What are the three C's of pool maintenance?

Circulation, cleaning and chemistry, and they are worth doing in that order. Circulation is the pump pushing the whole volume of water through the filter, without which any product you add treats the patch it lands in. Cleaning is brushing, netting, vacuuming and emptying the baskets, so that algae is in the water where treatment reaches it. Chemistry comes last, because a test taken after brushing tells you what the pool needs now rather than an hour ago.

How long should a pool pump run each day?

Long enough to turn the whole volume of the pool through the filter once or twice in twenty four hours, which for most domestic pools means around eight to twelve hours in high summer and roughly four to six in winter. Divide it into two or three blocks rather than one, with the longest block through the hottest hours. On a salt pool the run time is the chlorine dose, because the cell only produces while water is moving through it.

What should the readings be on a home pool test kit?

For a domestic pool the usual targets are free chlorine 1 to 3 mg/L, pH 7.2 to 7.6, total alkalinity 80 to 120 mg/L, stabiliser 30 to 50 mg/L, and calcium hardness roughly 200 to 400 mg/L on a tiled or plaster pool. A salt pool adds salt, at whatever range the cell's own manual states, commonly 3 to 5 g/L. Correct pH first: the other readings behave differently once it is in range.

How often does a swimming pool need maintenance?

An owner looking after their own pool tests twice a week through July and August and once a week the rest of the season, runs the full routine of baskets, brushing, netting and correction weekly, and adds the monthly jobs of filter cleaning, salt cell inspection and a proper look at the water line. Winter is lighter but not nothing: reduced filtration hours, a fortnightly check, and the same monthly filter attention.

What pool jobs should you not do yourself?

Anything electrical at the pump, the timer or the salt cell, because that is mains voltage a metre from water and it is wired to rules a professional works to. Add to that a pool that has stayed green after a week of correct treatment, which is an equipment or filtration fault rather than a chemistry one, and any water loss that is not evaporation, which needs the pipework and the shell traced rather than topped up.

How to Maintain a Pool: A Beginner's Weekly Routine

Maintaining a pool is three jobs in one order, every week: circulation, cleaning, chemistry. Get the water moving, get the surfaces and the baskets clean, then test and correct. Do it in that order and most of what goes wrong with a pool never starts, because chemistry only works in moving water and on surfaces that are not quietly feeding algae.

The weekly routine, in the order to do it

Empty the skimmer and pump baskets first. Everything after this depends on flow, and a basket packed with leaves starves the pump.
Check the water level. It should sit around the middle of the skimmer mouth. Below the opening the skimmer draws air, and a pump that loses its prime can be damaged in minutes.
Brush the walls, water line, steps and corners. Algae starts where the water moves least: behind the ladder, in the corners, on the step treads.
Net the surface, then vacuum if the floor needs it. Netting first stops the vacuum clogging on the leaves you could have lifted out.
Test the water, and correct pH before anything else. Chlorine follows pH, not the other way round.
Read the filter pressure against the reading it showed when the filter was last clean. If you do not know that one, write it down next time.
Stand and listen to the pump for half a minute. Pumps announce most of their failures before they cause one.

What does each test reading actually tell you?

Free chlorine, 1 to 3 mg/L. The disinfectant still available to do work. A zero reading means nothing is protecting the water, and in an Algarve August that is not a slow problem.
pH, 7.2 to 7.6. The reading that governs all the others. Push pH towards 8 and most of the chlorine present converts to a form that barely disinfects, which is why a pool can hold plenty of chlorine and still cloud.
Total alkalinity, 80 to 120 mg/L. The shock absorber for pH. Too low and pH swings after every dose. Too high and pH creeps upward and resists every attempt to bring it down.
Stabiliser, or cyanuric acid, 30 to 50 mg/L. It shields chlorine from ultraviolet light. Too little and your chlorine is gone by mid afternoon. Too much and what you have works sluggishly.
Calcium hardness, roughly 200 to 400 mg/L on a tiled or plaster pool, lower being tolerable on a liner. Low calcium is aggressive to grout and coping. High calcium scales the water line and the equipment.
Salt, on a salt pool. Use the range printed on your own cell, commonly between 3 and 5 g/L. The cell converts that salt into chlorine as water passes through it, so a salt pool is a chlorinated pool with its own generator, not a chlorine-free one.

No page can tell you how much of anything to add, because the dose is set by your pool’s volume and the product’s own label governs it. Add one thing at a time, let the filtration circulate it, and retest before adding anything else. Nobody swims while a correction is working through. After any dose, keep everyone out until the pool has circulated and a fresh test puts free chlorine back between 1 and 3 mg/L and pH between 7.2 and 7.6. After a heavy dose that takes longer, and it is the reading that decides, never the clock. Never mix products or pour one into another: each goes into the water separately. Where a product has to be diluted first, it goes into the water and never the water into it, which is what stops a reaction throwing back out of the bucket.

How long should the filtration run?

Long enough to turn the whole volume of the pool through the filter once or twice a day. In practice that is around eight to twelve hours in high summer and four to six through winter, split into two or three blocks rather than one long run, with the main block over the hottest hours. A winter setting left in place through July is one of the commonest reasons a pool loses control of itself in a hot week. On a salt pool it matters twice over, because the cell only makes chlorine while the pump is running.

Which jobs are monthly rather than weekly?

Clean or backwash the filter on the gauge, not the calendar. Stop the pump before you move a multiport valve or open a filter housing: both are under pressure while it runs. A sand filter is usually backwashed when the pressure sits roughly 0.2 to 0.3 bar above its clean reading; a cartridge comes out and gets hosed. Monthly in season for most pools, more often after a green recovery.
Look inside the salt cell. Switch the system off at the board and wait for the pump to stop before you open anything: the cell is mains-fed electrodes in a pressurised line. Scale between the plates cuts output long before the pool looks wrong. Clean it the way its maker states, and never scrape the plates. If the cell will not come out without disturbing its wiring, that is the point to hand it over.
Check the water line and the skimmer. Calcium and body oils build a ring that hardens the longer it sits, and a slow drop below the skimmer mouth is what makes a pump run dry.

What does an Algarve summer change?

Chiefly the top-up. June, July and August together bring 9.0 mm of rain at Faro, 2.0 per cent of the 455.1 mm annual normal. Source: IPMA climate normals, 1991 to 2020. Nothing comes back in from the sky, so every centimetre lost to evaporation is replaced by you, from the mains, on top of a heavier bathing load, sun cream, and the dust and pine needles the wind puts on the surface.

Two things follow. Salt and stabiliser do not evaporate, so topping up leaves them roughly where they were; they fall only when water genuinely leaves the pool, through splash-out, backwashing or a partial drain. And stabiliser only ever climbs while you are using stabilised tablets, which is how a pool that started the season in range is over the top of it by August without anyone adding stabiliser on purpose.

Does the water you top up with change anything?

The mains water doing that topping up is worth knowing about, because hardness here is not uniform and the assumption cuts both ways. In the first quarter of 2026, Portimão’s utility published total hardness of 30 mg/L CaCO₃ for its supply zone, Faro’s published 87 mg/L and Tavira’s published 100 mg/L for its main zone, all below the 150 to 500 mg/L desirable range that Portuguese water quality editais carry from Decreto-Lei n.º 69/2023, which replaced Decreto-Lei 306/2007 and kept that range intact. In the second quarter the Portimão zone read 82 mg/L and Tavira’s main zone 85 mg/L, still below that range, so a topping-up figure is worth re-reading each quarter rather than remembering. Sources: EMARP and Taviraverde quarterly water quality editais, first and second quarters 2026; FAGAR, first quarter 2026. Tavira also states that its zones fed only by boreholes average 300 to 400 mg/L, which is hard water.

That is a practical difference, not trivia. Topping up from a soft supply adds very little calcium, so calcium hardness drifts downward over a season and the risk is aggressive water attacking grout and coping. On a borehole supply the opposite holds and the salt cell is where scale shows first. Some councils here publish a hardness figure for each supply zone every quarter, and Loulé publishes the origin of every one of its zones instead. Where a figure or an origin exists for your zone, it settles this better than any regional generalisation.

Which beginner mistakes cost the most?

Dosing without testing. Adding chlorine because the pool looks dull is how stabiliser ends up off the top of the scale and pH ends up somewhere nobody chose.
Trimming the pump hours to save electricity. The most expensive saving available, because a recovery costs more in product and pump hours than the hours you skipped.
Ignoring pH. A pool with high pH is a pool where chlorine is present and not working, and no amount of extra chlorine fixes that.
Brushing nothing. Algae on a wall is out of reach of treated water. If the brush never comes out, the chemistry is fighting something it cannot touch.
Writing nothing down. Filter pressure when clean, the salt reading, the date the cell was cleaned: three numbers that turn guesswork into a decision.

Where doing it yourself stops

Three things are worth handing over rather than attempting. Anything electrical at the pump, the timer or the salt cell is mains voltage a metre from water, and a professional isolates the circuit, tests it dead and works to the wiring rules before touching it. A pool still green after a week of correct treatment and long filtration has an equipment or filtration fault, not a chemistry one, and more product will not find it. And water disappearing faster than the weather accounts for is a leak in the pipework or the shell, which is traced rather than topped up.

If you would rather the routine simply happened, Handyman Algarve arranges pool maintenance and repair in the Algarve, and the professional assigned to your job can take the weekly round, the monthly filter and cell work, or only the parts you would rather not do. What that arrangement is built from is set out in what it costs to maintain a pool.

How do you maintain a pool for beginners?