🌀 Hurricane HQ
Your pool's hurricane checklist
Living in Southwest Florida means storm season is part of pool ownership. Here's exactly what to do before, during, and after — from your neighborhood pool techs.
⚠️ Never drain your pool
It feels logical — it's very wrong. Storm-saturated ground pushes up on an empty shell, and hydrostatic pressure can lift a concrete pool right out of the ground ("popping"). A full pool is a stable pool. Leave the water in. Always.
📋 Before the storm
- Leave the water level alone (or lower a few inches at most if heavy surge flooding is forecast). The water weight protects the shell and the screen enclosure.
- Kill power to the equipment at the breaker — pumps, heaters, chlorinators, lights. Flooded equipment that's energized is how motors die.
- Shock the pool with extra chlorine before the storm hits. It buys you days of algae protection while everything else is chaos.
- Clear the deck — furniture, toys, potted plants, and umbrellas become projectiles. Store them indoors. Please don't toss furniture into the pool: it scratches finishes, stains surfaces, and rusts hardware.
- Don't cover the pool. Debris shreds covers, and a torn cover in the water is a bigger cleanup than leaves. Skip it.
- Trim overhanging branches earlier in the season — most storm debris in your pool comes from your own yard.
🌀 During the storm
- Stay away from the pool area. Nothing out there is worth the risk.
- Leave the power off until things are dry and inspected.
☀️ After the storm
- Still don't drain it — even if it looks like a pond. The ground is at its most saturated right after the storm, which is exactly when empty pools pop.
- Hand-skim the big debris with a net first. Don't run a vacuum straight into a debris field — it clogs lines and burns up pumps.
- Inspect before you re-energize. If equipment took on water, have it checked before flipping breakers back on.
- Shock again and run the filter long — storm water is loaded with organics and the chemistry will be way off.
- Be patient. A storm-hit pool usually takes days of filtering to come back. It will come back.
- Or just text us. After every storm we run cleanup routes across Cape Coral and Fort Myers — weekly customers get priority, and we'll get to everyone as fast as we can.
Storm cleanup, handled
Text us a photo of the damage and we'll tell you what it needs — no charge for the advice.
💬 Text (631) 488-5403