Our pool has a 200 gallon spillover spa, which we'd like to heat so we can use it as more than a kiddie pool. There is currently a propane pool heater but it's obviously broken and according to our neighbors, the tank was above ground and removed before we bought the property. Our efforts to follow the propane line seem to confirm their information. Natural gas is not available in our neighborhood. So to get it up and running with the current setup we'd need to pay for both a new propane heater and tank, plus installation costs, and the initial propane fill up. This would be several thousand dollars and is more than we can currently afford, but the wife really wants a hot tub/spa she can use to help get over the pains and stresses from having 2 children in less than 2 years.
Since we're only trying to heat the spa and not the rest of the pool, would there be any problem with installing an 11 kw electric spa heater, like this, for this purpose? We would flip all the valves to spa only mode when in use so there would be no mixing of the water, avoid using the spillover during normal operation, and use a solar cover (or maybe a spa specific one?) which would help keep the heat in so we don't have to constantly start from scratch. In the reviews and questions of that product several people mention using it to heat pools of up to several thousand gallons effectively, so it seems doable to me.
I've thought about using solar heaters, and will probably install those for the pool, but I doubt they'd get the water temperature up to the 110 or so we'd want for the spa. Even if they would, would it do so quickly enough?
Since we're only trying to heat the spa and not the rest of the pool, would there be any problem with installing an 11 kw electric spa heater, like this, for this purpose? We would flip all the valves to spa only mode when in use so there would be no mixing of the water, avoid using the spillover during normal operation, and use a solar cover (or maybe a spa specific one?) which would help keep the heat in so we don't have to constantly start from scratch. In the reviews and questions of that product several people mention using it to heat pools of up to several thousand gallons effectively, so it seems doable to me.
I've thought about using solar heaters, and will probably install those for the pool, but I doubt they'd get the water temperature up to the 110 or so we'd want for the spa. Even if they would, would it do so quickly enough?