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Save Money on Water if You have a Pool (Utilities)

We own a pool. It’s expensive. If it didn’t come with the house we bought, I would never purchase a pool.  So if you are in this situation and you want to save money on water if you have a pool, consider doing two things; signing up for your local uilities “pool book” and getting a solar cover for your pool

Maintaining a pool means buying chemicals, testing water, using power to run the pump (and heater if you have one) and using water to top off the pool.

Our pool is 13,000 gallons or so, but since it’s the end of the pool season, we’re only going to fill up about 8,000 gallons and let the winter rain and snow fill up the rest. But the problem lies in paying for 8,000 gallons of water. We could have it trucked in, or get the fire company to tap a hydrant. Instead, though, we’ll just use our hose to fill it up over a couple days. The reason? Water is cheap.

One problem though. Sewer charges are NOT cheap.

If you pay a water utility bill, most likely you pay for both water and sewer. At least for our water utility (the city of Rockville, MD), water in = water out. That means if we use 8,000 gallons to fill the pool, we pay for 8,000 gallons of sewer, even though none of it is going into the sewer.

Our water costs $2.78 per 1,000 gallons, but sewer costs $4.12 per 1,000 gallons. Doing the math:

Water for 8,000 gallons = $22.24
Sewer for 8,000 gallons = $32.96

We’ll be paying $34 more than we need to fill up this pool. Even though $34 is chump change when you’re talking about thousands of gallons of water, it’s still money. And it’s something we have to deal with each year. While this is the first time our pool has been empty, we DO need to top it off each year, multiple times, thanks to evaporation and belly flops.

So this time, I decided to call the city to ask what can be done about not paying the sewer fees for this water usage. That’s when I found out about the “pool book“!

Call Your Water Utility Company

Another way to save money on water if you have a pool, call your water company to find out if they have something like a “pool book” that tracks their customers who own pools. We’ve gone 5 years not knowing about this book with our city, and could have save a few hundred dollars by now. Basically, if you’re on the list (i.e. they’ve confirmed you own a pool), you can call when you need to either fill up or top-off the pool, and they’ll send someone out to do a reading before and after you fill it up.

In our case, I told them how much I expected to use (8,000 gallons, although it’s an estimate) and when I would start/finish filling. They’re flexible in that I can call Monday and tell them I need another day or two. They’ll credit the appropriate amount (they also compare against average usage) against sewage. Now that I know the “pool book” and this process exist, I’ll definitely be using it more often.

Get a Solar Cover

Solar covers are pretty much a “no brainer” in terms of the money savings.  Basically how they work is you add a durable plastic cover over the pool.  This does a couple of things to help you save money.  First, it reduces the amount of water that evaporates. Second, it heats the pool by a significant amount.  Evaporation is expensive because you have to pay to replace the water.  And if you have an indoor pool, covering it also reduces your air conditioning and ventilation costs (Energy.gov).

Personally, we’ve kept our water loss to a minimum by using a solar cover (giant sheet of bubble wrap) to reduce evaporation (and chlorine loss), but we still have to throw in a few hundred gallons every so often. The image here basically what they look like.

There are several companies that install solar covers, but a good place to start is Amazon.com.  That should give you a baseline for what pricing options are available.  The one we got was a Sun to Solar 20 by 40 foot rectangular cover.  It sells for something like $177 on Amazon, which should pay for itself in reduced water costs.   You can check it out here, or click on the picture.

If you are doing anything clever to save money on your pool bills, please leave us a comment below!  Readers will want to know about it.

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