By taking advantage of a few easy swimming pool maintenance tips, you can easily make yourself the most profitable customer your local pool business has ever seen.

1. Don't clean your pool! A dirty pool is an expensive pool (expensive for you, profitable for your local pool business). The more you let your pool go, the more it will cost to get things back together again. Do you see leaves in there? By all means, let them sit. Are random foreign objects floating around in your pool? Sure, let them stay. Anything that doesn't belong in the pool, it shouldn't cause any problems, right? Likewise, it's a waste of time to be brushing your pool... especially the dead spots where algae is likely to grow. Your pool company will love you, knowing that you'll need to be buying algaecide, shock, and possibly other products to clean up a mess. Your pool business would love for you to let your pool go.

2. Never empty your skimmer or pump baskets. Those baskets are meant to permanently store all the debris that they catch. That's what baskets are for, right? Storage! It would be a far greater hassle to empty that skimmer basket every few days, as opposed to letting it break and having to buy a new one (at $15 a pop) with great regularity. Not only that, but it's good for your pool to be choking on the water circulation. Forcing your pump to work harder only makes it stronger, right? No pain, no gain. When your skimmer basket breaks, letting debris get through, let that same junk sit in your pump basket for a while. You can break two baskets with only one load of debris! After your pump basket breaks, that's when the real excitement begins. You'll have all sorts of chunks flying through the rest of the pump, and being forced into the filter. Hoorah! All the equipment is getting some exercise now! Hopefully something will break, which will further ingratiate you with your favorite pool place. After all, cleaning out those baskets is far more trouble than it's worth, right?

3. If you see algae, brush it and hope it goes away. It's a well-known fact that scrubbing algae kills it, as opposed to the nonsense of using concentrated chlorine on it. After all, even though algae was actually growing in the pool, there still should be enough chlorine in the pool to kill that stuff. The idea of actually shocking the pool wouldn't make any sense then, would it? By all means, wipe away the algae and then continue on your merry way. It's not like it will come back, right? Your pool company would much rather you waited until your algae becomes a significant problem, and growing everywhere before you take an interest in treating it. So do your pool business a favor and wait until there's algae everywhere before you decide to do anything about it.

4. Buy all your chemicals in as small amount as humanly possible. If you need some shock or chlorine sticks, make sure you get them in the smallest container available. You want to avoid those larger containers like the plague. Not only are those larger containers of the dreaded economical type, and not only do they cost you less per pound, but they will keep you from being required to regularly visit your favorite pool business.

Keep in mind, these tips are only useful if you want to be as financially supportive as possible to your local pool company. If you'd rather save money, or spend it on something other than your pool, you would do best to ignore all this advice, or even do the opposite.