Design/layout factors to keep Arizona pool from getting hot

Welcome to the forum!

While water features can help to increase heat loss, they do this at the expense of increased evaporation (i.e. higher water use). Given the drought conditions in the SW and the increasing expense of water, you might want to think about alternatives. One cost effective solution would be to get some shade over the pool such as a shade sail.

I guess asthetics trumps water conservation.

Just saw this in my "similar threads" and just wanted to throw out a couple of observations.

My pool was just finished at the beginning of August, so I did not get to experience it in the hottest part of the year, but August is still pretty hot out here. The hottest my pool hit (even when the temps hit low teens) was 92 degrees. That may sound hot to you, but it really isn't for out here. I am currently running my heat pump for 87 degrees (my wife would probably like it higher). Over the weekend, we had our first group of family friends over to swim in the afternoon/evening. We set the heat pump for 89 and we liked it. They like their pool at 95, but it may be a thermometer calibration because they thought our 89 degree pool felt like their 95 degree pool.

The deeper the pool, the less it seems to heat up. Our neighbors with pools (all seem to have 5-foot deep pools around us) thought their pools felt hotter than ours. That could be due to a variety of factors, but our baja ledge was definitely warmer than the rest of the pool before I stared using the heat pump. Also, if I now jump to the deep end, I can feel the layer where the temperature seems to go from warm water to cool water.

Definitely take shadows into account to shade your pool. Our pool is shaded in the morning by the house and the deep end is shaded decently by the grotto in the late afternoon. I played with VIP3D to see how the shadows would come into play when I was playing with my own pool designs in the beginning (free trial from structure studio with some limitations, mainly the ability to save). Seeing how shadows would fall changed our initial pool placement completely (along with sightlines from the main living areas of the house). I will still need to get a cantilever umbrella for the shallow end.

Finish color also seems to play an impact. The darker the finish, the more heat that seems to be absorbed (especially in shallower areas).

Water features will help cool, but at the expense of evaporation AND raising the pH of the pool. I have the waterfall (lots of surface area as that water drops from the top of the grotto) and I also have an aerator that I have not used (other than for testing at the beginning and finding the line was full of pipe cement that had come loose and was blocking the aerator fitting.

We were originally planning on getting a Heat/Chill heat pump, but decided against it after speaking with a few people that had the chilling mode. Running the chill mode is expensive in the summer (initial cost was only going to be a couple of hundred more than the regular heat pump as an O/B pool). We decided that we would see how it does in the summer and if we felt we needed a chiller, we would get a glacier chiller instead (higher initial cost, less moving parts and energy to use).

Good luck with your build.