The PSP swimming pool story – Maintain an Automatic Swimming Pool Cover

Just like buses we had two call outs last week to automatic pool covers fitted to two different indoor pools, one at Farnborough Park in Kent and the other at Hampstead in London which their owners reported would not close. There are various cover makes on the market today, but basically they all work in the same way which is that the cover is made up of slats that fix together and float on the pool surface. They can be located in the bottom of the pool, inside their own pit or an underwater cave and if they are fitted at a later date mounted above the pool on the pool surround. The picture below shows a cover pit with trapped cover slats.

These covers roll up on a roller that’s rotated by a electric motor, which can be either 12 volt or 24 volt so they meet the electrical regulations set by the IEE. These motors can be located in a separate pit next to the pool using a spindle connection through the pool shell or be housed inside the pit about the water level and employs a chain drive to rotate the cover roller. The new covers we install today have the motor housed inside the roller and normally fixed inside the pit using two stainless brackets that get attached to each end of the pit, which allows us to upgrade old style covers, the picture below shows a motor drive located in a separate pit.

The cover and its equipment need to be maintain and checked on a regular basis to ensure they do not develop a fault. In the above picture you can see a small amount of water in the pit which is a common problem we come across, where the pit floods and no one knows until the cover stops working. We recommend that pool builders should fit some form of alarm or sump pump to these pits as the cost to replace a cover motor if flooded can run into thousands of pounds. These pits should be checked as part of your regular maintenance programme and have a lid that’s easy to remove by one person.

These old style cover motors employ special switches that switch off the motor when the cover is fully open or fully closed, but due to the dampness they operate in, these switches can fail causing the covers not to operate or in the worst cases fail to stop and damage themselves in the cover pits as per the first picture we showed you above. Some of the motors are controlled by electronics that monitor the amount of power they are using and will switch off the cover until a pool engineer has reset the equipment and old systems employ fuses which blow to protect the motor.

We recommend that the pool covers are operated on a regular basis to stop scale developing on the covers surface and that the covers are brushed down on a regular basis as well to help stop this deposit. Water balance is important to stop scale forming not just on the cover, but the waterline and the pool finishes. But the most common problem we find with cover breakdowns is due to incorrect water levels and the pool water not being flat when operated by the pool owner. As the cover floats on the pool water the cover causes the pool water level to rise when it opens and fall when it closes due to the water it displaces and if the level is not correct the covers can become stuck and fail to open or close and in the worst cases breaking the slats.

These covers are slow in operation and may people leave them before they are fully closed. If the water level is wrong or the water had not settled after the swimmers get out then the covers can get trapped without anyone noticing. Please ensure that when opening a cover that no one jumps in before its fully open and the water is flat when closing it and you observe it until it finishes its operation, if you notice a problem then operate the emergency stop and call your pool maintainer to check over the cover.

We hope you found this information helpful and that you appreciate we cannot cover all problems in such a short article.

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