Your pool is a great place to gather with your family and friends. It adds value to your home as well. If not maintained properly, it will create expensive and time-consuming headaches for you. It doesn't have to be that way. With a little effort it can look great every day.
The three important things you need are chemistry, cleanliness, and circulation. A test kit or test strips will tell you if you have your chemistry properly balanced. It's not hard, it just takes practice. It's never going to be perfect. Don't worry about trying to get a score of 100 at a pool store. Water is organic and it cannot be sterile or it won't be healthy water to swim in. It needs to be balanced daily or at least weekly.
Your pool needs to have the surface skimmed with the net, walls cleaned with a brush, and floor cleaned with a vacuum on a regular basis. All traps need to be cleaned including the skimmer baskets and pump baskets. Removing debris daily prevents your baskets from acting as a tea bag and making your water dirty and allows water to flow freely and circulate in your pool.
Hydraulic equipment is what makes your water circulate. If it's not working, the pool can turn green in a matter of days and it will require expensive chemical treatments to revive it.
That's pool 101. Give Blue Frog Pools a call and we can take care of most of this for you.