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By maintaining your pool with energy-efficient methods, you can save both energy and water.

How to use energy-efficient ways to maintain your pool

Basic approaches can result in dramatic savings. By simply paying attention to maintaining your pool, you can directly prevent a significant amount of energy and water waste. Here's how:

• Look out for leaks: Check your pool by marking the water level with a grease pencil. Look at the mark 24 hours later. If there is a difference of more than 1/4-inch of water, a leak is indicated; get a repair as soon as possible.

• Top up your pool using rainwater to replace the water lost to evaporation. You may want to install a rain barrel to collect water easily.

• Keep your cool: Turn the heat down anytime the pool is not being used, and turn it off when you're away for more than a lunch break.

• Pump less: Most pools need the water circulated only about three hours a day. Run the pump in several short cycles during the day, rather than running it once continuously for several hours a day.

• Follow filter fundamentals: Only using the filter four or five hours a day should be plenty to maintain clear water. If you’re using the filter more than this because you’re concerned about water clarity, reduce your daily filtering time by 30 minutes. After a week, if the water clarity is fine, reduce your filtering time by another 30 minutes. Continue this process. If at any point the water is not clear, put the filtration time back to the last point when the water had stayed clear. A good test of water clarity is to make sure the main drain cover is clearly visible from the deck. Clean the filter as recommended by the manufacturer so it can work at top efficiency. Take care of trees around the pool. When leaves and twigs shed into the water, the filtering system is much less efficient.

Maintaining your pool with energy-efficient methods helps you go green because...

• It cuts down on water waste. An inch-a-day leak in an average pool wastes 102,000 gallons per year.[1]
• It cuts down on energy waste: Reducing the time the filter is used down to five hours a day saves electrical consumption by up to 50 percent in the average pool.[2] For every degree the pool heater is turned down, there is an average 10 percent decline in energy use.[3]

Additional benefits

• You’ll save money. For example, by just cutting the amount of time a pool filter is run from 12 hours to four hours per day, an average of $55 is saved per month.[4]
• By keeping up with your pool’s maintenance needs, you’ll have an all-around superior pool for swimming—it will run better and cleaner.

More than 20 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions in the United States come from energy use in homes,[5] and homes with pools use even more energy. During the summer season a typical backyard California pool, for example, can use enough energy to power an entire home for three months.[2] They also are estimated to use twice the amount of water outdoors as homes without pools.[2] Maintaining a pool regularly can cut back on energy and water use in pools more than almost any other action pool owners can take. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water can be saved; energy use for the pool can be cut by as much as 50 percent.[6]

External links

• Department of Energy - A Consumer's Guide to Energy-Efficiency and Renewable Energy
• US Department of Energy - Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy: Installing and Operating a Swimming Pool Pump for Energy-Efficiency