5 Simple Ways To Keep Leaves Out of Your Pool

Keeping the pools leaves out of your pool can become a major issue, especially as autumn starts to roll around. You can quickly find that you spend more time pulling out leaves than you do swimming. If you want to cut back on the number of leaves in your pool, you’ve come to the right place. We’re going to share five easy and affordable tips that you can use to keep leaves out of your pool.

The 5 Simple Tips to Reduce Pool Leaves:

These are the five simple tips that we’ve put together for you to try out to reduce the number of leaves in your pool. Where possible, we have included examples of products we recommend, but these are just examples. Many other brands will work fine.

1. Move Plants

The best place to begin is by looking around your yard and seeing how the leaves get there. Far too often, the leaves are coming from a tall tree that’s not on your property, but if you have trees on your property, there are some steps you can take.

If you have small trees, bushes, or other plants around your pool, you can move them away. Try to keep as much distance between any trees and your pool as possible. Many garden plants and flowers also shed a lot of leaves and should be kept far from the pool.

If the tree is too large to move, you can try cutting back on some of the branches that face your pool, but in some cases, the tree may need to come down. It’s never a good idea to have a large tree near your pool anyway because the roots can damage the floor and put pressure on the structure. Roots can also puncture the liner.

Gardens should never be placed near a pool because chlorinated water can harm the vegetables, and fruits will attract bugs, which will end up in your pool water.

2. Screen and Netting

In some cases, screen panels can help. Screen panels (like the Alion home privacy screen) can help reduce the number of leaves that fall in your pool after blowing across the yard. They don’t work so well for leaves that are falling from overhead. Screening also works better with inground pools because the panels will need to be quite tall to help with an above ground pool, although there are some screens designed for above-ground pools.

Another helpful way to use screening is to use a bird net. While not designed for catching leaves, bird nets make an excellent screen for the top of your pool. The bird net will not only prevent ducks and other birds from landing in your pool, but it will also do a great job of catching leaves. It’s very inexpensive, lightweight, and comes in large rolls, so you could double it and increase its effectiveness. Tying the same netting around tree branches can also help catch the leaves while remaining hardly noticeable.

3. Solar or Leaf Cover

Covering your pool with either a solar cover or a leaf cover when you’re not using it is one of the best ways you can reduce the number of leaves in your water. The leaf cover is available in many shapes and sizes for both inground and above-ground pools. These covers resemble ordinary winter covers, but they’re very lightweight and allow sunlight to pass through.

If you cannot find a leaf cover to fit your pool, you can use a solar cover. We recommend only using the solar cover when the sun goes down unless you want to raise the temperature of your water. Besides increasing the temperature, the solar cover also uses more chlorine and can contribute to bacteria and algae growth if used during the day. If you are using a solar cover and notice that the water has become cloudy, it’s because algae is being allowed to grow in the warm water directly below the cover.

4. Automatic Pool Skimmer

If you cannot prevent the leaves from falling into your pool, we recommend removing them by using an automatic pool skimmer. The automatic pool skimmer will work tirelessly to remove the leaves from your pool before they waste chlorine as they breakdown. These devices work using the same principle as the automatic vacuum. The pool skimmer uses the filter system to travel on top of the water instead of the pool floor. These devices can be extremely effective and only require daily cleaning. However, if there is an enormous amount of leaves, you might find that the automatic skimmer gets clogged, and this can reduce your pool filter’s ability to clean the rest of the water.

5. Hand Skimmer

At the end of the day, the best way to keep leaves out of your pool is to use a hand skimmer and remove them yourself. It may be tedious, but no machine or net is going to prevent every leaf from getting in the water. Once any organic material enters the pool, the chlorine will immediately attack it and start to break it down. As the leaf breaks down, the chlorine depletes. If there are many leaves in the pool, you can quickly find yourself in a situation that promotes algae growth as well as bacteria. Mosquitoes and other insects may also lay eggs in the water.

It’s essential to get every leaf out as quickly as possible, and a hand skimmer and your eyes are the best tools.

Conclusion

We recommend using the hand skimmer daily to stay on top of any problems. Reduce the number of plants and trees around your pool as much as possible. Cover the pool with the netting or the leaf cover when convenient, and always when you know a storm is approaching, or there will be high winds. If you’re still unable to keep the leaves down, you’ll have to try the automatic pool skimmer and tying some branches with netting. You may also find yourself talking with neighbors to see if they’ll help you by cutting back their trees or eliminating them.

The most important thing is to get the leaves out of your pool before they destroy the chlorine, or worse, clog your pool filter. You never want to let the leaves go, or let them pile up until next spring. If the effort to keep the leaves out of the pool becomes too great, you may find the only solution is to close the pool before the leaves begin to fall. Once the winter cover is on, the leaves can pile up without affecting the water or your filter system.

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading over these simple tips and tricks to a cleaner pool. If our guide has helped you and you have learned something new, please share these five simple ways to keep leaves out of your pool on Facebook and Twitter.

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Featured image credit: barefootpainting, Pixabay