18 fantastic swimming pool covers for covering your pool, from simple night time covers to security and safety covers.
Swimming pool covers can have multiple functions. First and foremost, covering your pool is an important step in winterizing. Covering your pool in the winter helps prevent debris from falling in, and unwanted critters from taking up residence in your swimming pool.
Swimming pool covers also work to warm our pools, by absorbing sunlight and transferring the heat into the pool. This can help save money and energy that would otherwise be spent on heating the pool.
Depending on the strength of the cover on your pool, it may also be a good safety measure. They can prevent children or animals from falling into the pool when the pool is closed.
Security is a another advantage of pool covers. An automatic pool cover can work will as a deterrent for unwanted swimmers.
There are three standard types of pool covers, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. These three basic kinds of covers are standard winter covers, security covers, and automatic covers.
You climate and your lifestyle will have a lot to do with your choice in pool cover. If your winters are not heavy and you don’t get much snow, you may be able to get away with a lighter, and less durable pool cover.
The standard winter cover is first of the three basic pool cover types. This is your basic sheet of material, that you pull across your pool and weigh down on the sides and corners to keep it in place. This kind of cover is good for keeping out sunlight, and debris in the fall. This kind of cover does have drawbacks though.
Namely, since this kind of cover is simply a sheet of material, it does not have a long lifespan. After a few years of use, it can become ragged, and deteriorate through use. Also, because this kind of cover is held down by weights around the edges, it cannot hold much weight on its top. Anything venturing out on top of the cover will surely fall through the cover. Standard covers range between $75 and $225 depending on the size of the area you need to cover.
The second kind of pool cover is the security cover. A security cover is made from a mesh or solid vinyl material and is connected by spring loaded straps, anchored into concrete. This kind of cover can hold larger load of weight and are equally good at keeping out debris. These kinds of covers last between 6 and 15 years depending on wear. Security covers can range from $1200 to $3000
Automatic pool covers are the third kind. There are a wide variety of automatic covers available. Automatic covers are excellent solar covers for your pool. Because they are such good solar covers, they can reduce the cost for heating your pool. They are also amazing keeping debris out of the pool, even during the swimming season. This can reduce the maintenance and cleaning that you will have to do for your pool.
- A standard cover is on this above ground pool. Th material is simple, and application is easy. For an above ground pool, without a dedicated heater, a solar cover like this is very useful to keep the water warm for swimming.
- This is a long rectangular pool with a standard solar cover on it. The tarp is connected to a bar on the end of the pool for easy retraction. This reduces the hassle of constantly replacing and removing the cover if you are using it to help heat the water.
- A standard winter cover in place, preparing this pool for the off season. The tarp here is weighted down by long bags filled with water. This helps keep the cover from blowing away. While these weights can hold down the cover against wind anything too heavy placed on the cover would sink into the water.
- A good example of a security cover on this rectangle pool. Because of the tethering of the cover to the concrete, you can see that the cover is far more secure from things falling into the pool. It can support far more weight.
- This pool has multiple covers, a security cover for longer term covering, as in the winter or long periods of non usage, and a solar cover for temporary covering.
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This close up of an automatic pool cover track gives you an idea on how an automatic pool cover works, sliding the rolled cover along the track, unrolling it as it crosses the distance.
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For much larger pools, such as this one, the convenience of the automatic cover is multiplied. The size of the pool makes a great deal of difference on the ease of the task when you have to manually apply a pool cover.
