What Pool ?

November 5th and 6th 2007 sees me exhibiting at "The Back Show" advocating upgrading an above ground pool for use in Hydrotherapy.

My handout produced for the show updates my thinking as originally written some 18 months previously. Please click on the link.

Warm Water Therapy Handout for "The Back Show"

Subsequent to writing this I wrote the article that's appeared in "Home Pools and Hot Tubs" click on Upgrade.pdf and produced the guide to buying the Doughboy pool I recommended click on Doughboy Pools

This is a personal view based on 15 years of owning above ground pools, adding to them, altering them and inventing patenting and manufacturing new products to make them more enjoyable. Most above ground pools are bought on extremely hot days are only used 2 or 3 times a year and lie neglected and green for the rest of the year. I thought that was silly, so here is some advice to USE THEM MORE.

I can source and give you a good price on the equipment mentioned, but I also tell you where else you can get it from. See the Links page. Where I give guide prices, they are what I would sell it for before vat. I pitch my prices to retain about half of the retail margin I can obtain.

Surveys have shown that adding a pool to your house may not add value to it. In fact some people hate water, swimming pools, the idea of maintaining them and dread the prospect of someone drowning. Some houses with pools can be difficult to sell and some surveys suggest that a pool can reduce the value of your house by 20%.

Buy a cheap replaceable pool tank (you can get these separately if you ask) and buy good quality equipment to go with it that could be used on any future pool.

Consider having the pool above-ground or only partially set into the ground and decked around. It makes removing or replacing the pool a lot easier.

Big pools are expensive to buy, expensive to fill with water, expensive to heat, expensive to buy chemicals for, hard to keep clean.

Buy a small pool 12 foot diameter is fine and a counter-current swimming machine. I have the most powerful Badu-Jet on my pool with an underwater light so I can swim at night Counter-current swimming machines can be fitted to above ground pools that have a stable top rail, so most of the steel walled pools e.g. Doughboy, and sturdy all-in-one plastic liner pools such as IASO. With a counter-current swimming machine YOU DON'T NEED A BIG UGLY EXPENSIVE POOL.

Insulate your pool. O.K. this is my big thing, but it really makes the difference between a pool that you do use and a pool that you don't.

Most of the heat loss from a pool comes from the water from the pool evaporating and taking the heat from the pool with it. The simple solution to this is keep a bubble cover over the pool. Your pool will still lose a very considerable amount of heat through the surface and through the side walls and to some extent through the bottom. This heat is lost through conduction and convection. The wind takes a lot of heat away, if you wrap your pool with insulation or put it in an enclosure you exclude the wind. Plastic is a reasonable insulator and so is earth. A thicker plastic cover will be more insulating than a thin one. Earth is fairly insulating - but not if it's wet. Of course the very best insulator is air. That's why materials with a lot of air in them are the very best insulators such as expanded polystyrene, expanded polyethylene foam, bubble wrap, or simply a sealed air gap that's not to big and not too small. Plastic metalised bubble covers may possibly work to some extent by letting the sun's radiation through into the pool and then reflecting it back into the pool relying on a change in the wave length of the relative radiations (the greenhouse effect) but I remain to be convinced on this. I suspect that whatever benefit there may be in this is counter-acted by the cover being more blocking to the sun's radiation in the first place, however if you are not relying on the sun to heat your pool, just your heater, there probably is a benefit as the makers claim. As anyone who as tried it will know, the big difficulties of insulating the side walls of an above ground pool are 1) obtaining suitable materials in a suitable size and 2) attaching them to the pool wall without damaging that pool wall. These are the problems I believe I have come a long way to solving.

Any above ground pool can be insulated. Just take a roll of insulation wrap it round your pool and secure with U.V. resistant transparent tape. There are more elegant solutions, and straight sided above ground pools can be insulated better than others. These include the Intex and Garden Leisure and Steel Walled Splashers. Better still to insulate are robust, straight sided pools whose sides don't wobble and which have robust support legs to attach insulation onto or between. Any steel walled pool with support legs can be insulated by using the Clip-Behind type clips, and for a new pool, insulation can be rolled up and placed in the hollow legs. Clip-Over type clips do where they can be used offer a better insulating solution, but you need a more-or-less rectangular leg. The Doughboy models with the 3 inch square section legs seem best and these are I believe, the Havenwood, Sand Dollar, and Whispers pools. Of these I would currently plump for the Whispers as it has the deeper 52 inch sides and a resin (plastic) top rail and legs. (Plastic is of course more insulating than Metal). I believe that Clip-Over clips can be made to work with the SCP Regatta and Equinox pools and the Allegro pool from Plastica but I haven't yet had the opportunity to try this on a real life in-situ pool. First choice insulation material is pool grade big-bubble which I think is fine if installed neatly. This of course being transparent lets the sun's energy through to the pool wall. Second choice is a smaller bubble less obvious material, and then flexible expanded polyethylene foam. I've been able to buy this relatively cheaply in Grey. As demand picks up I'll be able to buy foam in a range of other colours.

I have the British Made Calorex AW820 which has been replaced this year by the AW830 which is mechanically identical. This I could sell to you for £2,300 plus the vat. In fact as I swim through the winter I'm going to replace this with the Reverse Cycle Defrost Model which I would have to sell to you at £3,300 plus the vat. This beast will still function with an operating air temperature 15 degrees C below zero.

For one unit of electrical energy in a heat pump will produce five units of heat out in the height of Summer, probably three units of heat energy in the Spring and possibly 2 units of heat energy in the depths of winter. By sucking heat out of the air they are the cheapest most flexible form of heating going unless you have your own free supply of solid fuel.

Paramount are importing the Alto Heat Pump which has a very impressive specification on paper and price level more like £1,200 plus the vat. These have all sold out until the next container comes in in June. Is it as good as the "gold-standard" Calorex ? -Don't Know but as it only operates down to +5 degrees Centigrade I think I will still stick with Calorex. If you've bought one please tell me what you think of it.

Elecro make good electric heaters £200 to £400 plus vat but read the warning on their website, their effectiveness depends on the insulation qualities of your pool wall. If the atmosphere is cold, unless you've got good insulation the heat you put in your pool will be almost immediately lost. As well as my heat pump I've got an 11Kw electric heater. Without insulation that heater will not heat my pool up in Spring, and my pool is only 12 foot in diameter.

They really don't work, you can't clean the filters, and new filters cost a fortune.

Put your hand on the top rail of the pool, shake hard, and see what happens. Does the rail come away in your hand (it will on some pools). Does the water go everywhere ? Does the place you're buying your pool from let you do that ? My prejudice is still for steel-walled pools with proper (preferably rectangular) support legs. These are a time proven lasting product and some are really very cheap. Of course you will look on the web, but do consider how much information you actually get about the pool you are going to buy. Do you now understand the difference between one pool and another? What power and type of pump do you get, how big a sand filter, what does the ladder look like, now robust is it ? Might it be better to actually see the pool you are going to buy ?

Buy a bigger powered pump than they say you'll need and make sure it's self priming. Self priming means you don't have to make sure your pipework is entirely air-free before starting up.

If you want to attach a suction powered pool cleaner you need at least a 1 hp pump, if you're going to run your water through heaters and other devices you will also need more power.

People ask can I bury my above-ground pool below-ground. Yes you can - But it does depend on your site and soil conditions. Manufacturers recommendations will probably suggest back-filling with foamed concrete or a concrete made with a lot of sharp sand so that the concrete will break up easily if required. Steel walls receive a lot of protective treatments, but underneath it all they are still mild steel. PVC only has a limited life. Makers may give you a 25 or 35 year guarantee, but that is only against faulty workmanship or materials and it is a reducing balance guarantee so after 10 years of a 25 year guarantee only 60% of the purchase price is covered.

People don't find the need to bury their Spa or Hot Tub under the ground so I say save your time and money buy a small pool, keep most of it above ground, and use the effort you've saved to buy a decent pump, sand filter, heat pump, and counter-current swimming machine.

Last Summer I made my first prototype of Pleasure-Dome I'm exhibiting the all-singing all-dancing version at the big swimming pool exhibition in Lyon in November.

Pleasure-Dome is a transparent plastic cover held up high by inflatable plastic columns and with a real door where you can simply turn the handle and enter and which you can lock if you want to.

I'm going to just make one model to begin with. It will be approximately 5m in diameter and will house a 12foot diameter above ground pool complete with ladder inside the dome. You will be able to deflate the enclosure easily and pack it away in the garage if you no longer want it over your pool for a period of time.

So what difference did the enclosure make ? Well the enclosure makes a micro-climate which is at least 2 or 3 degrees warmer than outside. Take the cover off the pool and the air temperature instantly rises. In the depths of winter you get a bit of condensation on the inside of the cover, but that really isn't a problem. The cover has excluded the wind so convection losses are virtually eliminated. I arranged the heat pump so that it drew hot air from the inside of the dome and re-cycled the heat back into the pool water. This also has the effect of ventilating the dome and stop it smelling of tropical jungle. I maintained a temperature of between 32 and 36 degrees C in the pool water throughout the winter, and I swam outside on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Years Day. Because the cover is transparent you still feel that you are outdoors and your pool stays clean. All the tree litter, pollen, dead insects, atmospheric dirt etc. stays outside. The counter-current swimming machine has an air intake, so turn this on and your pool is transformed into a swirling, bubbling spa. I invented the Relaxation In-Pool Hammock that completely supports your body under the water, and which lets you read a book in your pool. It is so-so relaxing.

I will also sell the stands, inflatable tubes and cover materials so that if you want to make your own DIY Pleasure-Dome you can.

Instead of Buying an Expensive £17k + Swim-Spa, buy an above ground pool, heat pump, counter-current swimming machine, insulation, sand filter, pump and enclosure. If you're on a budget work up to it in stages?

Thank you for reading this. Any polite comments, critical, constructive or congratulatory I'll put on the comments page. I would like to hear from you. Write to chris.brindle@use-it-more.com