Condo and HOA pool maintenance in Tulum

A condo pool is not a house pool with more cubic metres. A committee decides on it, dozens of people who do not look after it use it, and it is paid out of a fee someone has to justify at the owners meeting. From $2,400 MXN per month per pool, with an invoice, a contract and a written log after every visit.

We service shared condominium pools across Tulum: from eight-unit buildings in La Veleta and Región 15 to high-turnover developments in Aldea Zamá, Luum Zama, Selvazama and La Ceiba. We deal with the administration or the board, one contact and one invoice.

Why a shared pool behaves differently

The difference is not size, it is load. A private 30 m3 pool takes two or three people a few days a week. The shared pool of a twelve-unit building takes sunscreen, insect repellent, body oil, sand and sweat every day of the year, and every body that gets in consumes chlorine. In a building with half the units on vacation rental, that load also arrives concentrated from Friday to Sunday.

That produces the same three failures in almost every condominium in Tulum:

• The chlorine does not reach day seven. The water looks fine on Tuesday and smells of swimming pool on Sunday, which is the opposite signal to the one people read: that smell is chloramines, chlorine already spent.
• The filter saturates early. Sunscreen and oil do not get filtered, they stick. A sand filter that needs one backwash a week in a house needs two in a condominium.
• Nobody owns the problem. The owner who sees cloudy water tells the guard, the guard tells the administrator and the administrator calls when it has already gone green. Recovering it costs seven times a single visit.

What the administration needs and rarely gets

An administrator is not buying cleaning: they are buying the ability to answer at the owners meeting. So the service is built around four deliverables, not adjectives.

• A log for every visit. Date, technician, free chlorine, pH, alkalinity, what was done and a before and after photo. Without written readings there is no way to know whether the service worked or whether somebody simply walked past with a net.
• One monthly invoice in the name of the condominium, itemised however your accounting needs. If the development has more than one pool, the ground-floor one and the rooftop one go on the same invoice as separate lines.
• A closed annual price for the budget. The monthly figure times twelve, plus a separate estimated line for parts, is what gets voted. No mid-year adjustments.
• A private page with a password for the administration and, if they decide so, for the board: the full visit history with photos and readings, readable from a phone. You can see how it works on the clients page.

If the board needs documentary backing in front of the owners, the Mexican standard that applies to collective-use pools is NOM-245-SSA1-2010. What we add is the dated written record of every visit so that file exists.

The surge tank nobody saw coming

A good share of the newer condo pools in Tulum are overflow designs: the water spills over the edge into a channel and from there into a buried surge tank. That tank is in practice the real bottom of the pool, and it is where everything the skimmer missed ends up: sand, leaves, insects and the fine sediment that comes with well water.

In a five-year-old building that never opened it, what we find is usually two or three fingers of sludge and a pump working against it. The symptoms are familiar: the level drops on its own, the pump draws air, the water goes cloudy two days after a cleaning and the electricity bill climbs. Draining and cleaning the surge tank costs $1,800 MXN and, on an overflow pool in daily use, comes round once or twice a year. We put it in the proposal from the start so it does not show up as a surprise halfway through the financial year.

Well water, scale and the finish of a shared pool

Tulum fills its pools with well water drawn through limestone: hard, with a saturation index that pushes towards scaling. In a private pool you notice that over years. In a condo pool, where evaporation is topped up almost daily because somebody is always splashing water out, the calcium keeps coming in and settles on the waterline, on the steps and inside the equipment.

We hold calcium hardness between 200 and 400 ppm and pH between 7.2 and 7.6 precisely for that reason: it is not a textbook number, it is what stops the rooftop edge ending up with a white band that then has to be taken off with acid and refinishing. The full detail is in the chlorine and pH guide, and if the pool runs on salt, in the salt versus chlorine comparison for Tulum, where well-water scale hits the chlorinator cell directly.

How many visits it really needs

We do not decide this at quoting time. For the first four weeks we measure free chlorine on day seven and, if it falls below 1 ppm before the next visit, we say so with the readings in hand. Raising the frequency without measuring it is selling visits.

Company or individual: the honest comparison

There are good, cheap independent technicians in Tulum. The difference is not who cleans better on any given day, it is what happens the rest of the year.

What the monthly price covers

• Four visits a month, a fixed day of the week and the same technician on your route
• Chlorine, pH and alkalinity adjusters, preventive algaecide and clarifier
• Full cleaning: surface, floor, walls, steps, skimmer, baskets and waterline
• Backwash and filter pressure check on every visit
• Pump, timer and circulation checked, with early warning if something starts to fail
• Log with readings and photos, plus password access for the administration
• Emergency attention between visits, weekends included

Outside the monthly price, and always approved in writing beforehand: parts and equipment, filter media replacement ($2,200 MXN), surge tank cleaning ($1,800 MXN), salt cell cleaning ($900 MXN) and tanker refills. The full table is on the pricing page.

How we start

First we come and look at the pool: real volume, condition of the equipment, type of filter, whether it is an overflow design, how loaded the surge tank is and how full the building runs. That visit produces a written proposal with the monthly price, the annual price and the items worth budgeting separately. That is the document you take to the board.

Message us on WhatsApp at +52 984 208 8235 with the name of the building and the area. We cover all of Tulum and the corridor; the full list is on service areas. If what you manage is individual houses and villas on rental, the right service is Airbnb and rental villa pools; if it is a hotel or a small lodging, it is hotel pools.