Frequently asked questions

Electricity is the largest line and is fully computable: watts × hours per day × days ÷ 1,000 × your rate. At the EIA’s June 2026 US residential average of 18.34 cents per kWh, every 100 W of pump run 8 hours a day for a 120-day season costs about $17.61. Add one fill (about $24 for a 3,955-gallon pool at the EPA WaterSense average of $6.06 per 1,000 gallons), roughly 14 chlorine tablets, and filter cartridges. Full arithmetic in the cost-to-run guide.

Work backwards from your space. A pool needs three feet of clear ground on every side, so a 12-foot pool requires an 18-foot square and a 15-foot pool requires 21 feet. Then remember that gallons drive every recurring cost: an 18-foot pool holds roughly four times the water of a 12-foot one, which is four times the chlorine and four times the fill, permanently. See the sizing guide.

Within roughly one to two inches across the whole footprint, which is the tolerance manufacturers commonly specify. Critically, level by cutting down high spots rather than filling low ones — loose fill compacts under the weight of the water and the pool goes out of level once it is full, at which point fixing it means draining everything. See setup.

Long enough for two full turnovers a day in hot weather. Divide your gallons by the pump’s system flow rate — not the headline pump flow rate — to get hours per turnover. Beyond two turnovers, extra hours buy nothing and cost money. See pumps.

Four usual causes, and they are distinguishable: free chlorine too low, pH out of the CDC’s published 7.0–7.8 range, a blocked or under-run filter, or particles too fine for the filter to catch. The fix for each is different and two of them make the others worse, so test before dosing. Work the decision tree.

Most likely because you are using trichlor chlorine tablets, which are acidic and push pH down steadily all season. That is expected chemistry, not a fault. If pH is also swinging unpredictably rather than just trending down, your total alkalinity is low and that is the real problem — fix alkalinity first, then pH. See pH and alkalinity.

Brush every surface first, correct pH, then shock hard with unstabilized calcium hypochlorite at the full dose for your volume, run the filter continuously for 24 to 48 hours, clean the filter repeatedly, vacuum the settled debris, then rebalance and add a polyquat algaecide. Skipping the brushing is why repeat shocking fails. See the algae guide.

In any climate that freezes, yes, and the equipment matters more than the water. Water left in a pump housing expands when it freezes and cracks the housing, which is the most common winter loss and takes ten minutes to prevent. Soft-side pools are different: empty, dry and store them indoors. See winterizing.

It is the highest-return purchase on this site. It reduces evaporation, and evaporation is simultaneously your water bill, the chemistry that leaves with the water, and the dominant heat-loss route from an open pool. Three cost lines, one accessory, no running cost. See solar covers.

It depends on four things: whether your ground is level, how many weeks your household will genuinely swim, whether you will do a twenty-minute weekly routine, and who the pool is really for. Where the answer is marginal, a smaller pool is usually better than none, because nearly every recurring cost scales with gallons. We argue both sides at are backyard pools worth it.

At equivalent size and price, their published specifications do not support a confident preference. Intex publishes more — notably both pump flow and system flow rate — and has wider cartridge availability. Bestway’s mid-size kits more consistently include the ladder and cover. Buy on size, kit contents and stock. See the comparison.

A saltwater pool is a chlorine pool — the system electrolyzes salt to make chlorine on site, and the sanitizer is chemically identical. What improves is the handling and the absence of cyanuric acid build-up. What gets worse is the up-front cost and the cell as a consumable. On a pool you drain each autumn the payback never arrives. See salt vs chlorine.

No, and we say so on every page. There is no test pool here, no product samples and no lab. We compile published manufacturer specifications, note where a manufacturer publishes nothing, and compute what each option costs to run with the arithmetic shown so you can check it. The full process is on the methodology page.

Because you can check them. Every figure on this site names its inputs, its formula and its source, so a reader with the same manuals and the same electricity rate should reach our numbers. That is a different kind of credibility from a test lab and it requires nothing we do not have. Where we could not verify something, we say that too — for instance, neither Intex nor Bestway publishes pump wattage, and we print that rather than estimating around it.

Sawyer V., an enthusiast — someone genuinely interested in the category who reads the manuals, compiles the published specs and does the math. Not an expert, not a professional, and not somebody with a test pool. The about page has the full position.

Affiliate commission on qualifying purchases through Amazon, at no extra cost to you. Commission never decides ranking order, we accept no free products and no sponsored placements, and every roundup names at least one thing to skip. Full detail on the disclosure page.

Because we only ever show a live price. Prices come from a data feed stamped with the date they were checked, and anything older than 48 hours is treated as absent so the button falls back to “check price”. There is deliberately no way to write a price into an article on this site — a hardcoded price goes stale and becomes a false claim.

Because we have no customers and no first-party ratings, so publishing either would be fabrication. The numeric scores you see are our own reading of published specifications, they are labeled as such, and they deliberately never appear in the page’s structured data as review ratings.

Tell us: info@splashandskimmer.com. The page, the figure and what you believe it should be gets fixed fastest. We publish arithmetic specifically so it can be checked, and a correction is a better outcome than an unchallenged mistake.