How to Optimize Pool Integration with Home Assistant – What Are Your Setups?

Hardware
1

Hi everyone,

I’m looking to optimize the integration of my saltwater swimming pool with Home Assistant and would love to hear how others have approached this. Let me share some details about my setup and goals to provide context.

Pool Details

Based on the pump curve and the volume of my pool, I calculated the optimal running time for the pump for each season. To control the pump, I installed a Shelly switch for automated start and stop functionality. Volume of the pool is approximately 32.3 m³ (20.18 m² surface area with a depth of 1.6 m).

Home Assistant Goals

I would like to automate the pool’s operation using Home Assistant and potentially integrate additional sensors or systems. For example:

  1. Temperature Control: Monitor and act based on water and air temperatures.

  2. Energy Monitoring: Track the pump’s power consumption over time.

  3. Chlorine Levels: Automate or monitor chlorine production via sensors.

  4. Frost Alerts: Trigger automated actions during freezing temperatures.

Questions for the Community

  1. What equipment do you use to connect your pool to Home Assistant?
    I’m particularly interested in smart relays, sensors, or pumps that integrate seamlessly.

  2. How do you manage your pool’s automation?
    Do you trigger actions based on external weather data, or use specific thresholds for water quality?

  3. Any tips for optimizing pool maintenance with Home Assistant?
    I’d love to hear about your setups, any recommendations for hardware, or creative solutions you’ve implemented. If anyone has suggestions for specific integrations, dashboards, or automations, I’d be grateful to learn more.

Thanks in advance for sharing your insights!

2

As it warms up, I’m just trying to keep this thread alive. I’m scouring github/HA for active projects… lots of them haven’t been updated since 2019. Anyone out there have throughts?

3

Warning: long post ahead—but if you’re into pools, Home Assistant, or solar nerdiness, read on.

I’ve got a Pentair ScreenLogic system tied into Home Assistant via the native integration. It works pretty well, though it’s a bit limited by what Pentair actually exposes. Still, it’s enough to ditch the onboard scheduling and hand control over to HA. We live in the desert, so our pool runs year-round—no winterizing here!

Once I got the HA integration stable, I completely removed the programmed schedules from the Pentair side and let Home Assistant take the wheel. We recently installed solar panels, so energy management became a new obsession. (We already had old-school solar pool heating—the black coil tubes on the roof—so solar’s not exactly new to the pool.)

A few years back, I upgraded our crusty old 2-speed pump to a variable-speed model. Huge difference. For reference:

  • 1500 RPM → 216 watts
  • 3390 RPM → 2300 watts
    …same pump, same pool, wildly different energy draw.

This past winter, our pump was down for a couple months (long story), and weirdly… the pool stayed crystal clear. Got me thinking: maybe we’re all running our pumps way more than needed? It seems like most pool “wisdom” is built around the idea of keeping customers happy—not necessarily optimizing for energy.

Some common recommendations I found:

  • 10–12 hours/day in summer, 6–8 in winter
  • Filter the total gallons of your pool once per day
  • One hour of runtime for every 10°F of air temp

There’s no definitive answer out there, so I’ve been experimenting. Now that runtime is handled by Home Assistant, I run the pump at high speed for just 2 hours (mainly to get the skimmers pulling properly), then switch to low speed to complete the cycle.

Here’s where it gets fun: I use a HA template that grabs the pool temperature during the high-speed window, and calculates the low-speed runtime needed to hit my filtering goal. Each day, it recalculates based on updated water temp. It’s kind of like a pool butler who also understands math.

Every month or so I eyeball the water clarity and adjust as needed. So far, I’ve been steadily reducing runtime without sacrificing water quality. The endgame is simple: gorgeous pool, minimal watts.

What’s currently working:

  • High speed for 2 hrs/day (gets the skimmers humming)
  • Low speed runtime is dynamically calculated based on water temp
  • Solar heating kicks in when water gets close to swimmable—it really stretches the swimming season
  • At night, that same solar plumbing cools the pool when it gets too hot (low speed only, to keep energy use down)
  • HA turns on pool lights automatically when we’re entertaining
  • Freeze protection logic runs the pump when needed, and that runtime gets subtracted from the next day’s schedule

Still to-do: dig into water chemistry automation. But for now, energy optimization is in full swing—and it’s working.

Would love to hear if anyone else has gone down this rabbit hole, or found better heuristics for runtime control!