pools constantly down

From experience and reading here: Pools, spas, elevators and entry gates persistently cause problems at HOAs/COAs. They cost a lot to fix. Getting parts, especially these days, is often a problem. Hiring skilled technicians is a huge challenge these days.

In my experience, it's likely that the board and management have little control over the shut-downs.

I think your best option is to get on the board and see up-close why the HOA/COA struggles to get repairs on the pool done. I agree 43 times in 18 months sounds excessive. But shoot, my municipal pool and spa is shut down several hours a week for maintenance. Even this regularly scheduled maintenance is not enough to preclude spontaneous shut-downs, especially of the spa, from time to time.

Perhaps our gated 200-unit HOA with pool & spa is unusual, and I've been posting here a for quite a while and haven't noticed a barrage of complaints about pools being shut down. I'd say in a year, ours is closed off & on for maybe a total of two weeks. I'd say the spa is the same, though it was down for a couple of weeks solid when the heater wasn't available.

We do have a few posters here now & then with pool issues due to vandalism, after hours misconduct, etc. My post is about normal use)

I was on the Board for a long time until a year ago and part of our job was to make sure our pool vendor followed the contract. Some tasks are beyond his scope so various specialists must be contacted by our PM.

As an owner, you have every right to read the pool vendor contract. To Jackie's point, it's possible your assn. isn't paying enough for adequate service. Btw, Our contact for '23 was increased a lot due to inflation. If your board's trying to cut corners, pool maintenance might take a hit.

Where I live is a 55 plus retirement community owned by Sun Community. Responsibility on pool maint belongs to the owner, Sun Community. Residents have an Home owner association. Not much of one. Money raised by the HOA is from the price to join (only $5 a year) and social functions. Anyway, residents are discussing what options we may have (as residents), to force the owner to keep up with the pools and hot tubs.

I'm an HOA president.

The pool was closed 43 times in an 18 month period? 2.39 times per month? That's indicative with some major issues with the either the equipment, the underground plumbing, or the pool and spa themselves.

We have our community pool and spa operational for over 40 years. Everything in our pool equipment room (as we call it) has been replaced 3-4 times including heaters, pumps, filters, and above ground plumbing over the years. We had an underground water feed leak that was detected and fixed. We've replastered and retiled the pool and spa twice and I'm about to enter into a contract to replaster again for the 3rd time.

If I were to guess, I want to say that in 42 years of operation, our pool and spa has been down for repairs not much more than 80 days. The pool replaster jobs were the most time consuming project, and those took no more the 15 days each. One luxury that we have is that our pool service who maintains our equipment does an excellent job of looking ahead and forecasting when certain parts will need replacement. This gives us the opportunity to shop for the best parts deals and to warehouse the parts until they are needed. It also also allows me to account for these future costs in our budget so that we're not surprised and unprepared by projecting these costs as planned expenses as opposed to dealing with them as emergency repairs.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to get a 3rd party pool service to come in and assess the pool, spa, and all related equipment and to see if their assessment matches the information that Sun pool services is providing you. For all you know, Sun pool service might be nickel and dime-ing you to death with small short-term fixes, which when added up over time, may cost more than doing a more expensive proper fix to the pool equipment.

Example: You can overhaul a pool filter over and over again until the cows come home, but the cumulative repair cost can exceed the cost of a brand new pump which would result in less breakdowns. There's also some maintenance that is often avoided because it considered unnecessary, such as draining and acid washing the pool and spa and looking for plaster imperfections every 5 years. This needs to be done to remove the loose plaster which ends up clogging up the pool filters.

The message here is it's a bad idea to short cut or cheap out on pool services. If you can't afford the pool, then close it up and bury it.

There's a science to keeping a pool maintained and operational, and it starts by working with a pool service who is transparent, provides constant communications about the health of the swimming pool, and works proactively with the homeowner/HOA on what needs to be done to keep the pool at the peak of its performance.