Pump run-time in the Central-Texas winter?

[aquarium]

Now that our ice storm has melted, I put the plugs back in and turned the pumps on for a while to get the leaves out of the water. All working fine and very little need to add chlorine or acid. The storms tend to blow through here about once a week for the next several weeks, so taking the plugs out that often isn't really a chore. I discovered they are plastic and hold their seal even if finger tight, at least for a while.

[aquarium]

Dunno if anyone is still reading, but I let it go two weeks without a pump run, and other than a collection of small debris on the bottom the pool did fine. I've run it for a few hours over the last couple of days just to clean up a bit, but I'm pretty sure I could have let it go indefinitely until spring arrives. Our electric bill has dropped significantly and I'm going to turn back the summer runtime too.

EDIT: My recent maintenance consisted of adding a little muriatic acid and bleach twice a week (amount based on either testing or prior experience) and then using a leaf net to clean the water surface and to stir the water.

[joelq]

Hi - for what it's worth, I live the the Dallas-area, and I've been running my pool 1.5 hours everyday, and that seems to be enough to keep the water sparkling. I did throw in about 1/3 gallon of bleach the other day (11k gallon pool), just in case, as my FC was down to 0.5 ppm.

[dawndenise]

Tom/aquarium...yes, I'm still reading and interested to see how your experiments are coming along.

After the initial postings, I turned off my scheduled times and let the pool go with just the freeze protection, since it was coming on for parts of almost every night anyway. Recently, I broke down and put on 2 hours of run time during the part of the day I was home so I could admire the waterfall.

The pool water temp actually got up to 50 degrees yesterday, but a front came through and I think it'll be back to the 40's for the foreseeable future.

Joelq...good to hear other pools can survive with reduced pump time, too.