Pity the pool man

 

After years of cleaning our pool myself, a few years ago we chose to use The Pool People to undertake this task for us.

Last night, the rain brought down all of the Saharan dust that had turned the sky a mucky brown colour.* 
 

Whereas the continued rain has washed a lot of the dust from the terracing away, that which fell on the pool is now starting to settle and will eventually form a thick brown film on the bottom.  

I have faced the task of cleaning a layer of dust like this from the pool before and it is a pain in the butt. You can only go so far before the filter clogs and you have to backwash it. You then carry on until the filter clogs again. It can take several of these cycles even with a small pool like ours.

To make matters worse, cleaning stirs up the dust and so the whole process needs to be repeated once that dust has resettled. It can take a couple of weeks to get the pool back to clean. 

Of course, there is an alternative; empty the pool, pressure wash the tiles and refill it but that process is just as tedious and more expensive. 

* The rain was hardest between 9pm and midnight. In total there was probably less than 3mm but that was sufficient to carry all that dust down. There is further rain predicted for today and tomorrow but I'm not sure whether that will be "mucky" rain or not. 

The pool man is due to come on Wednesday. For sure it will take him longer than the usual 20 minutes he spends on our pool this week.