Costs to Maintain and Run Your Pool

10 Jun 2019

Sticking with the Pool theme we are back today with Owen at Reflection Pools. There’s nothing quite as refreshing as a dip in a pool in our beautiful Okanagan summers. How much does it cost to maintain a pool each month and what’s involved? How much will your utility bills go up to fill, heat, and filter the pool? Perhaps having your own pool is more doable than you think…

Here is the Transcript:

BRENDAN – Hi, it’s Brendan at RE/MAX Kelowna here, and I’m sitting with Owen at Reflection Pools. Alright, so one hesitation that people often have about owning a pool is just the concerns about, you know, costs, and time involved to maintain and look after it. And, obviously, a neglected pool can get pretty nasty. So, just wanted to chat with you about what’s required in keeping the pool at its best throughout the season.

OWEN – The number one thing for looking after your pool is keeping your chemicals in good shape. Chemicals being out of balance can do a number of things. It can affect your liner, it can affect your plumbing, it can affect your pool equipment – like the components, the heater, the pump. And over time it can damage those things. So if you’re a pool owner, you really have to look after your water chemistry. And that might include testing your water every, at least every two or three days, and balancing your water out. It’s fairly straight forward. It’s fairly easy. Our goal with our company is to get you up and running, help you through that process in the first summer, and get it so that you’re doing that yourself, ideally.

BRENDAN – Yeah, so educate them on how all this stuff works so they can look after it and not have any problems down the road.

OWEN – That’s right. And it’s not super hard to do. It’s just taking the time to do it – it’s no different than owning a car and having to put gas in it every three or four days, or a week. You gotta just take the time to check the chemicals, look after the water, and make sure that everything’s running smoothly.

BRENDAN – So now from a budget standpoint when people are looking at the ongoing maintenance cost throughout the pool season, what would you advise people? You know, how much they’re going to have to spend to keep the water in check throughout the season.

OWEN – The budget for looking after your pool can vary greatly. If you’re on top of it – your water quality, your water chemistry – it’s going to be very inexpensive to run. If you’re playing catch-up and you’ve let your pool get to a point where you’ve gotta add a lot of chemicals to get it back in shape, then it can be costly. So the range can be quite, quite dramatic. In a perfect world, if you’re looking after your water, it should be relatively inexpensive. Hard to put a number on it per month, but I would suspect less than $100 a month.

BRENDAN – So now more on the energy cost side of things. People are often wondering too, what’s this going to add to my utility bills throughout the season?

OWEN – Right. Well you really have three things. You have water, you have electricity and most of the time you have gas for your gas furnace. The gas, let’s talk about the gas first. The gas can vary. If you’re running your pool in March, you’re going to spend a lot of money on gas. If you’re running it in October, you’re going to spend a lot of money on gas. So there is a big variance on what you should expect to pay depending on how much you’re running your pool. With our Okanagan weather, you’re not heating your pool a lot in July and August. You’re really probably not using that heat at all. Water costs – very insignificant. You add water every once and a while. You will always lose water to evaporation. Your utility bills will, you’ll hardly notice a difference in what you’re using for water. Electricity, one of the things we do as a company is, and it just started in the last year or so, we started putting variable speed pumps into pool systems. So you have a really good opportunity to run it at lower speeds, conserve energy. And run it at higher speeds, you know, to get proper filtration. But, electricity costs, I would guess that you’re not more than $20 or $30 a month to run that pump all through your swimming season.