Opening and closing a pool: planning a season’s rush

A pool service firm near Thun looks after sixty private pools. From November to March hardly anyone calls. In April everyone gets in touch in the same week, and in October the picture repeats in the opposite direction. In between there are service visits every few weeks and the call because the water has turned green.

This article describes how firms can plan this double rush: what sets it apart from the rest of the year, what plays a part in weather, water and working hours, and what a weekly overview can look like. It is written for firms that look after private pools, whirlpools and swim spas. It does not replace a legal assessment of an individual case.

Two peaks and a long plateau

A pool service year has an unusual shape. The work piles up in two places, and both times almost every pool needs the same job.

Time	Kind of visit	What marks it
Spring	Opening	Many pools at once, each with a longer visit
Summer	Service	Short, regular visits, plus calls about faults
Autumn	Closing	Many pools at once, each with a longer visit
Winter	little	Repairs, quotes, preparing the next season

Exactly when the peaks fall depends on altitude, weather and what clients prefer. What matters for planning is the arithmetic behind it. An example, not a benchmark: sixty pools at two and a half hours each make 150 working hours. Three people working 40 hours a week deliver 120 hours a week. Closing those sixty pools then fills a little more than a week, without travel time, without rainy days and without pools that are only ready later.

The same arithmetic can be done per week and per town. It shows in which week more visits are due than there are hours, before clients’ calls show it.

From the season list to the weekly overview

A simple form is a list of all pools with a tick per visit. That is enough while the list is short. As it grows, two views that complement each other are needed:

• A season round: all openings or all closings as one list, grouped by week and town, with the number of visits that still have no day.
• A weekly overview: on the left the visits without a day, on the right one column per person with the planned hours against the hours available.

Visits in the same municipality or neighbourhood can be put on one day, which saves travel time. A visit that did not happen in its week slips into the next and pushes the others.

What weather and water set

Two things influence on which day a pool can be worked on: the weather and the question of where the water goes. The environment office of the canton of Solothurn describes in a leaflet (as of March 2026) for private swimming pools, including mobile pools, how the waste water is to be handled. The leaflet applies to the canton of Solothurn; how it is regulated in other cantons and municipalities may differ. For the permit to discharge into the public sewer it names the local building authority.

It says the following on emptying a pool:

• All waste water from emptying the pool, backwashing the filter and cleaning counts as polluted waste water and belongs in the public foul sewer.
• Emptying is allowed only in dry weather and throttled to at most 2 l/s.
• The pool is emptied only once the disinfection system is out of operation and any chlorine tablets are removed or dissolved. After that the leaflet names a waiting time of at least 48 hours so that the disinfectant loses its effect.
• The pH of the discharged water must be between 6.5 and 9.0.
• Filter backwashing runs only until the rinse water is clear.

If a day is lost to rain, the open visits move to the next working day. An overview that moves a whole day with one action saves re-scheduling each visit one by one.

Employees’ working hours

In peak season teams work longer and differently spread hours. SECO’s page on working time recording states that under Art. 73 of Ordinance 1 to the Labour Act (ArGV 1) the duration, start and end of daily and weekly working time must be recorded, including breaks of 30 minutes or more. In firms with fewer than 50 employees, simplified recording can be agreed in writing with individual employees under Art. 73b. How these rules apply to a particular firm is for the employer to clarify.

In practice, a firm that already records hours per visit and person in the report has the figures for the invoice and for working time from the same source.

What the water rules in this article do not cover

The ordinance on drinking water and water in publicly accessible baths and shower facilities (TBDV, SR 817.022.11) defines a publicly accessible bath as one that is open to the general public or to an authorised group of people and is not intended for family use. Such baths have their own requirements for water quality and staff. Whether a particular pool, for example one in an apartment block, falls under it is not answered here.

How the idea fits

Our idea for pool service firms starts from this course of the year: the app will create the visits from each pool’s season plan, show in a season round how many openings and closings fall due per week and how many have no day yet, and move a whole day with one action in rain or illness. Hours per person are meant to be recorded in the report and exported every month.