Should You Have a Swimming Pool in El Paso?

Should You Have a Swimming Pool in El Paso?

Hi, and welcome to Living in El Paso, Texas. My name is John Peña, and in this episode we are going to talk about swimming pools and what that looks like if you are purchasing a home. Some people love a pool.

Some people know that it's going to be a little bit of work. Some people aren't interested, but we thought we would give you just kind of the quick and dirty about having a pool, trying to find a pool guy, and a lot of people don't have luck with that, so they end up doing it themselves.

So if you're thinking about a pool, this is going to be the episode you're going to want to check out. Okay, so like I said, when we purchased this home, the seller was kind enough to have pool service set up for us.

It was about $100 a month. The guy came once a week. He vacuumed out the pool, so you're going to see our pool is pretty dirty, but he would come once a week, vacuum out that dirt, and then he would throw chemicals in.

We weren't exactly sure what. We decided, you know what, we're going to do it ourselves. So if you're going to do it yourselves, then you're going to think about something like this.

So this is a bot, and it essentially gets dropped into the bottom of the pool. It gets plugged in to electricity, and it essentially vacuums up the bottom of the pool all of the material, mostly dust, dirt, leaves maybe, gets captured in here, and then you have to empty that out.

So if you come over and look at the bottom of our pool, unfortunately, our bot suffered an issue. We had a little mishap, and so our bot is out of commission, and so normally our bottom would have much more, it would be less clean.

It would be more clean. There would be less dirt in our pool if the bot were running, but our bot's down. So how much did we pay for that bot? $650.

Yeah, so we paid about $650 for our bot, but if you're not going to have a pool guy, that's really what you're going to need to do, because especially during the windy season, leaves, dirt, all of that's going to get blown in. And then finally, really the only thing that I have to do is one of two things.

So routinely, I have to, this is just a brush, I have to come by and I have to sweep down the sides of the pool, because the bot will climb the sides, but it's not very reliable. So we don't want all of that dirt clinging to the sides, because then we start to have issues.

So routinely, I'll go around and I'll just brush down the sides of the pool, and then the bot can do its job. And then the other thing that I have to do is, it's not too bad right now, but I have to essentially net out debris from the pool.

Like I said, right now it's not too bad, it hasn't been that windy, but a couple of months ago when the tree next to us was budding out, it was pretty serious. So there was a lot of this going on. So right now, it's not that big of a deal, and I can usually crank that out in a couple

of minutes. So that, I'd say it's kind of your bare minimum maintenance. If you were going to do this yourself, you're probably going to want to get a bot that's going to be able to vacuum the bottom of the pool.

Some pools have, it looks like a little squid octopus thing, and it goes around, you plug it into the filter. If you don't have that, you get a bot, you might have to do some scrubbing down the sides, you might have to net off what floats on the top of the pool.

And other than that, you've got to do the chemicals, which we're going to talk about right now with Leah. And then the last thing that I'll say about a pool is the other question I get is, well, how much does it impact your electricity bill and your water bill?

And so let's go ahead and walk over to the pool equipment here. So our pool equipment is a little bit older, but it works, and so we've been using it. Essentially, what runs is there is a motor here that basically powers the filter. How long would you say it's on?

A couple hours a day? Eight hours. Okay. So the filter runs every day for about eight hours a day.

It's on an automatic timer. The motor is a one and a half horsepower motor. I am not exactly sure how much that draws, but I do not believe that it is a big impact on our electricity bill.

Would you agree? I would. Okay. So that's a minimal expense.

Water, sometimes, of course, water does evaporate and you have to put more water in. But again, I would still say I don't think that really impacts our water bill dramatically at all either. And so, yeah, Leah did have a good point.

On our filter, this isn't on every type of filter, but our filter about weekly, we have to clean the filter more or less, and we turn this to backwash. It spits out a bunch of water. I think it clean spits out the water here.

Then we rinse it with fresh water, which is going to pull a lot of the debris out of the filter. And then we turn it back on as we put in, what is it, diatomaceous earth, right? And it acts, I believe, within the filter, it grips onto the dirt more or less.

So that's another process that takes us about 10 minutes. We should do it weekly. Sometimes we do it not weekly, but that's another expense or expense of time. Not so much money.

And finally, the last thing with the pool is, obviously in El Paso, the sun city, in the summer, it gets hot and it's pretty awesome to have a pool because it's a great way to cool down. We specifically got our pool because we wanted a means of kind of low impact exercise to

be able to do. And however, if you don't have a pool heater, I would say that for most people, you're going to get about three to four months of use out of it. I don't mind a little bit of cold water, so I might be able to squeeze out four months

and I'm going in it now. So I might get May, June, July, August, maybe even a little bit of September, quite honestly. And but if you're not really into cold, colder water, you might only get two to three months. Like Leah is probably in there two to three months and that's July, August mainly.

However, we have decided to go ahead and get a pool heater because we want to expand our season. And so we're hoping to, you know, pull maybe eight to nine months a year if we could. And so a pool heater can go one of two ways.

It can be electric and they insist that this will not be a huge draw on your power. Or you can go gas, but you'd have to get a gas line run over here. Natural gas is typically pretty affordable here in West Texas. OK, so one of the things you have to do on a pool is if you're going to do it yourself,

you have to check the water. And so we're going to have Leah just kind of demonstrate this. So she just basically scoops up some water and then you've got to buy yourself these testing strips.

What does that say? Six way test strips. So and what does this look for? This tests six different things, chlorine, pH, alkalinity, hardness, and the cyanic acid.

So we need chlorine. This is saying that the pH is back up at the max, that this is ideal, or ideal in hardness. Sitting at about the max for and this is a stabilizer for the chlorine in the sun. OK, and so how often do we do this?

At least weekly. OK, weekly. All right. So we're going to go then and look at our chemicals over here.

And, you know, we we had a pool guy come out actually when we bought the home. He kind of came with the home. The seller had purchased a couple of months of pool service for us, which was awesome. And he came out once a week and he would bring a vacuum and he would vacuum out the bottom

of the pool and he would throw chemicals in the pool. We weren't exactly sure which ones or what. And what did that cost? $100 a month.

It was $100 a month. So it's reasonably priced. But, you know, as I'm going to show you here in a second, we went with this and a different option.

So first, though, if you're going to do your own pool, you're going to have to get into onto chemicals. So Leah is going to explain what these chemicals are. OK, so here are some of the chemicals that you are going to need.

So you have a couple of different options for chlorinating. You can go with these patties that go into a float device such as the pineapple here. We've had some trouble with the smaller floating devices getting caught in our our pool. So we've chosen this larger one to try it out.

Up until this point, we've been using the chlorination in the liquid form. It's messy. You definitely need some specialized clothes for it because it does splash all over. So we're going to try moving back to the patties now.

The patties are pretty expensive, but they last for some time. The liquid chlorine is about $5 a bottle. And then the special powder that the pool service throws in is the shock. Basically, we were finding out.

So when when needed, we will throw in a bag of that shock. It also is sold in bulk. We have a lot of problems keeping our pool the pH level correct. We need to keep adding acid continually.

So muric acid is is pretty nasty to use. And I just bought this new granular item to try out here in the future. Then you have to remove the phosphates because that impacts the filter and the cloudiness of of the pool.

We're trying this one. Leslie makes a very expensive phosphate remover that's a natural enzyme. But we're going to try this out since we found this at Home Depot, I think. The other item that is really quite expensive is this black algae killer.

Our pool is porous and there tends to be a little bit of this happening in the spring. This is about $50 for this bottle. And it'll probably go through a treat, scrub, and then retreat. And you'll have to buy more.

So a couple of times a year, we do end up buying that. These other items on the end are clarifying chemicals. One helps just bring all the small particles together, the crazy clarifier, in the pool.

And then the filter pulls them out. The other one here, I'm not sure what it says on it, the flufenat or whatever, that one drops all of the small particles to the bottom. And then your vacuum or your bot can clean them out of the bottom of your pool.

So that kind of summarizes the pool situation. We do really enjoy our pool. But to be honest, there are times when we are like, oh, this stupid pool, right? In January, February, when it's not doing anything for us,

but we have to maintain it and make sure that, oh, we ran out of chlorine. Now we got to go to the store. Oh, I haven't had any time to brush down the sides and it's a pit. So there are times when it's not awesome.

And you're probably saying, well, why don't you just get a pool guy? I would love to get a pool guy. That, unfortunately, is a little easier said than done. We've reached out to a lot of our friends who have pools.

And we said, hey, who's your pool guy? Do you know any good pool guy? Do you know a good pool person? Their answer is typically no.

There are no good pool people in El Paso. I'm sure that's not the case. I'm sure some of them are great. But our experience hasn't been that great.

So we decided just to kind of take it on on our own. We do love the pool. But it is certainly something that you're going to put a little bit of time into and a little bit of money into.

And if it's meaningful and important enough for you, it can be a great asset. But at the same time, if you don't want to have the trouble of it, we have rec centers that have pools, and you could go that route, too. So thank you so much.

And if there's any other questions that you have about a pool, by all means, drop them in the comments. Let me know if you would like to have a pool or if you don't think a pool really matters.

And other than that, we'll see you next time. Thank you so much.