How often should a pool be serviced?

Most Sydney pools want a visit every fortnight through the warm months, and monthly over winter.

That is a starting point, not a rule. We have pools on weekly visits that genuinely need it, and pools on monthly all year that are perfectly fine.

What decides it is not the size of the pool. It is the load on it.

Trees are the biggest one. A pool under gums or in a leafy block fills its baskets constantly, and decomposing leaf litter uses up chlorine and stains surfaces. Round the Upper North Shore that alone pushes most pools to fortnightly all year.

Sun is the second. Ultraviolet light strips chlorine out of water fast, so a pool in full sun out in Western Sydney burns through sanitiser far quicker than a shaded one.

Then bather load. A pool that has six kids in it every weekend needs more attention than one that gets swum in twice a month, for the reasons covered in red eyes and the chlorine smell.

And salt against manually dosed. A salt pool makes chlorine continuously while the pump runs, which smooths out the dips — but it does not remove the need to check what the cell is actually producing.

In summer the water is warm, the sun is strong and the pool gets used. Chlorine demand is high and algae moves quickly. Gaps between visits show up fast.

In winter the water is cold, algae is slow, and the pump runs fewer hours. A lot of pools genuinely coast on monthly.

The mistake is dropping off entirely. A pool left alone from May to September does not stay still — it drifts, quietly, and then warms up in October with nothing holding it.

That is where most December emergencies actually start.

The cost of pool care is not linear. Skipping visits does not save proportionally, because recovery costs far more than maintenance.

A pool that goes green needs balancing, a heavy shock dose, days of filtering and a proper vacuum. That is green pool recovery, and it is several regular visits' worth of work and chemicals.

Worse, the slow damage does not reverse. Water left short of calcium will have been taking minerals out of your surfaces the whole time.

So the honest framing is not visits against no visits. It is small regular cost against occasional large cost, plus wear you cannot undo.

Chlorine that is gone before the next visit. If it reads fine on the day and zero a week later, the interval is too long for the load.

Baskets full every time. That is a leaf-load problem and it will keep costing chlorine.

Water that goes cloudy between visits, then clears after one. That is the pool telling you it cannot hold on its own for that long.

Any of those and the interval is wrong, not the chemicals.

A covered pool, out of the trees, lightly used, over winter, with a salt system doing its job — monthly is fine. Sometimes less.

We would rather say that than sell a visit that is not needed. A service that recommends the same interval for every pool is not looking at the pool.

The right way to settle it is to look at yours, run the numbers for a couple of cycles and adjust. That is what we do rather than quoting a frequency down the phone.