If you live in an area that’s prone to severe storms or even hurricanes, you know that that they’re an extremely destructive and potentially deadly force of nature. Not only can they interrupt or even threaten your life, but they can also cause all sorts of damage to your property. Pool owners, in particular, should take special precautions to help ensure that their pools, yards, and patio furniture weather the storm with as little damage as possible. This series of articles will focus on some of the ways you can begin to get your pool and the rest of your property ready as soon as you hear that there’s a major storm approaching your local area.
Never Leave Your Pool Equipment Running During a Severe Storm
One of the worst forms of damage your pool can sustain during a severe storm involves the pool’s motor and pump. In order to try to avoid this problem, you should cut off the power to your pool’s motor, pump, lighting, chlorinators, and other equipment. In fact, if you have enough warning time ahead of the storm, you should even take the motor out and put it inside your home in a dry location. You’ll want it up off of the floor in a place where it hopefully won’t sustain any flooding damage. If you don’t have time to completely remove the pool pump’s motor, you could secure it with tape, ropes, and a layer for firm plastic. Along with your pool’s electrical equipment, it’s a good idea before a storm to turn off your home’s electrical system, gas, and propane tanks. You could consider investing in a generator as a backup power source if you live in a storm-prone region of the country.
Keep Water in Your Swimming Pool
It’s a common yet inaccurate notion that draining a swimming pool before a storm will help you to avoid flooding. If you have a pool that’s up to code, it will already have overflow drains to accommodate for the extra water that will enter the pool during a storm. So it’s not necessary to drain your pool before a storm. In fact, it can actually do more harm than good.
The reason you don’t want to completely empty your pool is that it can end up causing the pool to come up out of the ground due to hydrostatic pressure. If this happens, your entire pool could need to be completely replaced. Another reason to keep water in the pool is that it acts as a barrier between your pool’s interior finish and any objects that are hurling through the air due to the storm’s high wind velocity. It’s fine to drain up to a couple of feet of water out of your pool before a storm if you’re concerned about flooding, but that’s as low as you should allow the water level to get.
In our next article, we’ll take a look at some more ways pool owners can get their properties prepared for a storm.
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