I'm Jonathan Broga with Potomac Pool Service. And today, I'm showing you how to open a pool for the season. The first thing we’re going to is remove the pool cover. This particular pool has a must safety cover. If your pool does not have a safety cover, then most likely it has a water bag cover which probably means it’s kind of a mess. You’ll going to need to pump the water off at first, remove the debris by hand before you attempt to remove the cover. The water is several hundred pounds and any attempt to remove with the water on it will result in dirty debris filled water in your pool. You’ll mostly want to upgrade to a cover like this for your own safety and for the cosmetics of the pool cover.

With the cover on, an easy and simple way to check your water level and insure the design of is being at the schemer. If you open your schemer, you’ll find that you most likely have something that looks like this floating in it. The technical term for this is an anti-expansion device, but really it’s just a half filled bottle of anti-freeze. It protects your schemer during the winter.

But if you look in the schemer, you can clearly see the water level in your pool and judge whether it’s going to be high enough before you actually starts the system. In this case, it’s almost to the scam line we call it left over from last year. So I know that I’m going to have enough water to open the pool. Now, removing a pool cover is very simple and only requires one person. People are often surprise when I show up on myself. But if you take proper planning, know where you’re going to pull the cover, how you’re going to fold it, and do it one step at a time. It only requires one person.

The first thing to do is to get any debris off the cover. The best way to do that would be to attach your brush to your vacuum pole and bring everything to one side making nice, neat little piles. That’s the first step to prevent things from falling in the pool as you remove the cover.

Once you’ve planned where you are going to pull the cover and you’ve got a clear area as the deck, go ahead and remove the springs from the grommet. This is what we call a cover popper. It should have been included when you purchased your cover. It’s used for prying off the high tension springs that are currently attached to your grommets. If you don’t have one and you’re in a pinch, you can always use the heel of your boot and kick it off. That will remove off the grommet.

If your pool cover has any special features that require D-rings as supposed to springs, make sure you remove the springs on the other side of the pool first. That will make it easy to remove the D-ring. Then, put the grommets down into the deck immediately. This prevents the grommets from catching the springs as you pull the cover off. It also helps prevent a trip hazard as you make your way around the pool.

Two notes when lowering your grommets, one, don’t make them too tight, if you sense them all the way down, they probably bind that way and it will make much more difficult to remove them in the fall. Additionally, if you have trouble putting one down, don’t force it, just pull it back out.

An open grommet won’t hurt you during the summer and it will make it easier to get it back-in in the fall. You really don’t want to put a whole lot attention on this because they’re brass and they do strip rather easily. Once you’ve got it all loose, pull it back one small section at a time folding it in envelope style until you’ve got one, clean, flat piece of cover. Then you’ll fold that one, two, three, and four into one flat square. It will fit neatly into your cover bag. That’s how you take the pool cover of a swimming pool by yourself. Not a big deal.

Next, we’re going to pulling out the plugs and putting plugs in the filter system.