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Automated Pool Safety Auto-Covers Pros And Cons 

• Minimizes the use of electric, oil, or gas consumption
• Extends your swimming pool usage season
• Can be used as a winter cover in place of the mesh cover
• Prevents rainwater from entering the pool water and unbalancing the chemicals.
• Prevents unattended kids or pets from falling in open water
• Extends the life of the equipment 
• Saves on chemicals and extends the life of the liner
• Highest resale value for your house
• Highest savings on backyard construction
• Freedom of design for your backyard layout.
• Saves on maintenance and cost of opening and closing the pool for the seasons 

The only con to an Automated Pool Safety Auto-Covers is that it can only be installed on a rectangular pool. If you are thinking of installing a freeform pool, trying to adopt an auto safety cover might not be possible or worth it due to the very high cost of the installation. But many times, new pool owners that are in the market for a new swimming pool and plan on installing a freeform pool, only do that because they like the look of a freeform pool. They don’t realize that a freeform swimming pool will cost more than a rectangular one and offers no benefit over a rectangular pool. Starting with the cost of a mesh winter cover, it’s always 50% more then if the mesh cover was installed on a rectangular pool. The pool stone coping is also 50% more than if the pool is rectangular and the patio is also more due to the access labor and waist of material to cut the stones around the swimming pool. A freeform pool will also take up much more space in a backyard to be able to offer the floor space as a rectangular one. 

The benefits of owning a swimming pool equipped with an Automated Pool Safety Auto-Covers are many. Homeowners in the market looking to purchase a swimming pool sometimes are not educated by their pool contractor and most often focus on items that are less important for the large investment. A safety auto-cover is one item but the benefits that it offers by far surpass the cost of buying one, you just need to educate yourself on them. Most of the time consumers don’t, mainly because they don’t find the right contractor that takes the time to educate the consumer on the benefits a safe electric auto-cover offers.

At Gappsi, as experienced pool builders and residential outdoor living designers and builders, we have incorporated and built many backyards with swimming pools equipped with safety auto-covers. We have calculated that operating and owning a swimming pool without an auto-cover could cost more than paying principal and financing charges if you have to get financing to install a safety auto-cover on your new swimming pool.

Many Homeowners ask how problematic Automated Pool Safety Auto-Covers are and what their maintenance is.

Installed properly, a pool auto-cover will have very few issues. With the experience of having installed many covers for our clients on Long Island NY for the past 20 years, we still promote auto-covers to our new clients because we know from our previous customers that they have always thanked us for educating and talking them into installing a safety auto-cover on their new pool. A safety auto-cover is a very simple mechanism, an electric motor, a solar rubberized fiber mesh reinforced cover, stain steel pulleys and nylon ropes. The auto-cover might need services from time to time if you see that the leading aluminum bar in front of the cover doesn’t close tight or doesn’t stay parallel with the pool stone coping that it closes against. But by experience with our cover installations, we have had situations where the cover was 12 years old and was never serviced and still going as smother as a Swiss watch. There are 3 principles we tell our customers to follow: 

1. Never open the auto cover with rain water on it! The auto cover comes equipped with a pump attached to a garden hose, all you have to do place the pump on the auto cover next to the pool coping and the weight of the pump creates a low spot. All the rainwater will go towards it and the pump will activate by itself when it senses water and shuts off when it doesn’t.
2. Always make sure that you don’t produce excess chlorine in the swimming pool. Most, if not all swimming pools today are equipped with a saltwater chlorine generator. It is very important that you set the generator to produce just enough chlorine and not more than what’s necessary. For example, on a 20×40 pool, the salt chlorine generator will work on approx. at 70% capacity. In the same 20×40 pool equipped with a safety auto cover, the salt chlorine generator must be set between 7 to 12% capacity of chlorine making. This is because if you make too much chlorine, it will be trapped under the cover and eventually make the cover rubber tarp become brittle and dry, and that will cause the tarp to eventually rip. But this is also a benefit by minimizing the amount of chlorine making when you own a safety auto-cover. Your salt chlorine generator cell will last you a long time before you need to replace it. It will work fewer hours and also you will swim in much healthier water that contains the least amount of chlorine and other chemicals. 
3. The third rule is that you have to remember that any one in the household that uses the pool has to know and follow these 2 very simple principles, and you will love the auto-cover and enjoy the pool more than you have to work maintaining it. 

Below are the benefits of owning a swimming pool equipped with an auto-cover 

• An Automated Pool Safety Auto-Covers is the best option you can add to your swimming pool, it’s a solar cover that minimizes the cost of fuel electric, oil, or gas that you will need to heat your swimming pool. It keeps the temperature of the water 10 to 15 degrees hotter. If you have a heater in the pool the auto-cover will limit the amount of time the heater would run to heat up the swimming pool water. This could save you up to 75% of the cost of the fuel bill.  
• A safety auto-cover will extend your season. You will be able to open the pool as soon as the freezing season is over, and run the pool just to keep water sanitized and as soon the weathers allows you will be ready to use it, or if you have some warm days and you have a gas or oil heater, you can spot heat the swimming pool just for that day. You will also be a better customer to the company that opens and closes your pool because they can do it off season not in the peak of the season when everyone wants their pool opened
• Automated Pool Safety Auto-Covers can be used as a winter cover in place of the mesh. This will eliminate installing anchors in your patio to tie the mesh cover straps, not only the cover and straps don’t look clean during the time that the pool is closed, but during snow falls the snow accumulating on the mesh cover would apply wait and thus pulling on the straps and put lifting leverage on the patio pavers resulting in unevenness of the patio and also discoloration of the pavers that are covered under the cover the overlaps the pool patio.
• The auto-cover prevents rain water from entering the pool and overflowing the pool and changing the chemistry of the pool water and unbalancing the chemicals. Every time it rains and especially in the summertime during hot days, not only the rainwater goes into the pool, but also all the dust that is in the dry air. Every time that it rains you would have to clean the pool or have a robot cleaner in the pool at all times, and you will also have to balance chemicals and pump excess water from the pool. 
• Auto-cover prevents unattended kids or pets from falling in open water. When you buy an auto-cover you are buying a safety feature that will protect your loved ones from danger. Auto covers are not made to play and jump on but sometimes kids do under the supervision of adults. Safety auto covers eliminate the cost of installing safety fences around swimming pools and also the use of the alarm system mostly requested by town inspectors to obtain final CEO’s.
• Safety pool auto-cover extends the life of equipment, when you have a safety auto-cover the benefits are more than you could ever imagine. Your equipment starting with the pump will work to minimum just enough to circulate the water in the pool to make chemicals like the chlorine from the salt water, also the filter doesn’t need to be backwashed as often and in many situations you don’t have to backwash it at all, because at the end of the season the filter gets taken apart and and that is the time that you will clean the filter and put it back in the following season. The Salt cell also will last longer than usual because it only works a few hours during a season when your pool has an auto-cover. 
• An Automated Pool Safety Auto-Covers saves on chemicals and extends the life of the liner by protecting the pool water from the sun rays. Very little chlorine is needed to maintain the pool water free of bacteria and also prevents chlorine from evaporating in the air. A safety auto cover will protect your liners from fading. When you winterize a vinyl pool with a mesh cover, you will have to lower the water in the pool to allow the new water that rains from September to May of the following season. If you don’t do that, the pool will overfill and all leaves that fall on mesh cover will get stuck and deteriorate. When you lower the water in a vinyl, pool the part of the liner that becomes exposed out of the water will start to dry and will shrink in a matter of weeks. This over time will cause the liner from pulling off the track resulting in eyesore but also eventually damage and shorten the life of the liner.
• A safety swimming pool auto-cover has the highest resale value of all the home improvements that you will do at your house over the years. One day you might sell your house for many good reasons, that day the new home buyer will be the most important person in your life, because you will try to get the most dollars for the house. Having an auto-cover on the swimming pool will be very easy to sell to the next homeowner. You will have a broader audience of potential buyers that will appreciate the auto cover benefits and safety. Also having a rectangular pool will help because many people are more accepting of a rectangular pool then they are of a free formed one.
• Installing a safety auto-cover will help you get the highest savings on backyard construction, starting with the fact that you would not need a mash winter cover. That is a savings of 20% of the total cost of the auto-cover. You will not need to install a fence to protect your loved ones from the open swimming pool, in most cases when installing a swimming pool in your yard, if you don’t plan to install a safety auto-cover, you will put the pool further away from the house for the following reasons:

1. Just in case you might want to enclose the pool area or you might want to install the fence in the future
2. You are going to use the pool for only 3 months if you don’t have an auto-cover, so you might not like to have to close to the house because the mesh cover straps might be in your way when you walk next to the pool. Or just because they are not appealing to the eye
3. When you install a safety fence around your swimming pool there is a great chance your patio cost will increase because it’s separate from your house patio and you are creating a separate living area and for sure will spend more money on the patio area just for the simple reason that there are separate living areas in your backyard. When you have a safety auto-cover installed on your pool your house patio and pool patio are together and the overall sq ft will be less, and less cost to you to accomplish the same thing

• When you install an Automated Pool Safety Auto-Covers on your swimming pool, you have freedom of design for your back yard layout. You can pretty much put the pool any way you like, you will have no obstruction of a fence, you don’t have to worry about if your or your neighbors trees canopy over the pool. You don’t have to consider the sunny area in your backyard. You can pretty much build the pool area anywhere in the yard without jeopardizing the rest of the yard grass or play area.
• Savings on maintenance and cost of opening and closing the pool for the seasons, the difference of winterizing a pool with an auto cover or without could range between $500 to $1000 dollars more for opening and closing the pool. In the spring time when your pool service company opens the pool that has a mesh cover, they most likely will have to make a few trips back to get the water free of bacteria that has created during the time that the pool was closed, caused by the sunrays that go through the mesh cover and by the rainwater that has entered to pool through the mesh cover. This results in your pool water turning green and that will translate in cost of man-hours coming back to shock, vacuum, and balance water chemistry a few times in the pool opening season. Also, several men are required to take off the mesh cover from the pool at the opening and also at closing. With a solid safety auto-cover your pool water in springtime if it’s not crystal clear it’s going to be very close to it, requiring fewer chemicals, less shock, and less chlorine from the beginning to the end of the all pool season and closed season.

Gappsi is an Automated Pool Safety Auto-Covers Retailer, designer, and installer serving Nassau and Suffolk County Long Island NY. Please call 631-543-1177.