Most maintenance checklists have two problems. They tell you to "test the water" without saying what the numbers should be — so the checklist is done and the pool is still wrong. And half the items on them are products rather than tasks: a weekly dose of clarifier, a weekly dose of algaecide, a shock "if it looks cloudy." Those aren't maintenance; they're a shopping list with a calendar on it.
This one has the targets on the sheet, generated from the same engine as our calculators, and every line is there because skipping it costs you something specific. It prints on one page.
Put it by the pool
Prints as a one-page checklist with the target ranges underneath — four weeks of tick boxes, nothing else. No email, no signup.
The schedule
| How often | Do | Wk 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2–3× a week | Test free chlorine and pH | ||||
| Add chlorine to the top of your range | |||||
| Glance at the water and the skimmer | |||||
| Weekly | Brush walls, steps and the waterline | ||||
| Empty skimmer and pump baskets | |||||
| Vacuum, or let the robot | |||||
| Check filter pressure against its clean reading | |||||
| Check the water level — mid-skimmer | |||||
| Every 2–4 weeks | Full test: alkalinity, CYA, calcium (and salt) | ||||
| Correct what has drifted, one chemical at a time | |||||
| Run the saturation index | |||||
| Seasonally | Deep-clean the filter: strip cartridges, recharge DE, inspect sand | ||||
| Salt pools: inspect the cell for scale | |||||
| Overnight chlorine loss test | |||||
Test also after heavy rain, a party, a heat wave, or topping up a lot of water. Shock is not on this list because it isn’t a scheduled task — see below.
| Target | Manual chlorine | Salt pool |
|---|---|---|
| Free chlorine at your CYA target | 3–8 ppm, aim 4.5 (CYA 40) | 3.5–7 ppm, aim 5 (CYA 70) |
| FC rule for any CYA | Minimum 7.5% of CYA, aim 11.5% | Minimum 5% of CYA, aim 7% |
| pH | 7.2–7.8, aim 7.5 | |
| Alkalinity | 60–90 ppm | 60–80 ppm |
| CYA | 30–50 ppm | 60–80 ppm |
| Calcium | 250–450 ppm | |
| Salt | — | 2,700–3,600 ppm |
| Shock (SLAM) level | 40% of CYA — 16 ppm at CYA 40. Only after a failed test, never on a schedule | |
| Filter | Clean when pressure is 8–10 psi above its clean-filter reading | |
Ranges from the same target set as every calculator on this site. Full chart with every CYA level at pooltoolbox.com/guides/pool-chemical-levels.
How often should you test pool water?
Chlorine and pH two or three times a week in season; everything else every few weeks. That isn't a habit recommendation, it falls out of the numbers. A summer pool loses roughly 2 ppm of free chlorine a day to sunlight and swimmers. Dose a manual-chlorine pool to the top of its range at CYA 40 — 8 ppm — and at that loss rate you reach the 3 ppm minimum in about 2.5 days. Test weekly and you spend four days of every seven below the level that keeps algae from starting. Test every two or three days and you never do.
That's also why the second line of the schedule says the top of your range, not the target. Dosing to the minimum is planning to be below it by tomorrow. A salt pool gets a gentler version of the same math — the cell tops chlorine up all day, so its band is narrower and the fall is slower (1.8 days at CYA 70 if the cell were off) — but the test cadence is the same, because the cell can scale up or run out of salt without telling you.
Alkalinity, calcium and stabilizer move over weeks, not days, which is why they're on the monthly line. Testing them weekly isn't wrong, it's just twenty minutes a month you don't need to spend. The one exception: if you use trichlor tablets, check CYA more often than you think you need to, because every tablet adds some, and by late summer the target that was right in May is wrong. How to test pool water covers what each kind of kit can and can't read.
Do you need to shock your pool every week?
No — and the checklists that say so are the ones written by chemical retailers. Shocking is what you do when a test tells you the chlorine has fallen behind: combined chlorine above about 0.5 ppm, or an overnight chlorine loss test that fails, or the water going cloudy with FC below the minimum. A pool held at the right free chlorine for its CYA doesn't build up the combined chlorine that shocking exists to burn off, so a weekly shock on such a pool is a weekly purchase of nothing. On a pool that isn't held at the right level, a weekly shock is a weekly rescue from a problem that the first line of the schedule would have prevented.
The same logic covers the rest of the retail calendar. Weekly algaecide is insurance against low chlorine, sold to people who could just keep chlorine up; most of it is copper or a quaternary compound that stains or foams. Weekly clarifier makes a filtration or chlorine problem look better for a day — cloudy water has four causes, and a bottle treats none of them. Weekly "pH balancer" is acid or baking soda in a smaller, dearer bag; you add it when a test says to, which is sometimes weekly and sometimes never.
Three routine chlorine doses on a 15,000-gallon pool — about 2 ppm each, replacing what the sun took — come to roughly 0.7 gallons of 12.5% liquid chlorine, call it $4 at $6 a jug. Skip them in July and the likely result is algae, and the fix for algae is a SLAM: raise FC to 16 ppm and hold it there for several days. Reaching that level and holding it through three days of losses takes about 3.4 gallons — 4.7 times the chlorine, around $20, plus three to five days of running the pump around the clock and a pool nobody can swim in. Prevention isn't just cheaper per week; it's cheaper per problem. The shock calculator does the SLAM math if you ever need it.
The weekly tasks, and what each one is for
Brushing is the most underrated fifteen minutes in pool care. Algae starts as an invisible film on the wall, and a film has a protective layer that chlorine penetrates slowly; brushed loose into the water, the same cells die in minutes. Brush the steps, the corners, behind the ladder, and the waterline — the places water moves least.
Baskets are about flow, not tidiness. A skimmer basket packed with leaves, or a pump strainer full of grit, cuts the water the pump can move — so every hour it runs filters less, and the motor works harder to do it. The water level matters for the same reason: below the skimmer mouth, the skimmer gulps air, and a pump that runs dry for long doesn't survive it.
Filter pressure is the one weekly number besides your test readings, and it only means something against a baseline. Note the gauge reading right after the filter is cleaned; clean it again when the reading is 8–10 psi higher, and not before. A slightly dirty filter actually catches finer particles than a clean one. Vacuuming removes the debris that would otherwise dissolve into nutrients — a robot does it better than you will, and doesn't need the main pump running.
Rising pressure means the filter is loading up — normal, and the cue to clean it. Falling pressure is the one to worry about: it means less water is arriving at the filter, so the restriction is upstream — a full skimmer basket, a clogged pump strainer, a closed valve, or air being pulled in at the pump lid. Pressure that never rises at all usually means a torn cartridge or channelled sand letting water bypass the media, which is why the pool stays cloudy no matter how long the pump runs. The run time calculator covers how many hours that pump actually needs.
Monthly and seasonal tasks
The monthly line is the full test — alkalinity, calcium, stabilizer, and salt if you have a cell — followed by correcting whatever has drifted. Do it one chemical at a time with the pump running, and let each mix before re-testing; the carbonate system needs an hour or two to settle, and readings taken too soon send you chasing a number that was going to arrive on its own. Fix alkalinity before pH when alkalinity is low, and pH first when alkalinity is high — the alkalinity calculator explains the order. Then run the saturation index with the water temperature, since the same numbers that were balanced in a 65 °F pool in May are scaling in an 86 °F pool in August.
Seasonally: strip and hose the cartridges, or backwash and recharge DE, or check that sand hasn't channelled — the pressure-based cleaning keeps the filter running, the strip-down keeps it filtering fine. Inspect a salt cell for scale on the plates and acid-wash it only if there is some; cleaning a clean cell shortens its life. And run an overnight chlorine loss test at least once at the start of the season: FC at dusk, FC at dawn, pump running. Losing more than a ppm overnight means something in the water is consuming chlorine, and it is the earliest warning you'll ever get.
When the schedule changes
- After rain, a party, or a heat wave — test FC and pH that day, not on the next scheduled visit. Rain dilutes and carries debris; swimmers bring sunscreen and sweat; heat speeds up everything that consumes chlorine.
- Salt pools — the cell only makes chlorine while the pump runs, so pump hours are part of your chlorine dose. Test FC just as often; adjust the cell's output percentage, not the salt level, when it drifts.
- Covered pools — a cover cuts chlorine loss and debris dramatically, so you may find the 2–3× a week test consistently shows no drift. Don't stretch the interval past a week anyway; a cover also hides the water from you.
- Off-season — an open pool below about 60 °F has little chlorine demand and almost no algae pressure. Weekly FC and pH is plenty; the monthly line stays monthly.
- Vacation — dose to the top of the range the day you leave, put the cover on, and leave the pump on its normal schedule. A week is fine. Two weeks in July is a favor to ask a neighbor, with a jug of liquid chlorine and a note saying how much.
That's the whole job: about twenty minutes a week, most of it brushing. Pools that eat weekends are almost always pools that dropped below minimum chlorine once and were expensive to bring back. The test dashboard takes the readings from the 2–3× a week line and turns them into doses, and remembers last week's numbers so you can see the trend — which is worth more than any single reading.