves and sticks or whatever else is on your cover to dry.
Matt Giovanisci:I personally have a cordless electric leaf blower that is awesome because it doesn't require gas. You just charge up this big battery, and it's handheld, it's lightweight, and you can just blow things right off the cover. I use it all over my backyard, not just for leaves, but if I wanna clear debris off my deck, off my patio, off the cover of the hot tub, It's perfect for that. And it's so versatile and you're I mean, electric is clearly the way to go with this with this piece. Now, if the cover is still wet, the leaf blower option's not gonna work because, you know, you need it you need it to be able to I mean, the leaf blower that I have is pretty powerful.
Matt Giovanisci:So you could get you can even blow water off. But if it doesn't work, you can use a soft broom or a skimmer net. Now I recommend using a soft wooden broom with no edging to it. Because what you don't want is if you're brushing off your cover, you don't want any plastic that's on the cover to snag the cover and rip it. So that's why I recommend a soft wooden broom.
Matt Giovanisci:You can use a skimmer net, but that's all plastic, and so you'd have to be incredibly careful. But it is pretty lightweight. If you wanna keep leaves and debris off the top of your cover in the first place, you can invest in what's called a leaf net. Now this net goes over your pool cover and collects all of the leaves. It's just a big giant black mesh net.
Matt Giovanisci:It's very, very lightweight. In fact, I also have a pond in my backyard, and we use a net over that when all of the leaves are falling so that we don't have to constantly go out there and scoop a bunch of leaves out of the pond. We have this, like, giant net. So you can do that on top of your pool cover so that you can just pull the net off and all the leaves come together and you can compost them or do whatever you wanna do with the leaves. So after a huge fall and then right around in the fall area, you can simply just remove the cover again, shake off the leaves, and you're and you're good to go.
Matt Giovanisci:So how do you fix a sagging in ground pool cover? Well, there are 2 types. There's pool safety covers, and then there's winter tarps. For safety covers, the best that you can do is make sure there's no water on the cover and that all of the straps are tight. For a tarp cover, though, you wanna make sure that you have enough water filled or at least you want enough, filled water bags or tubes around the pool to keep the cover in place.
Matt Giovanisci:Now, we did a a reel about this recently where we noticed, and we've seen this countless times, where people will use cinder blocks to put hold their cover in place. And that's a terrible idea because you get one windstorm that turns your cover into a parachute and pulls cinder blocks into your pool. Not good for your pool. So we recommend using water bags. Now water bags are these giant tubes and they come in 2 forms.
Matt Giovanisci:There's, double and single. The double ones are a little bit better because they have 2 separate chambers. So if one chamber happens to burst, you still have the other chamber available, hopefully, to keep the cover in place. But if it's a single chamber, if you have one of those and that bursts, that can be a problem. Now I get a lot of complaints about water bags because they do break.
Matt Giovanisci:They are not, you know, the best quality things. They do make high quality versions of them. You can find black ones that are a little bit more high quality. But there's actually a better way. You can do 2 things.
Matt Giovanisci:Alright? And I've seen this done. It's not as good, or I shouldn't say it's not as good. It's just not as recommended as a tube. Well, 1, some of the biggest reason that people have problems with these tubes ripping is because they overfill them.
Matt Giovanisci:Right? You just wanna make sure they're they're filled and there's enough air in there so that when the ice like, eventually, those those tubes are gonna freeze. And when it freezes, ice expands and gets bigger, and that's usually when these water bags rip. It's because you've filled it all the way to the brim. The water has nowhere to go and expand.
Matt Giovanisci:It just rips. You can get something called, what are they called? I always forget the name. They're they're water tubes or they're like water buckets. Essentially, they're they're like long troughs and they're usually black and they have a plastic lid and you fill them with water.
Matt Giovanisci:And so it's not a vinyl bag. It's a hard plastic piece, like, almost think of like a Tupperware, but it's better than cinder block. The other thing you can do is you can get milk jugs or water jugs, plastic water jugs, and fill those with water and place them around, but they don't have they're more likely to fall in because they're smaller. You want something that's very elongated and low to the ground because that's gonna give you the best, coverage. Now you gotta make sure that your your you want your cover to be tight, but you also want it to at least sag and lay on top of the pool water.
Matt Giovanisci:That's what you want. The tarp should be resting on the pool surface. And there's really no way to get this the tarp cover as tight as an installed safety cover. So the sagging might be because that the you have a low water level in your pool. And if you've lost some water, just put a hose under the cover and fill it back up to raise the cover up.
Matt Giovanisci:And if your cover still feels too saggy, you can add a pool air pillow under the cover. This will actually help spread out debris, rain and snow, all of that thing, so that it doesn't all collect in the middle and drag down your cover. It'll collect along the sides. Here's the other thing about if you decide to go with a pool air pillow, which you can add in an in ground or an above ground pool. And in fact, with an above ground pool, I recommend it for everyone.
Matt Giovanisci:And I'll tell you a story. For an inground pool, you can certainly add 1. A pool air pillow is simply, the the the same material that the water bags are made of, but instead of water, you fill it with air. A lot of people have problems with these because they don't stay in the middle of the pool. They don't need to stay in the middle of the pool.
Matt Giovanisci:They just need to keep the cover slightly elevated. If you wanna keep it in the middle of the pool, there is a product called the pool pillow pal. It's essentially a Velcro pad that you can stick on to the middle of your cover that keeps it in place, or you can tie it with string. They do have grommets on there, and you could tie it with 2 pieces of string on either side of your pool to keep it in the middle. Also, with the air pillow, just like the water bags, you do not wanna fill it all the way.
Matt Giovanisci:If you fill it all the way, it could pop. Right? So you just wanna fill it enough so that it's like slightly still, like it's not tight. It's just a little bit, you know, it's a buoyant enough. And the other thing is that yeah.
Matt Giovanisci:Again, you don't have to keep it in the middle, but you can keep it in the middle. And I recommend it for an above ground pool, for every above ground pool because as the ice what it really does, what an air pillow really does is as the ice expands, as, you know, you're gonna your pool's gonna your pool water's gonna freeze in certain areas. And as that ice expands, it's gonna put pressure on your pool walls. For an in ground pool, this is not really that big of a deal because your pool walls are very strong. But for an above ground pool, that pressure is unwanted.
Matt Giovanisci:And so that air pillow will help compensate that ice and it'll it'll instead expand into the pillow as opposed to on your walls. We had an above ground pool growing up in our backyard that we had a deep freeze 1 year and the we didn't put a pillow in and the ice expanded so much and it got so deep, such a deep freeze, that it actually broke the pool wall. And we didn't have a pool after that. And that was a 28 foot round above ground pool. That was a lot.
Matt Giovanisci:That was a big pool to get damaged and destroyed by 1 winter. Okay. So that's essentially how to fix a sagging, pool cover. Now if you have an above ground pool, you probably have a tarp cover and you have what's called a cable and a winch system. So you have these grommets that are along the sides of the cover.
Matt Giovanisci:In fact, every cover has grommets unless you're using a plastic tarp that comes out of a a roll. But they all have these grommets, basically metal holes along the edge of the winter cover. And so you loop this cable that comes with the cover, usually. It's a red cable. And it's it's it's a red cable, but technically, it's a metal cable, but it's wrapped in usually red plastic.
Matt Giovanisci:It sometimes can be clear plastic as well, so it doesn't rip anywhere. And you just loop it through the grommets and then you tighten that down with the winch that comes with the cover. Another way you can secure so you wanna obviously wanna make sure that that winch is tight and then that cover is secure underneath, you know, around the around the pool. The other thing you can do, and I I love using these, is you can use winter cover clips. These are simply plastic clips.
Matt Giovanisci:They're small black plastic clips that you clip underneath the railing of your pool and the cover. And it just keeps it tight right around your pool. And I would use that with your your cable and winch, not just only that. Right? And of course, the other thing you do, which seems counterintuitive, but you can actually add water to the top of the cover, which will stop it, you know, especially when you have wind gusts and it doesn't you don't want your tarp or sorry, you don't want your pool cover to turn into a parachute and then pull at your walls.
Matt Giovanisci:So having water on top of your cover is actually a good thing for an above ground pool. And then again, of course, use an air pillow. I highly recommend that. Alright. So here's a couple of tips just to kinda round things out.
Matt Giovanisci:Here's a couple of tips on how to protect your cover, your winter cover, throughout the season. So one, you wanna remove any ice, to protect the cover against ice. Let the ice melt so you can remove it with a cover pump. Don't try to remove ice because it has sharp edges and it can tear your cover. So when it is ice, don't remove it.
Matt Giovanisci:Put water on the cover like I just mentioned. You could do that. You can, of course, remove rain and snow as soon as it happens. Obviously, with snow, you're gonna have to wait for it to melt. I would not advise you take a shovel and try to remove snow that way.
Matt Giovanisci:You can, if you want, use a soft broom. If you get champagne powder, like very very light snow where you live, you can try using a leaf blower. That might actually push the snow off your pool. Or just wait till it melts and then use a pump. Remove any overhanging tree limbs that can obviously protect your your pool.
Matt Giovanisci:Keep animals out. That's, you know, the only way to really do that is by putting up a pool fence, which in your area, chances are you probably need one anyway, and patch holes immediately. There are 2 ways you can patch holes in your cover. One is you can go out and buy a specialized tape that can that you place on top of the cover to cover the hole and on the bottom of the cover to cover it so that you have that. Or you could just use duct tape.
Matt Giovanisci:That works too. It may not look the best, maybe you can find duct tape that matches, you know, the cover closely. I know they make green tape, but it's don't use painter's tape. Just use just use use strong tape. Gorilla tape, duct tape, whatever you got.
Matt Giovanisci:And okay. So that's essentially it. Now remember, if you need more help with pool maintenance, be sure to grab our free pool care cheat sheet at swimu.com/cheat. And if you found this episode helpful, subscribe for more pool maintenance tips on your favorite podcasting app. And when you do, please leave us a review.
Matt Giovanisci:That would mean the world and your support will help more pool owners just like you find this show. That's it. Thanks again, and happy swimming.