I've been using a layer of ice (thick enough to walk on) as a pool cover successfully for years now. The downside is a more difficult spring opening. Leaf soup, pine needles, turkey feathers and turkey poop (86 of them use my trees as a winter roost) and to top it off, someone in my area uses rodent poison and a bunch of them find their way to my pool looking for water before they die in it (yay!). I clean and sanitize it to crystal clear every spring (thanks, TFP!) but the dead rodents put my wife over the edge and she wants a pool cover.
The problem is that I can't see any cover surviving my winters. I get an average of 103" of snow each winter. I typically don't see the ground from November to April. I have to assume there will be 4+ feet of dense compressed snow on top of the cover at some point. I also have to drain the pool by at least 2 feet in the fall or snowmelt will fill it back up before the last freeze. Come spring I've never had to fill the pool more than 6". One year I had to cut a hole in the ice to drain it before it reached my skimmer. So any sort of float will have to handle a significant water level change.
With this amount of snow, checking on the pool and addressing things throughout the winter is very difficult. I pretty much have to take every winterization precaution I can in the fall and say "Good luck! See you in spring" (Like, literally. It's buried in snow all winter). So far that approach has worked well for everything, but I can't see a pool cover surviving this winter gauntlet.
Does anyone have any winter cover ideas or suggestions that might work here?
For context, two pics. A typical summer and a typical winter.
You can't see it in the pic, but there are stairs down from the deck to the concrete two feet below. They're buried every winter.
The problem is that I can't see any cover surviving my winters. I get an average of 103" of snow each winter. I typically don't see the ground from November to April. I have to assume there will be 4+ feet of dense compressed snow on top of the cover at some point. I also have to drain the pool by at least 2 feet in the fall or snowmelt will fill it back up before the last freeze. Come spring I've never had to fill the pool more than 6". One year I had to cut a hole in the ice to drain it before it reached my skimmer. So any sort of float will have to handle a significant water level change.
With this amount of snow, checking on the pool and addressing things throughout the winter is very difficult. I pretty much have to take every winterization precaution I can in the fall and say "Good luck! See you in spring" (Like, literally. It's buried in snow all winter). So far that approach has worked well for everything, but I can't see a pool cover surviving this winter gauntlet.
Does anyone have any winter cover ideas or suggestions that might work here?
For context, two pics. A typical summer and a typical winter.
You can't see it in the pic, but there are stairs down from the deck to the concrete two feet below. They're buried every winter.
