Want to prevent evaporation, NOT retain heat

[Lindseycr]

Hi! We live in south Texas and our pool gets too warm at times.

Is there a pool cover (especially an inexpensive one) that can help prevent evaporation but won’t warm up our pool?

 

[mas985]

Not really, a cover reduces evaporation which reduces heat loss so really come as a package. The more opaque it is the more it will resist temperature rises but manufactures generally don't make them that way. An insulated auto cover is probably as close as you can get but they are expensive.

To reduce heat without evaporation can be done in a couple different ways.

1) Heat pump to remove heat from the pool and transfer it to the air. However, this can be quite expensive.

2) Use a solar panel at night to radiate the heat away but the air temp needs to be lower than pool temps to work effectively.

3) Buried pipe/panels is another way but again could be expensive.

Should have mentioned that shading the pool could help as well so that the heat gain is not as much. Solar shades such as these can be effective:

 

[duraleigh]

Before you spend a lot of money, try a manual pool cooler. Cooling A Pool - Further Reading

It raises pH but not much and, surprisingly, I had very little evaporative loss. I can't explain that.........just report it

 

[mas985]

I suppose with high humidity and air temperatures lower than water temperatures, those types of devices might reduce water temps without too much evaporation but those conditions would be quite rare. It would be dependent on convection cooling only which is much slower than evaporation cooling.

But the main reason to use a fountain type of cooler is to increase evaporation. That is the fastest cooling method.

 

[JoyfulNoise]

Pool owners in your neck of the woods have found Glacier Chillers to be useful devices. They operate on the same principal as swamp coolers (evaporative coolers) where the pool water is used in conjunction with spray wands and an air blower to cool the pool water. Users report easily achieving 6-8°F reductions in temperature. They don’t use as much electrical energy as a heat pump does since there’s no compressor involved but they do cost a pretty penny and they need to be installed by a a qualified installer that knows how to READ THE MANUAL. We’ve seen backwards Glacier installations that just scream “the guy installing it had no clue!”

Covers are ugly and a pain in the rear to deploy and remove. If you’re like 99.9% of people that buy one, you’ll hate them and, within a year, it’ll be riding off to the landfill on the back of a garbage truck.

 

[duraleigh]

I cooled my 43k pool through a fountain (aeration) quite effectively in North Carolina summers for 6-8 years. The evaporation seemed minimal. Others here have reported the same success.......lot's of them. It works.

 

[Mdragger88]

I can attest that a fountain does work to cool the pool - I use one every year to prevent my pool becoming a boiling cauldron here in the south
My ph is really not affected (possibly due to my ta being a steady 60).
I do have evaporative water loss during the peak of the summer but it occurs with or without the use of the fountain.
Using a cover will prevent evaporation, this doesn’t increase the temperature of the pool in an appreciable way it just prevents heat loss that is due to evaporation.

 

[Mdragger88]

Mine’s the $20 amazon version that just screws into a return, on my old pool I had a homemade one hard plumbed with a valve.