Green pool cleaning and recovery in Miami
You went away for nine days in August and came back to a pond. It happens to good pools here every summer. Most of them come back clear in three to five days without draining a drop.
What it costs, before you ask
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Typical Miami range: $350 to $700
The spread is wide because green is not one condition. A pool you can still see the bottom of is at the low end. A pool with frogs in it, a filter full of dead algae and a salt cell that quit two months ago is at the high end, and it might need a filter service on top.
We quote after the first test, not before. If it turns out the plaster is stained under the algae, we will tell you that too. A stain is a separate job and no amount of chlorine fixes it.
How long does a green pool take?
Three to five days for most Miami pools. A week or more if it has been sitting since the last hurricane and you cannot see the second step. Anyone promising same day is either draining it or selling you a dye job.
Day 1
Test, net, and hit it hard
We test first, because the fix depends on whether cyanuric acid is at 40 or at 130. Then the big debris comes out by net, the baskets get cleared, and the pool takes its first shock dose. We do not vacuum yet. Vacuuming green water just clouds it.
Day 2
Filter runs, chlorine holds
Pump runs around the clock. We come back, retest, and dose again to hold chlorine up. Water usually turns from green to grey or milky blue here. That colour change looks worse to most people and it is actually the algae dying.
Day 3
Backwash, brush, repeat
Dead algae loads the filter fast, so it gets cleaned or backwashed, sometimes twice. Walls and floor get brushed properly now. Chlorine gets held again. On a mild bloom, this is the last hard day.
Day 4 to 5
Vacuum out and balance
Once the water is clear enough to see the floor, the settled dead algae gets vacuumed to waste rather than back through the filter. Then pH, alkalinity and stabiliser get set properly, and the pool goes on a normal weekly schedule.
Why we will not just drain it and start over
Draining sounds like the fast answer and in South Florida it is the expensive one. The water table here sits high, and after a wet week it sits very high. An empty pool shell in saturated ground can lift, and a lifted shell is a structural repair, not a cleaning bill.
Draining also cooks the finish. Plaster and marcite that dry out in Miami sun crack and craze, and a pool that came back clear would have come back with a rough grey shell instead. There are real reasons to drain, mostly calcium hardness that has climbed too far to fix any other way, and those get done with the water table checked first.
Same rule applies before a storm. Leave the water in. Our service area pages go through hurricane prep for the neighbourhoods where it matters most.
Send us a photo of it
Text a picture of the pool and tell us roughly how long it has been like that. We can usually give you a recovery price and a start date off one photo.