My weekend project.

[Shibiwan]

Wife & kid kept complaining that the pool water was too cold even at 80 F (yes I live in the Phoenix metro area). Got tired of the whining and bought me a solar heater (EcoSaver) and started building an aluminum frame for it......

Plumbed it all up

Temp is now up to 85 F after about 4 hours.

Tired now...


-S

P.S. .... wonder how long it'll be before the neighbor next door (HOA prez) complains.

 

[linen]

Looks really nice Shibiwan

You might want to consider putting a board or something behind your panels, to eliminate the cooling on that side that can occur.

 

[Durf]

Is that pool covered? Even in the Phoenix area I would assume you would need direct sun light for an outside pool to be comfortable. 80 degree water would feel much cooler in the shade than 80 degree water swimming in sun light.

 

[Shibiwan]

The pool is completely in our main back patio and gets full shade all the time, and it isn't covered. Temps remain pretty constant overnight probably because the air never gets much cooler than the pool water for more than 1-2 hours at dawn.

Not sure about the board backing. I bypass the panels when temps cool off (75f ish at 6am is the lowest it gets right now) and I figured that the panel would still continue to absorb the stored heat from the ground.

I intend to add another panel set when it cools off in a month or two, that's why I left the space at the bottom half of the frame.

-S


Sent from my DROID4 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Shane1]

This is the first pool I've seen on a covered patio. Can I ask why you put it there instead of in the yard?

 

[1380ken]

Couldn't you put the solar heater around the corner near your sat dish?

 

[Shibiwan]

This is the first pool I've seen on a covered patio. Can I ask why you put it there instead of in the yard?

HOA rules doesn't allow for AGP's, and living next door to stickler HOA Prez (even though our HOA covers only 12 homes) doesn't help either. We had bought and easy set ring pool on a whim on 7/4 and have been having so much fun that we traded it in for a frame pool and decided to keep it up for as long as we can.

Putting it in the patio is a technical loophole until we get our proper pool, backyard, and shop/guesthouse built........and besides, the sun out here is brutal, especially in the summer. This time of year we get huge dust storms too and putting it in the patio keeps it cleaner. Almost all of us in this neighborhood have dirt backyards - the builder had gone bust during the 2008 crash just before the homes were sold and even though the houses were done, the front and backyards were all dirt.

[edit] DERP... just noticed you're in Buckeye... you know how it gets out here.... LOL

Here's a sequence of pics from within our family room looking across our backyard during a dust storm:

Approaching dust storm....

BAM -- zero visibility....

-S

 

[Shibiwan]

Couldn't you put the solar heater around the corner near your sat dish?

The panel is set in an East-West alignment, the panel is angled to the South and it would have been shaded by the shadow of the house in the afternoon, defeating the entire purpose of the solar heater. It's angled down to capture the max sun during the winter solstice at 33 degrees declination. I left enough space on the bottom half of the frame so I can add another panel later.

-S