Equipment in Pool Proposal

[pliesj]

Greetings,
We are building a new house in central Texas. The house will be built with a smallish in ground pool (12,000 gallons). There is no hot tub. My builder received a proposal from the pool sub that has the following equipment:

• Pool pump: 2.0 HP Pentair Whisperflo pump
• Filtration: 30" Pentair sand filter
• Pool Cleaner: Polaris 280 with booster pump
• Water treatment: Delta UV system with 320 Chlorinator
• Water Fill: Pool Miser automatic fill system with RPZ valve
• Automation: Jandy Z-4Pi Electronic control with iAqualink for Smartphone Operation

The pool pumps will be located about 3.5' below the coping and about 25 feet away.
I would appreciate any comments on this equipment proposal. I don't know much about pool equipment. One thing I do know is that the pumps for the pool in our current house consume quite a bit of electricity and are expensive to run. Thus, for the new pool I would like the most efficient pump system possible. I believe the proposed Whisperflo is a 2-speed pump. Should I be requesting a variable speed pump? Can't a single variable speed pump run both the filter and the Polaris eliminating the need for the booster pump?
Thanks in advance.

 

[Agent99]

I have the same Polaris 280 and it does require a booster pump to work properly. It works great but you might look into The Pool Cleaner which does not require a booster pump to work.

I also have the 320 Chlorinator but that means you'll be using chlorine tablets or pucks. While these are convenient and add chlorine to your pool, they also add cyanuric acid (CYA).

While CYA is fine for your pool and highly recommended (you want 30-50 ppm of CYA in your pool), continuous use of pucks will raise your CYA above and beyond the recommended range. Pool School - ABCs of Pool Water Chemistry is a great place to start to read up on the 5 parameters that are necessary to know and test for in order to have a Trouble Free Pool. CYA is covered in there so read up.

Also, UV is unnecessary and an expense you don't need. Here at TFP, chlorine is all you'll ever need to keep your pool sanitized and sparkly.

A recommendation for you is to pick yourself up a good test kit to check these parameters. The TF-100 or Taylor K-2006 are the two recommended kits. Find them at TFTestkits.net

I think a 2-speed pump would be an excellent choice for you. The VS would also work but it probably overkill due to the expense but they are very cool pumps giving you a lot of flexibility in what speed to run it at.

[edit] I wanted to add that if you go with a 2-speed or VS pump, and with your automation, you can likely run the pump on low speed for general filtration for 4ish hours and then on high-speed or highER-speed to run The Pool Cleaner for like an hour.

The 320 might still not be bad to have plumbed in but use it only when you go on vacation to take care of chlorine with the awareness of the CYA it'll add. There are other automated means of chlorine injection: The Liquidator and stenner pumps are commonly used here. There is also the 'open a jug of bleach/liquid chlorine and dump it in the pool' approach as well. Finally, a SWCG (salt water chlorine generator) is also another way to get chlorine into your pool although you'll now have a salt water pool but keep in mind the salt level is 10% of the ocean's water and most folks don't notice it.