Pool Question

How much per month does it cost to maintain/keep an inground pool?

Re: Pool Question

What level of maintenance do you want?

Do it yourself? Pool service?

I want to say that my pool guy (we only have him do opening and closing ~$200-300 each) charges ~45-55/week +chemicals and maybe a little extra is a lot of vacuuming is needed.


We maintain ourselves and it's pretty easy.

I would say we spend ~$300/summer for chemicals (opening and maintaining).

We have a pool robot to vacuum that was a one time cost of $850.

Our water bill goes up by about $50-60 in the summer a month, but that's probably mostly from the sprinklers - but you do have to add water occasionally from evaporation and splashing.

Our electricity goes up quite a bit in the summer - but again - most of that is from a/c...our pump is on a timer to go on for 8 hours a day (I think).

I think the worst part is taxes. Our taxes are $1000 more a year than a similar house in my neighborhood (not sure if it's b/c they are on a busier street though?)

Re: Pool Question

We have an IGP and have been living in our home for 2 years but 3 summers.

The biggest cost I think is spending the money on chemicals to get it clear. Once it is clear and you check the levels every week it won't be bad.
- I want to say we spend about $300 a season on chemicals, give or take. This year we wasted A LOT because of all the rain we had.
-Opening and closings for the season is about $500-$600 (that is for both) .
-We bought the Dolphin vacuum last month. We had a coupon for Leslie pool's and it came to $800.
-This year we needed to shell out $9K to fix our pool. That included:
1. a new liner
2. added a skimmer box because we only had 1 for a
20x40 pool
3. we needed to pull up the cemement behind the steps
(about 10 ft) and back fill it with stuff because the
steps were starting to settle unevenly and crack.
4. we added another inlet for better flow of the pool
and opened up another one that the previous
owners closed up.
5. when we took out the liner we found out we needed
2 new pieces of metal sheeting because it was
corroded in certain spots from the chorine.
6. needed new foam (goes behind the liner) because
that was deteriorating from the chlorine
-If you have a pool heater or heat syphon your gas or electric will go up A LOT. We have a heat syphon and between that the pool filiter running and CAC our electric bill last month was $750 . Now, my DH was running the heater a lot so I told him to cut it back because I don't go in the pool durning the week with the kids. We were going to go with propane but it burns a lot faster and we figured it would have costed us about $600-700 for 6 days of usage. We didn't look into natural gas because running the line was not an option since we would have had to dig up the patio.
-With out the heater and just the filter and CAC our electric bill is usually around $400 a month in the summer.

Going forward our pool shouldn't need any work for 10-15 years, just regular maintenance.
We are thinking of switching to salt water since you don't use all the chemicals you do with chlorine pools.

Re: Pool Question

We installed an Inground pool last year.

Open & closing -$500 total (we pay someone, you can do it yourself if you know what you are doing.)

chemicals - $200 for the year

LIPA - this gets expensive because of the filter running. Last year probably cost me $800 but that is because I was running it 12 hours a day.
I now run it 4-6 hours during the week, longer on the weekends.

We have only had it go green 1x this year (knock on wood!).


We don't have a heater. I didn't want the expense of buying one or running one.

Message edited 8/3/2009 12:52:30 PM.