What do you get ?

Premier Standard Kit

52" high steel Pool wall, galvanised metal top and bottom support rails, 3 inch square pressed metal support legs, 4 inch wide metal top deck, 20 mil/.5mm/500 micron thick plain blue pvc liner, skimmer, flexible tubing to big 16 inch diameter sand filter, Doughboy 1 h.p. non self priming pump, 2 bags of filter sand, painted metal steps with plastic treads, or equivalent deck ladder. Full instructions.

Premier Super Kit

Standard Kit plus

(0.2mm/200 micron) thick solar cover,

pool cleaning kit that uses the suction from your pump and plugs into the skimmer comprising extending handle, brush, hose, leaf net

1kg chlorine, 1.5kg ph - (use of chlorine pushes the alkalinity of your pool up, and you have to adjust it down) 1kg ph +, 1/2 litre of algicide, chlorine level test strips. Maintenance manual

Regent Standard Kit

as Premier except

the top deck components are resin (plastic) which is better because metal top deck components, in our experience are liable to corrosion after 10 years

the ladder is the Deluxe Doughboy A frame safety ladder 48/52 inch in Resin, (or Deck ladder equivalent), which in our opinion is far better than the ladder supplied with the Premier

Regent Super Kit

the cover, cleaning and chemicals are the same as with the Premier.

components subject to change, and are based on our understanding as at 30th January 2008

Doughboy Upgrades

You are going to pay £88 to have a pallet delivered from Doughboy, so it makes sense to load that pallet up with as much Doughboy sourced kit as possible to save on carriage charges. If you buy your pool from use-it-more, we will give you incredibly good prices on additional equipment bought at the same time and supplied on the same pallet.

1)    The Doughboy Pump is powerful, but it is not self-priming, which means it doesn't cope well with air that gets into its supply pipes, and it may be difficult to get it to pump if the pump is higher than the water outlet of the pool e.g. if you've sunk the pool in the ground. Doughboy will instead supply a Speck pump of approximately half the power as a no cost option. This is fine if you are only going to filter your water, but for an upgrade cost of around £50 you can change to a pump that will run an automatic pool cleaner effectively and cope with additional equipment and longer pipe runs.

2)    The ladder in the Premier Kit is not the most robust you can find, and you might want to swap it for the Resin A frame ladder or Deluxe Resin Deck ladder at a cost of around £80, or the Stainless Steel Deck Ladder for around £175 more. (Please enquire when purchasing)

3)    If you are going to put a deck round your pool you won't need to climb up to get into your pool, you just need to climb down, so you need a Deck ladder.  Upgrading the Resin Deck ladder on the Regent to the Stainless Steel Deck ladder costs around £50.   (Please enquire when purchasing)

4)    A Deeper Pool. (See Below) If you'd like a deeper pool you can dig down lower that the pool walls and use an Expandable Liner. This can add about a foot of depth on a 12 foot diameter pool (up to 7 feet deep on a big pool). This is a special order an the upgrade would cost only £70 on a 12 foot diameter pool.

5)    Simple winter cover

6)    Alto Heat Pump

OUR PRICES

ALTO 12kw (equivalent) Horizontal flow. Our Price £1232

ALTO 12kw (equivalent) Horizontal flow - Titanium for use with salt water chlorinated pools. Our Price £1360

ALTO 15kw (equivalent) Our Price £1615 (right hand picture)

Now in their 2nd year of sale in the UK these are are popular entry-level Summer-use-only Heat Pumps.  (See also our "Heat Pumps" page).  Very convenient in that they can come on the same pallet as your pool from Doughboy, saving carriage costs and coming with either the flexible or rigid pipe connections required.

They come with a 1 year Parts and Labour guarantee, with some internal parts guaranteed for 3 years. Service will be provided by an established network of air conditioning engineers.

This is pure opinion based on personal experience.

1)    Paying for a pool kit, such as the Regent at the £1000 + price level, is likely to prove much much better value than buying a budget £300 or £400 pool with its inferior equipment. Pools at the £300 or £400 level allow you to get wet when its really hot in the summer but not much more than that. But for £1000+ you can get a pool that will have a much longer life and which is worth upgrading. Beware of some other cheap makes of steel walled pool that have little in the way of support legs and top rail deck. They lack rigidity, can be liable to corrosion, impact damage and early failure.

2)    My 10 year old Doughboy has some limited  corrosion in the pool wall, but that is my own fault. I should have followed the instructions and painted the exposed metal edge of the skimmer and outlets with enamel paint to stop a bit of rust creeping in there. A little bit of enamel paint on the cut edges of the metal legs would also have been a good idea, because a bit of corrosion has crept in there as well. The metal top deck has a bit of corrosion in places, which is why I think the resin (plastic) top deck of the Regent pool is probably better. The liner is still original and water-tight although I have bleached it slightly in places where, again against instructions I've tipped too much chlorine in in one place.

 3)    Doughboy pools are made in Arkansas USA and the designs date back 60 years.

4)     Although above-ground pools are frequently advertised as packages, if you go to a good dealer it should be possible to but the individual components separately, should you need to in the future.

Doughboy pools are easy to install - but you must stretch the liner.  You do this by starting with the centre of the liner some 1 foot above the ground and with some 2 feet of liner down the outside of the pool wall. You can also clip the liner to the top deck of the pool wall using jubilee type clips and bits of cardboard to protect the liner. As you pour water on top of the liner the weight of water will begin to stretch it and as the tension increases on the liner you gradually feed it into the pool.  This should give a wrinkle-free finish.

SIDE WALLS of  pools installed above-ground

2008 will be the third year we've been selling insulation products for above ground pools.  We have a variety of foam and bubble materials in stock that can be attached to the outside walls of the pools.

For 2008 however we are concentrating on transparent, inflatable, pvc panels that can be blown up and attached to the side walls of Doughboy pools by means of clips.  We are concentrating on the inflatable panels because they look good and are inexpensive to store and transport.  Since all Doughboy pools in 2008 have the same 3inch square support legs, the insulation panels can be easily and effectively attached by means of our "clip-over" pattern clips.  The "clip-behind" pattern clips can be used to secure panels between the buttress legs of the oval pools.

SURFACE

Loss of heat by evaporation of water from the surface is a major factor. A 200 micron solar cover will do much to minimise this. A 400 micron solar cover will additionally help reduce conduction and convection losses from the surface.  To improve this still further requires a foam heat retention cover.  Please enquire.

1)    Spend money on insulating your pool, before you spend it on buying a heater.

2)    Low end solar heating is really only effective when it's so hot you don't really need it. High end systems are effective but still have a long pay-back period.

3)    Small electric Elecro and Garden Leisure heaters e.g. 3kw and 5kw are bought by web retailers in bulk and sold very cheaply on E-Bay and pool web-sites. They are worth having as a stand-by, but don't expect them to make much difference other than in Summer or in a well insulated pool.

4)    Heat Pumps are well worth the money because they can create as much as 5 units of heat for each unit of power put in (in high summer at least). The Alto Heat Pumps from Doughboy are an entry-level product, but if the budget stretches that far the all-year-round products from Elecro or Calorex may provide you with the heat you need when you most need it - i.e. the beginning and the end of the season. (See separate page)

:- The question virtually everyone asks.

Lots of people do. My own pool is inset into a slope by about 18 inches and back-filled with sand and the side wall protected from soil contact by polythene and foam.

Doughboy say you can install below ground, but they also suggest it's a professional job. They advise against back-filling with earth (you might need to empty the pool to replace the liner at some future date) and suggest back-filling with a brittle concrete mix made with plaster (soft/mortar) sand or having a retaining wall between pool and soil, or on compacted soils having a slope down to the bottom of the pool wall and covering the void with decking. There is a set of instructions available on request. (The hyperlink below may take some time to load - I can send you a paper version).

In Ground Installation Instructions

Soil can exert a very considerable force especially if there is clay in it or if it is not free draining. A normal in-ground pool would have a strong ring-beam structure to cope with this.

So the truthful answer is, yes you can install below-ground but unless you are a professional pool installer and follow the "Below-Grade Installation Instructions" you potentially void the warranty.