Download Pool Tip #30: Winter Swimming (PDF format, 19KB)

It’s never too early or too late in the year to go swimming. As a matter of fact, there’s no real reason to winterize your pool at all if you plan to swim regularly throughout the winter season. You can continue to operate your pool on a year round basis with only a few modification to your pool and its equipment.

To keep a pool open in cold weather, it is necessary to keep the water heated and circulating continuously, 24 hours per day. Pool chemical treatment, circulation and filtration equipment should be installed in a sheltered, heated and well ventilated room. The pool heater should be properly sized for temperature maintenance rather than intermittent heating, and should be installed as close to the pool as possible. The pool shell and circulation pipes can be insulated to avoid heat loss.

When not in use, it is essential that the pool be covered immediately with a thick, thermal pool blanket to prevent unnecessary heat loss. Your house, fences, windscreens, and advantageously placed trees and landscaping materials can also be installed and used as windbreaks to prevent loss of heat through convection to moving air. Add a monomolecular film product (Ex. Heat$avr) to the water to help retain heat.

Shortly before swimming, uncover the pool and let the steam layer rise over the pool and deck. Do not allow anyone to swim in the pool, without first removing all of the insulating blankets. The steam layer and warm pool water in relation to the ambient air will keep swimmers remarkably comfortable even in light snows, and in all but the most severe weather conditions.

Have warm towels or blankets available to wrap up in and keep you cozy when you get out of the pool and walk back to the house. Many pools in resort areas operated during all seasons of the year with no detrimental effect to the health of swimmers. Anyone who has ever soaked in a spa at a Colorado ski resort in January, or swum laps in a mountainside pool in Lake Tahoe while watching the snow fall gently on the pool deck will attest to the healthful, stress relieving benefits of outdoor swimming and water exercise during the winter.