- Hey everyone, welcome to the very first
episode of Swim University.
Today we are in New Jersey on a very hot
sunny day, a memorial day weekend
and I'm here with my good friend Nicole.
And we are going to open up her Inground Pool.
Now, full disclosure, I've opened this pool before
but I didn't open it this year
and I didn't close it either.
So I don't know what we're in for
but we're just gonna through this and see what happens.
So, are you ready?
- I'm ready.
- But are you excited?
- Whoo! I'm excited.
- Okay, but just tone it down, just a bit.
(surf music)
Okay, first thing we gotta do is take this safety cover off.
It's called a safety cover
and it looks like a giant trampoline
but I would not advise jumping on it.
It's called a safety cover because it allows anything
or anyone to move across the cover
without falling in the pool.
If you don't have a safety cover
I would highly recommend investing in one,
if you don't already have one.
In order to get the cover off
we're gonna need to get a insulation rod and a hex key
to pop off the spring to the anchor
and then we're gonna use the hex key
to screw the anchor down, making it flush with the concrete.
(birds tweeting)
We gotta go dig through the shed and find those.
(tools rustling)
Aha!
Yeah, I think it's time that you get new ones of these.
If your installation rod and hex key are rusty
like these, it's a good idea to get them replaced.
It might make it harder to pop off
the springs on the cover.
And if I were you, I would keep it out of a shed.
I would keep it indoors, and away from pool chemicals,
especially chlorine 'cause chlorine can oxidize
these things really quick.
So, let's go!
We're gonna take this installation rod
and we're gonna pop the spring off the anchor.
So you just take the rod, stick it in the little round thing
and on top of the anchor.
And we're just gonna twist,
a little bit of elbow grease.
Pop off, boom!
Just like that.
(upbeat Latin music)
Okay, next what we're gonna do
is we're gonna take off the pool cover
now that we have all the springs off the anchors.
And what we wanna do, is you wanna fold the cover
over in half each time.
That way it's easy to get off the pool.
You don't wanna drag it
'cause then that can cause damage to the cover.
And this is a mesh safety cover so all
that water and debris is just gonna fall through.
But if you have a solid cover or you have a tarp cover,
there's a lot of debris and water that's collected on there.
So what you wanna do before you remove the cover
is drain it off with a sump pump or use a brush to get,
or sometimes you can get it clean enough without water,
you can use a leaf blower to get it off.
So, that's good.
So since she has a mesh cover,
chances are the pool
is gonna be dark green, if not black.
What do you think?
- I'm thinkin' it might be clear.
- You think it's gonna be clear?
- I think it's gonna be clear.
- How much you wanna bet?
20 bucks, loser jumps in?
- I'll bet 20 bucks.
- 20 bucks, you're on. - 20 bucks.
See what happens.
(upbeat Latin music)
Well, in your face!
In your face, whoo, uhhu!
Face!
Whatcha want, (laughing) whoo!
Gonna do, whatcha gonna do?
Yeah!
20 bucks!
(smacks lips) Pay up, pay up at the bank.
(smacks lips) (claps) Pay up.
We'll get it later, get it later.
All right, the next step in the process
is to get the winter plugs out of the return lines
and the ice compensators out of the skimmer buckets.
Now, since this pool was kinda filled up already
because it's a mesh cover,
if your pool was below the skimmer,
below midway through the skimmer,
you're gonna wanna take your garden hose
and you're gonna wanna fill up your water level
to about midway in the skimmer.
Once we're doing that lets go ahead and get these
winter plugs outta the return lines.
This particular pool has two return lines
and then two step jets,
so we're just gonna go ahead and find them.
Here's one.
This is gross.
I'm just loosening the wing nut.
And ooh, there you go.
Now that's a good sign that we see bubbles
'cause that means the company that closed the pool
actually blew out the lines properly.
Hey, you wanna hold that?
All right, we got two here in the step jets.
And...
Well no bubbles there.
Well in New Jersey we had a very mild winter
so I don't think any of the pipes had a chance to freeze.
So we should be okay, I guess.
But they only blew out the, oh there we go.
All right, that's all of 'em.
All right next, pill the skimmer lid off
and you'll either have a gizmo inside here
or an ice compensator.
Which the pool company used
a half a frozen bottle of antifreeze to do it.
Now there may be a plug in the bottom of this
that you'll need to get out.
And this is really disgusting.
(water drops)
And there's the plug there.
Now at this point you're just gonna wanna take your
skimmer baskets and just pop them right in there.
Now it's time to get the filter and pump set up.
What you wanna do here is we wanna take all the drain plugs
and we wanna replace all the drain plugs
in the pump and in the filter.
Now depending on who closed your pool,
hopefully they put the drain plugs inside the pump housing.
So we'll just take a look now and see if they did that.
Ooh, awesome.
Let's see we got sight glass, jandy valve handle,
big old drain plug for the filter, drain plug for the pump.
What else we got?
Another drain plug for the pump, and the pressure gauge.
And there's an O-ring in here,
which I assume is for the sight gauge, so that's good.
All right Nicole, put the drain plug on the filter.
There you go.
Pressure gauge in to the pressure gauge spot right there.
Just make sure it's tight.
And put the sight gauge, or the sight glass,
sight gauge, sight glass.
We have two drain plugs for the pump housing.
One down here,
on the side.
I believe the other one should be back here.
Yeah.
Now that we have the pump lid off and we took all the stuff
out of the pump housing you wanna check the O-ring
that's on the pump lid.
So what we're gonna do is
(pump lid clatters)
pop the O-ring off, right?
Take a look at it, you wanna make sure
that there's no cracks.
And you just wanna bend it between your fingers
to make sure, you know, it's not brittle or dry.
This one seems pretty good.
So what we're gonna do is
we're gonna actually throw some lube on there.
Some Teflon based O-ring lube.
Now I just happen to have some lube here and a rubber glove.
- You have lube?
- I always carry lube.
I'm gonna pop this glove on here.
Now what you wanna do is, this is a Teflon based lubricant,
and we're gonna put a dollop, get like a quarter size,
on your hand like so.
And be liberal.
I mean, get this all over the O-ring.
You want this thing to be nice and lubed up.
More lube helps create a seal.
So get it all over there like that.
We're gonna pop it on.
And twist.
The filter system's now on winterize.
And what we're gonna do is
we're actually gonna turn it to filter.
And that's it.
All right, now that we got everything hooked up
final step, turn it on.
- All right.
(pool pump whirring)
- It's comin' through.
Now at this point, it's probably a little loud,
but at this point if there's nothing coming
through in the pump what you're gonna wanna do
is you're gonna wanna prime the pump.
And the way you do that is just take the pump lid off
when the filter's not running and fill it with water.
Once you do that it should start starting to suck
and if you look right over there in the steps
you'll see it's starting to bubble.
That means it's starting to circulate.
And there's water coming through on the pump lid,
we're flush, everything's running.
Whoo!
Nice.
Okay, we've done everything we needed to open up the pool.
So now just to recap, we got the cover off,
we used the installation rod and popped the springs off
the anchors, we screwed down the anchors
so that they're flush with the concrete.
We went around, we took all the drain plugs out,
or all the winter plugs out of the return lines,
we put the ice compensators out of the skimmers.
We replaced the baskets.
We took the O-ring from the pump,
replaced all the drain plugs.
We lubed the O-rings and we started the filter system.
And if you can hear it right now it's super super loud,
so you may wanna get that looked at.
But now what we're gonna do is we have to take this
nasty, green, smelly pool
and we have to make it clear and swimmable.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go around to the
pool store around the corner.
So come along with us and we'll get everything done.
Let's go.
(laid back guitar music)
Right now Nicole is getting the water checked over here.
She's gonna check for PH, alkalinity, and calcium.
Make sure the water's properly balanced
before we go and add shock.
And what we're gonna do is we're gonna find shock.
So right now I'm picking up this bag of shock
that they have here, and the active ingredient is
calcium hypochlorite and it's 47.6%
and that's what you wanna look for.
Calcium hypochlorite, it might be hard to read here
but that's the main active ingredient in shock
that you're gonna want in order to kill algae in your water.
All right?
So we're gonna do,
since she has a roughly 20,000 gallon pool,
and if you wanna find out how many gallons are in your pool
you wanna go to SwimUniversity.com and we have,
in our tools section we have a place where you can
find out how many gallons are actually in your pool.
Also, we have a tool where you can find out
how much shock you need to add.
Now, we're gonna triple shock the pool
since it's so green, it's so black, it's so dark.
What that means is one pound, which is this bag, one pound
of shock for 10,000 gallons of water.
As I said, she's roughly 20,000 gallons of water,
so that means we're gonna add three bags of shock
per 10,000 gallons, so six bags of shock.
So we're gonna get six bags of shock
and we're gonna shock it today.
It's a little bright out,
you really should be shocking at night
but with the time constraints we're gonna do it
during the day and then we'll check it tomorrow.
One other chemical I would choose
is I would get a clarifier.
This is a concentrated clarifier.
It says flocking,
but you wanna get a coagulant type of clarifier
and what that's gonna do is once the pool is cloudy blue
you're gonna wanna run your filter system 24/7
in order to get that cloudy water to be clear.
You get to let your filter do the work.
Now this is just gonna help your filter system
pick up those little particles.
So what this does, is it takes all those little
tiny particles that are making your water cloudy
and it brings them together so that they're bigger
so that your filter has a better chance of picking them up.
So use a couple ounces of this,
I think it's one ounce per 5,000 gallons.
Oh it says four ounces per 10,000 gallons,
so we're gonna use eight ounces every other day
in order to get this goin'.
So that should be it.
Once we get the water tested we'll be good to go
and we'll go back to the pool and we'll shock it.
(laid back guitar music)
(upbeat jazz music)
Now we are going to shock the pool.
The sun has gone down a little bit,
or it's gone behind the clouds,
so we should be pretty good right now.
'Cause you always wanna shock at night
because the unstabilized chlorine like shock
burns off one part per million every hour in the sun.
So what we're gonna do is
we're gonna take six bags of shock.
We're gonna dilute each bag into one bucket of water,
you can use pool water, you can use hose water.
We decided to use hose water here.
And what you wanna do is you wanna prefill
the bucket with water, we already have water in there.
And you never wanna add water to pool chemicals,
you always wanna add the pool chemical to water.
So what we're gonna do is dilute this up,
I'm wearing protective gloves,
and in reality you should wear protective eye wear as well.
Dump that in.
Now careful, this can bleach your clothes.
So we're gonna take this paint stirrer,
we're gonna stir this up.
Mix it in, try not to splash it.
Get this all diluted.
And we are mixing the shock up,
trying to get it nice and dissolved,
it's called pre-disolving.
And what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this bucket
and we're gonna walk it around
and we're gonna slowly pour it
around the edges of the pool while it's running.
Now that should be good to go.
(light rock music)
We successfully opened up your swimming pool today
and everything went pretty well.
It was pretty easy, right?
- Yeah, it was actually pretty easy.
- All right, cool.
If you have any more questions
on opening up a swimming pool,
you can go to SwimUniversity.com.
And all we need to do now
is get this thing ready and clear and open for the summer.
- Whoo! Yeah. - Now that's appropriate.
(upbeat surf music)