Winterize a Pool with Chemicals and Antifreeze

Hi! I am Jonathan Broga with Potomac Pools and today I am showing you how to winterize a swimming pool. Right now we are going to treat the water, and treat the skimmers. To treat the water, I have got a concoction, chlorine that will slow feed over the next couple of weeks until the cold weather really sets in. Algaecide, to prevent algae from growing, keep our water clear and clean until next spring. And then a winterizer, that precipitates phosphates, lowers them to the bottom for easier clean-up in the spring and then also biodegrades oils and organic matter to make it easier to clean in the spring as well.

We will start by punching a few holes in this chlorinator, so that the chlorine can slowly feed out; three or five, three, four or five holes is all that's required and one on top to let some air escape out the top. So water can actually get in the bottom. They can simply be tossed in the pool, and we will take care of itself. You may want to check this in the spring however as water temperatures and air temperatures come back up.

The next thing we will add will be this, Algaecide. We use a ratio of approximately one bottle to every 10,000 gallons. Most residential pools are somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 gallons, when lowered they are less than that. So, three bottles should be plenty for your typical pool.

Right now, I am going to go ahead and add the Algaecide and winterize it to the pool. I am going to add it to different areas of the pool to try and spread it around. It will dissipate over time. One additional note, when winterizing your pool with Algaecide; note that this is POLY-60 Algaecide, there is also a product POLY-10, there is many different Algaecide products. Know your ratios. The ratio I gave you of one quad to 10,000 gallons applies to POLY-60. POLY-10 will require much more Algaecide.

Now, that we have treated the water, we are going to go ahead and treat the skimmers. Skimmers are a plastic body that needs to have antifreeze both in the pipes as a backup to our blowing them out with air, but also the plastic body needs to be protected from the expansion of ice. We will start by dumping half a gallon of pool safe antifreeze into the pipes. Don't use car antifreeze. Next spring, this liquid is going to be in your pool and it needs to be safe for swimming.

So let's start by adding the half gallon of antifreeze. There is nothing tricky about it; you simply pour it down the open hole in the bottom of your skimmer. Once you have dumped that in, as a little protection. Next, you will just want to plug the skimmer, this will keep rainwater from filling that line. Once the plug is tight and secure, you can drop another half-full bottle of the antifreeze into the skimmer body. This is technically called an anti-expansion device. What it's going to do, when the rainwater that fills the skimmer body freezes in the winter. This will take the expansion of that ice rather than the plastic of your skimmer body potentially cracking.

Simply, drop it in the empty skimmer. Instead of antifreeze you could also simply use an empty bottle filled with pebbles, something that will make it submerged just enough into the water to take that expansion of ice. Once you have got the anti-expansion device in your skimmer, you are done winterizing your skimmers. We have treated the water, we've treated the skimmers. Now we can move on to the final step which is placing the cover over the pool.