Your house’s outdoor pool efficiently withstands the hot summer sun and cool winter nights for many years, but weathering and age bring about paint chipping and equipment failures with time. It is necessary to empty the pool occasionally for specific repairs, like reaching a crack near the deep end. Discharging the water in your lawn is a permissible choice in some areas, especially if your home is not located close enough to the pool to allow you to drain the water to something such as a sink, and so the sanitary drain, via a hose.
Removing Debris
Depending on your regional water regulatory laws, your pool water may or might not be permitted to enter nearby storm drains. For instance, any water entering your lawn from the pool consumes into the soil, but the large water volume inevitably has runoff into side gutters that escape into municipal storm drains. Unlike sanitary sewer water treatment, storm drains don’t utilize extensive filtering and water cleaning processes. As a result, you have to wash your pool water of any debris or visible algae prior to allowing it to drain to your lawn. Clearing your lawn of debris is essential as well; moving pool water throughout the lawn drives usable debris into the storm drain. Remaining organic debris, such as leaves, alters the water’s acidity and might be bad for the environment when the pool water drains to local bodies of water.
Chlorine and pH Amounts
A freshly chlorinated pool shouldn’t be discharged to the lawn; the chlorine is harmful to lawn plants and the environment as a whole. Using a test kit, then your pool water should reflect a specific concentration of chlorine, like 0.1 ppm (parts per thousand), before it is safe to drain to your lawn. Your town might specify another quantity. Moreover, the pool’s pH level requires careful monitoring. Don’t drain the water if it isn’t in the neutral selection of 6.5 to 7.8. High acidity or alkalinity negatively affects your landscape’s soil health.
Saltwater Pools
Although not as common, some pools utilize saltwater as an alternative. If you don’t have highly salt-tolerant lawn plants, discharging saltwater to the lawn might cause extensive damage; the soil retains the salts suspended in the water runoff. It is possible, however, to drain a saltwater pool to the lawn using planned draining periods. Saturating the lawn with freshwater after discharging some of the pool allows the soil to recover its salt balance. You will need to alternate salt and freshwater throughout the lawn for the best outcomes. However, most of the saltwater should move down your private water ducts and into the storm drains to prevent any significant plant and soil damage.
Local Regulations
It is vital to check your regional regulations for pool water discharging laws. In general, most laws stipulate that the water remains on your property; it can’t seep or run via a neighbor’s property. Actually, some regions require a license to transfer large water sums into storm drains, even if they allow the practice in any respect. By adhering to local regulations, you preserve the regional environment and prevent water pollution in chlorine runoff.