Weekly pool service in Los Angeles

A fixed seven-point list: the full chemical panel with adjustments to range, netting and vacuuming, brushing the tile line and walls, emptying the skimmer, pump and leaf-canister baskets, inspecting every piece of equipment on the pad, setting pump speeds and time clocks for the season, and closing the gates. Recovery work, acid washes, filter tear-downs and repairs are separate jobs.

Once a week is the standard in Los Angeles and what most pools need. Two visits are worth it under heavy tree cover, on pools swum in every day, and where people entertain around the water through summer. Fortnightly saves less than it appears to, because chlorine demand and pH drift do not halve when the gap doubles.

On the same schedule as the rest of the year. There is no closing season here, so no winterisation and no spring reopening, and a winter storm puts more into a pool in one night than a still summer week does. What changes is the pump run time, not the frequency of the visit.

Most of what a service protects you from is not the water. It is a pump running against a blocked basket, a filter left until the pressure climbs, a salt cell scaling up unnoticed, or stabilizer creeping past the point where chlorine stops working. A year of weekly service costs a fraction of replacing a heater.

It starts at $159 a month for a pool up to 15,000 gallons and $179 for the 15,000 to 25,000 gallon range that most Los Angeles back gardens fall into. Most customers pay between $179 and $249. A second weekly visit is $129 a month on top, and a spa on the property $35.

There are three costs and only one of them is on our invoice. The weekly service is billed monthly from $159 with standard chemicals inside the price. Outside it sit the electricity to run the pump — often the largest of the three on an older single-speed pump — and repairs as equipment ages.

Check the licence yourself before anything else: for pool work in California you want a current C-53, in the same name as the quote, and it is public on cslb.ca.gov. Then ask three questions — are chemicals in the price or extra, is it the same technician every week, and is the equipment actually inspected or only the water. Most complaints about pool services come down to one of those three being assumed rather than agreed.

Twenty to forty minutes on a pool in good order, longer through autumn under heavy tree cover and longer again the week after a storm. Time is not the measure, though — the seven-point list is. A visit that is over in five minutes is a net dragged across the surface and a tablet dropped in the skimmer, with nothing tested and nothing on the pad looked at.

No. There is no start-up fee and no minimum term: the service is billed by the month and stops at the end of one. Cancelling is a phone call, not a notice period. The question underneath that question is usually whether the price moves after a few months, and it does not, unless the pool does — a new spa, a second weekly visit, a bigger body of water.