Cleaning the Doggy Pool

We get asked a lot to share how we do things behind the scenes. Some people are just curious but a lot of messages and emails we get are from other dog day cares asking how to do certain aspects of the business. How we manage to keep the place looking good and more importantly safe for the doggies. There really is so much to it and whilst also raising a young family we simply often just don’t have the time to make a video or put together all the information. We’re also a little family business trying to make it in the world and some things are just trade secrets that we’ve really spent a lot of time and a whole bucket of money testing to get exactly right. We do share a whole lot on social media, I’d say more than most dog day cares with our 20-30 minute videos every day that show many facets of the business. But we can’t show everything, everyday. It just isn’t physically possible. Every one additional thing added is another hour or so in filming, editing and posting. We start filming before 9am and don’t finish until 8 or 9pm posting. So I try to focus on something each week or so as a special, and then move onto something else, on top of all the activities. Like the go pro - doggy perspectives, we did those for a few weeks and then moved on to the bus arrivals or pick ups at the bus stops. If you go to our YouTube channel you can go back through the videos to see highlights on parts of the business you may have missed. There’s also an FAQs section on our website with a lot of common questions answered and some have video references. But we still want to share a little more of the business side with everyone, here and there just when we can.

So today we made a short video about just one part of the process of cleaning the heated pool. We’re in a very unique situation when it comes to pool cleanliness. We are a farm dog day care with up to 40 dirty dogs using it at once over a 2-3 hour period each day. It’s not just hair and bacteria it’s also all the solid particles you can imagine found on a farm. Dirt, dust, mud, clay, sand etc. Water is scarce living on a rural farm so doing a pre rinse is not always an option.

We have two dog pools now. The big 260,000 litre sports pool and the small heated 80,000 litre hydro therapy pool. We run many large sand filters, have a pool specialist that comes out almost every day at the moment, we have vacuums that run off peak and both pools are treated with a mineral magnesium blend.

This video is about just one part of the process only. Your first point of call if you have questions regarding your pool for your dogs be it for personal use or for business use, should in all instances be to your pool or water specialist. They know so much more than you could find yourself on Google and simply asking another dog day care.

This part of the process is called flocking. We use a natural eco friendly flocculant. A water clarifying agent. Whilst the sand filters and vacuuming pick up and treat some of the problem there is a lot of waste from the farm and from dogs that is too light and is dispersed throughout the water that can’t be picked up. Hair and dust isn’t like leaves. It lives all throughout the water and to get every bit of it you need a flocculant to clump it all together and sink it to the bottom to carefully suck up.

The flocculant is applied once a week on the Friday afternoon/evening after all the dogs have gone home. You can’t flock every day it can mess up the process and won’t work. Throughout the Friday night the flocculant works through the pool and all the particles clump together and sink to the bottom. On Saturday mornings we vacuum it all up.

Fun facts about the heated pool:

Each week we lose 10,000 litres out of the pool just from dogs taking water out in their coats each time they get in and out of the water.

One gas cylinder usually runs a normal household for two months. We use 8 x 45kg gas cylinders a week heating the dog pool. This is why we only heat the small 80,000 litre pool and not the 260,000 litre sports one.

On a normal pool you might clean the filters once a week through the peak period. We clean the filters four times a day.

Because we’re constantly putting fresh water in the pool due to the water loss, we have to add approximately 10 x 25kg bags of Magnesium across the month, with endless testing and balancing constantly. To put into perspective, a normal pool used for personal use might not need magnesium levels changed/increased for up to 6 months.

We run the pool at 32 degrees Celsius which is the optimal range for canine hydro therapy. To reach and maintain this temperature you need some hefty power. Solar heating will not achieve the temperature required.

Видео Cleaning the Doggy Pool канала The Farm