Tailored to Your Pool

What actually determines the price of pool maintenance

Two pools of the same surface area can cost very different amounts to maintain. What drives the quote is not the square metre — it is the volume of water being treated, the system treating it, the surroundings the pool sits in, and how often it needs a visit.

The sections below explain each of those factors. They are here so you understand where the number comes from before you ask us for a quote, and so you can compare proposals properly — including proposals from other companies.

Water volume, lining and pool type

Volume sets how much product each correction needs and how long a filtration cycle has to run. An 8×4 pool averaging 1.5 m deep holds around 48,000 litres; the same footprint sloping to 2.2 m goes past 60,000. That is a difference of more than 20% in chemical consumption, every month.

The lining matters too. A liner needs tighter pH control to keep its elasticity and cannot be scrubbed with steel brushes. A tiled or mosaic pool has grout lines that hold biofilm and need more attention at the waterline. Painted concrete grows porous over the years and consumes more chlorine than it looks like it should.

Above-ground and seasonal frame pools follow a different logic from in-ground pools and are quoted separately.

Treatment system: salt, chlorine or automated dosing

A salt chlorinator makes its own chlorine and uses less product, but it means watching the cell, the pH and the hardness — and descaling regularly in hard-water areas. A traditional chlorine pool spends more on product and less on equipment.

If you have automatic pH and chlorine dosing, much of the manual work disappears and visits shift towards checking, calibrating and mechanical maintenance. UV or ozone systems cut the chlorine needed but add lamps and cells with a service life of their own.

On the first visit our team identifies what is installed and what condition it is genuinely in before proposing any plan. A system undersized for the pool's volume costs money every month until it is corrected.

Location, exposure and access

A pool in Cascais or Estoril, a few hundred metres from the sea, sits in salt aerosol that corrodes equipment and calls for more frequent rinsing. A pool ringed by pines or eucalyptus fills skimmer baskets with needles and pollen for months. A pool sheltered in an inner courtyard in Lisbon carries far less external load.

Access counts as well: a plant room outdoors with space around the pump and filter means work takes minutes; equipment wedged into a storeroom with no room to move doubles the time on any intervention.

Distance matters too, but less than people assume. We cover Greater Lisbon and the Silver Coast on planned routes, and travel cost dilutes when your pool sits on the team's run. It is worth asking — at plenty of addresses the answer is better than you expect.

Visit frequency and time of year

This is the single biggest lever on the monthly figure. A pool in daily summer use needs a weekly visit; the same pool in November holds steady on one visit a month. A year-round plan with varying frequency — weekly from June to September, fortnightly in spring and autumn, monthly through winter — costs far less than a fixed weekly plan and looks after the pool in exactly the same way.

That is also why seasonal plans exist. If you only use the pool between April and October, paying all year makes no sense — but keeping the filtration running through winter still does, because a pool left standing for five months costs more to recover than it would have cost to maintain.

The state the pool is in when we start

A balanced pool goes straight onto a maintenance plan. A green pool, a clogged filter or months without treatment needs recovery first: shock treatment, continuous filtration, several backwashes and often flocculant and new filter media.

That recovery is quoted once and kept separate from the monthly figure. We always say which part is recovery and which part is maintenance, so you know exactly what you are paying on the first invoice and what you pay from the second month onwards.

Why we quote instead of publishing a price list

A fixed price list is easy to publish and easy to compare — but it forces one of two things: overcharging the straightforward pools to cover the difficult ones, or arriving with a price that has to be revised once we see the site. Neither strikes us as honest.

We would rather see the pool, test the water, check the equipment and propose a figure that holds. The quote is free, carries no obligation and arrives within 24 hours. If you then want to compare it against other proposals, the factors above are exactly what to ask anyone else about.