Everyone welcome to the very first episode of Swim University. Today we are in New Jersey on a very hot sunny day Memorial Day weekend and I'm here with my good friend Nicole, and we are going to open up her in-ground pool now. Full disclosure I've opened this pool before and but I've never. I didn't opened it this year and I didn't close it either.

So I don't know we're in for but we're just gon na go through this and see what happens. So you ready I'm ready, but are you excited? Well, I'm excited okay, but okay. First thing we got to do is take this safety cover off. It's called a safety cover and it looks like a giant trampoline, but I would not advise jumping on it.

It's called a safety cover because it allows anything or anyone to move across the cover without falling in the pool. If you don't have a safety cover, I would highly recommend investing in one. If you don't already have one in order to get the cover off, we're going to need to get a insulation rod and a hex key to pop off the spring to the anchor and then we're going to use the hex key to screw the anchor down making. It flush with the concrete we get a go dick to the shed and find those yeah.

I think it's time that you get new ones of these. If your installation, rod and hex key are rusty like these, it's a good idea to get them replaced. It might make it harder to pop off the springs on the cover, and if I were you, I would keep it away. I would keep it out of a shed.

I would keep it indoors and away from pool chemicals, especially chlorine, because chlorine can oxidize these things. Really quick, so let's go we're going to take this installation rod and we're going to pop the spring off the anchor. So you just take the rod. Stick it in the little round thing and on top of the anchor and we're just going to twist, we'll be the elbow grease pop up boom, just like that, okay, next, we're going to do is we're going to take off the pool cover now that we have All the springs off the anchors and what we want to do is you want to fold the cover over in half each time that way it's easy to get off the get off the pool.

You don't want to drag it because then that could cause damage to the cover, and this is a mesh safety cover. So all that water and debris is just going to fall through. But if you have a solid cover or you have a tarp cover, there's a lot of debris and water that's collected on there. So what you want to do before you remove the cover is drain it off with a sub pump or and use like a brush to get you know, or sometimes you can get it clean enough without water.

You can use the leaf blower to get it off. So that's good! So, since she has a mess cover chances are the pool is going to be dark, green. If not black. What do you think? I'm thinking it might be clear? You think it's gon na be clear.

I think it's gon na be clear. How much you wan na bet, 20 bucks loser jumps in I'll bet: 20. Bucks, 20 bucks you're on see what happens well in your face in your face. Uh-Huh face what you, what you go to do: yeah 20 bucks yeah paper for me: pimp we'll get it later all right.

The next step in the process is to get the winter plugs out of the return lines and the ice compensators out of the skimmer buckets. Now, since this pool was kind of filled up already, because it's a mesh cover, if your pool is below the skimmer below midway through the skimmer you're gon na, want to take your garden hose and you're going to want to fill up your water level to about Midway in the skimmer once we're doing that, let's go ahead and let's get these winter plugs out of the return lines. This particular pool has to return lines and then two-step jets, so we're just going to go ahead and find them. Here's one.

This is gross. I'm just loosening the wing nut and oh there you go now, that's a good sign of bubbles, because that means the company that closed the pool actually blew out the lines properly. Hey I'm gon na hold that all right. We got two here in the step.

Jets and well no bubbles there. Well in New Jersey, we had a very mild winter, so I don't think any of the pipes had a chance to freeze. So we should be okay, I guess. Well, they only blew out the oh.

There we go. Alright, that's all of them. Alright, next could just skimmer let off and you'll, either have a gizmo inside here or an ice compensator which pool company used a half of frozen bottle of antifreeze to do it now there may be a plug in the bottom of this. That you'll need to get out.

This is really disgusting. There's the plug there now, at this point, you're just going to want to take your skimmer baskets and just pop them right in there. Now it's time to get the filter and pump set up. What you want to do here is we want to take all the drain plugs and we want to replace all the drain plugs in the pump and in the filter now, depending on who close your pool.

Hopefully they put the drain plugs inside the pump housing. So we'll just take a look now and see if they did that, Oh awesome, see, we got sightglass Jandy valve handle big old drain, plug for the filter drain plug for the pump. What else we got another drain plug for the filter for the pump and the pressure gauge and there's an o-ring in here, which I assume is for the sight gauge. So that's good.

Alright, a coal put the drain plug on the filter. There you go pressure gauge in to the pressure gauge spot right there. Let's make sure it's tight and put the sight gauge or the sight glass. Just like gauge slight glass.

We have to drain plugs for the pump housing one down here on the side believe the other one back here, yeah now that we have the pump lid off, we took all the stuff out of the pod of the pump housing. You want to check the o-ring. That's on the pump lid, so what we're going to do is pop the o-ring off right. Take a look at it.

You want to get make sure that there's no cracks! You just want to bend it between your fingers to make sure you know it's not brittle or dry. This one seems pretty good. So what we're going to do is we're going to actually throw some Lube on there. Some Teflon based overhang lube.

Now this happened to have some Lube here and a rubber glove yeah blue. I always carry lube. I pop this glove on here now. What you want to do is this is a Teflon based lubricant and we're going to put a dollop like a quarter size on your hand.

Like so and be liberal, I mean get this all over the o-ring. You want this thing to be nice and lubed up more Lube helps to create a seal, so get it all over there like that, we're going to pop it on and twist the filter systems now on winterize, and what we're going to do is we're actually going To turn it to filter, that's it alright! Now that we got everything hooked up, final step, turn it on all right. It's coming through now at this point, probably a little loud, but at this point, if there's nothing coming through in the pump, what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to prime the pump and the way you do. That is just take the pump lid off and the filters not running and fill it with water once you do that, it's a start starting to suck, and if you look right over there in the steps you'll see it's starting to bubble.

That means it's starting to circulate and there's water coming through on the pump lid, we're flush, everything's running who, okay, we've done everything we needed to open up the pool. So now, just a recap: we got the cover off, we use the you know the insulation, rod and pop the springs off of the anchors we screw down the anchor so that they're flush of the concrete we went around we took all the drain plugs out are All the winter plugs out of the return lines. We put the ice compensators out of the skimmers, we replace the baskets. We took the o-ring from the pump replaced all the drain drain plugs.

We lube the o-rings and we start at the filter system and if you can hear right now, it's super super loud, so you may want to get that looked at. But now what we're going to do is we have to take this nasty, green, smelly pool and we have to make it clear and swimmable. So what we're going to do is we're going to go around to the pool, slow around the corner and so come along with us, and you know we'll get everything done. Let's go you you right now: Nicole's getting the water checked over here, she's going to check for pH, alkalinity and calcium, make sure the water is properly balanced before we go in add shock, and what we're going to do is we're going to find shock.

So right now I'm picking up this bag of shock that they have here and the active ingredient is calcium, hypochlorite, that's 47.6 %, and that's what you want to look for calcium hypochlorite. It might be hard to read here, but that's the main active ingredient shot that you're going to want in order to kill algae in your water, all right. So we're going to do since she has a roughly 20,000 gallon pool and if you want to find out how many gallons are in your pool, you want to go to swim University comm and we have in our tool section. We have a place where you can do you can find out how many gallons are actually in your pool.

Also, we have a tool where you can find out how much shock you need to add. Now we're gon na triple shock the pool since it's so green. It's so black, it's so dark. So what that means is one pound which is this bag, one pound of shock for 10,000 gallons of water, as I said, she's, roughly 20,000 gallons of water.

So that means we're going to add three bags of shock per 10,000 gallons. So six bags of shock so we're gon na get six bags of shock we're going to shock it. Today, it's a little bright out. You really should be shocking at night, but with the time constraints, we're going to do it during the day and then we'll check it tomorrow.

One other chemical I would I would choose, is I would get a clarifier. This is a concentrated clarifier, it says flocking, but you want to get a coagulant type of clarifier and what that's going to do is once the pool is, you know cloudy blue you're, going to want to run your filter system 24/7 in order to get that cloudy Water to be clear, you had to let your filter do the work. Now. This is just going to help your filter system pick up those little particles.

So what this does is it takes all those little tiny particles that are making your water cloudy, and it brings them together so that they're bigger, so your filter has a better chance of picking them up so use a couple ounces of this. I think it's one ounce per 5,000 gallons, four ounces per 10,000 gallons, so we're going to use eight ounces every other day in order to get this going. So that should be it once we get to water test, it we'll be good to go and we'll go back to the pool and we'll shock it and you you now we are going to shock the pool. The Sun has gone down a little bit or it's gone behind the clouds.

So we should be pretty good right now because you always want to shock at night because the unstabilized chlorine like shock burns off one part per million every hour in the Sun. So what we're going to do is we're going to take six bags of shock we're going to dilute each bag into one bucket of water. You can use pool water, you can use hose water, we decided to use hose water here and what you want to do is you want to pre fill the bucket with water. We already have water in there and you never want to add water to pool chemicals.

You always want to add the chemical to water, so we're going to do is that loosens up now, I wear a protective gloves and in reality should wear protective eyewear as well. Dump that in now careful this can bleach your clothes. So we're going to take this pain start we're going to start this up, mix it in try to the splash it get this all diluted and we are mixing the shock up, trying to get nice and dissolved. It's called pre dissolving now we're going to do is rent 8.

This bucket we're going to walk it around we're going to slowly pour it around the edges of the pool. While it's running now that should be good to go. You we successfully open up your swimming pool today and everything went pretty well. It was pretty easy right.

It was actually pretty easy, all right cool. If you have any more questions on opening up a swimming pool, you can go to swim University comm and all we need to do now is get this thing ready and clear and open for the summer. Well, now that's appropriate! You! You.