Heater recs for 60,000 gallon gunite pool in Southeast Michigan

[dankasprick83]

Hey guys,

We have a 60k gallon gunite community pool in our subdivision in Southeast Michigan and I'm trying to put a proposal together to get our current heater replaced (can only get the pool up to 82 and we are looking more for 84-85). We'd like to have it open mid-May to mid-September ideally.

From what I've gathered it sounds like a 500,000 BTU gas heater would be ideal. Anybody working with a similar sized pool in Michigan have any recommendations?

Also, I've dug through the forums here and searched the web but haven't found a reliable calculator to compare the incremental increase in annual cost to heat the pool to 82 (which we currently do) compared to 84-85. Does anybody have any tips on how I could ballpark this or have a link to a nice calculator? The surface area is around 2000 square feet with an average depth of 4 feet. The cost of heating this would be split between 300 homes so I essentially just need to show that the marginal increase in annual cost to heat it 3 more degrees isn't going to be astronomical.

Thanks

 

[ajw22]

Hayward has the only 500K residential pool heater which at 80% efficiency gives about 409K BTUs into the water.

There are larger commercial pool heaters if you have the gas service for them.

A 500K pool heater will heat your 60K pool by 0.8 degrees per hour.

To raise the pool temperature by 3 degrees will take 4 hours of running assuming no heat loss to the air. If the air temperature is less then the 86F additional heater runtime is needed for air loss.

A 500K heater will use 5 therms of gas. At $1/therm it will cost $5/hour to run the heater.

So depending on your NG cost it can cost around $20 to raise the pool 3 degrees when the air temperature is above 86F. Hard to predict what it will cost to maintain the pool temperatures at lower air temperature. It may be hard for the heater to keep up with heat loss when ambient temperature is more then 5 to 8 degrees below pool temperature.

 

[Pep3az]

If your current heater is still in good shape and usable what about just adding a second heater and run it in parallel?

PEP3AZ