New Arizona Pool Build Help

[juice000]

Hi Everyone, New here and hoping this is the right spot.

We have two main bids were considering for a pool install and were struggling with making a final decision since we're far from experts on this.

Both are pretty much the same price- Within a couple hundred dollars. Both are free form 3-5 foot pools.

Pool Company A:
Perimeter 76'7"
Surface 307 SF
Interior 606 SF
Gallons 8,822
Stonescapes Mini Pebble Interior finish
PCC2000 In floor cleaning system
Pentair Intelliflo Variable Speed Pump
Pentair 320 SF Cartridge Filter
Rainbow Chlorinator
Pentair Color LED Light
Up to 2 Umbrella sleeves
Up to 4 Deck water jets
Up to 250SF Cantilever edge salt finish ( This amounts to a 70 SF deck and 2 feet around the whole pool i think)

Pool Company B:
Perimeter 74'
Surface 310 SF
Interior 606 SF
Gallons 9,275
Pebble Tec Interior
A&A in floor cleaning system. Venturi system per outline.
Intelliflo 2 VST pump by Sta-Rite division of Pentair
Sta-Rite System 3 Mod Media Filter
Rainbow Chlorinator
Pentair Color LED Light
Intellibrite controller for pool light
1 umbrella sleeve
Up to 300 SF Cantilever edge salt finish with 1 lb color saturation (So an extra 120 SF deck after sides of pool being 2 feet.) If math is right

Anyhow they both seem decent to me but I'm sure one of you experts will say yea or nea. Appreciate your insight.

 

[juice000]

Re: New Pool Build Help

Notice I posted this in the wrong thread. Will repost.

 

[Texas Splash]

Re: New Pool Build Help

It's okay. We can move it. No problem.

 

[Texas Splash]

Congrats on the new pool bids, and welcome to TFP! . Tough times deciding. I'm not a stone expert, so I'll let others reply to that. I'm not a fan of in-floor cleaning myself and would opt to invest in a top of the line cleaner like a robot/Dolphin-type product. Less plumbing and future headaches to worry about, and would probably save you some construction $$$. But that's me. Others who have an in-floor may rave about them. I'm assuming this is a non-salt water pool (no SWG)? If it is, please post the SWG size/capacity. If not, disregard. How many return jets does each builder plan on installing? That would be nice to know for water surface circulation. I suspect others will have ideas we well. Nice to have you with us.

 

[juice000]

Thanks, happy to be here. I'm sure I'll be spending a lot of time here going forward. it is a non salt water pool. The contacts I spoke with said the salt water pool would cause me headaches in the future with damaged equipment. Do you prefer them? I'm pretty naive so they could just be lying to me.

 

[Texas Splash]

We hear many times builders avoiding SWGs in an attempt to discourage buyers either to claim excessive corrosion or problems with flagstone materials. I'm not convinced of that, but I'll let others here have more experience than I discuss that further. But I can tell you there are hundreds/thousands of SWG owners in the AZ region. Just depends on a person's preference and ability to be home each day to give the pool some "TLC". Manual chlorination (adding a small amount of bleach) to the pool each day is no big deal for me and many others. Some just prefer to not have to dispense bleach each day. Personal preference.

 

[JoyfulNoise]

Hi Everyone, New here and hoping this is the right spot.

We have two main bids were considering for a pool install and were struggling with making a final decision since we're far from experts on this.

Both are pretty much the same price- Within a couple hundred dollars. Both are free form 3-5 foot pools.

Pool Company A:
Perimeter 76'7"
Surface 307 SF
Interior 606 SF
Gallons 8,822
Stonescapes Mini Pebble Interior finish
PCC2000 In floor cleaning system
Pentair Intelliflo Variable Speed Pump
Pentair 320 SF Cartridge Filter
Rainbow Chlorinator
Pentair Color LED Light
Up to 2 Umbrella sleeves
Up to 4 Deck water jets
Up to 250SF Cantilever edge salt finish ( This amounts to a 70 SF deck and 2 feet around the whole pool i think)

Pool Company B:
Perimeter 74'
Surface 310 SF
Interior 606 SF
Gallons 9,275
Pebble Tec Interior
A&A in floor cleaning system. Venturi system per outline.
Intelliflo 2 VST pump by Sta-Rite division of Pentair
Sta-Rite System 3 Mod Media Filter
Rainbow Chlorinator
Pentair Color LED Light
Intellibrite controller for pool light
1 umbrella sleeve
Up to 300 SF Cantilever edge salt finish with 1 lb color saturation (So an extra 120 SF deck after sides of pool being 2 feet.) If math is right

Anyhow they both seem decent to me but I'm sure one of you experts will say yea or nea. Appreciate your insight.

Thanks, happy to be here. I'm sure I'll be spending a lot of time here going forward. it is a non salt water pool. The contacts I spoke with said the salt water pool would cause me headaches in the future with damaged equipment. Do you prefer them? I'm pretty naive so they could just be lying to me.

The contacts are lying to you. I'm on my fourth season with an SWG pool and many of us here have them. Not a single problem with equipment. There are those here with salt pool over 10 years old, also no problems. Since you're in Tucson, you can PM me and tell which builders you are using and I can tell you if I have some inside info on them. There are quite few companies over the years here that have folded up after a few years leaving many pool owners in a lurch.

The Rainbow chlorinator is just a 3" trichlor puck feeder. You want to stay away from solid forms of chlorine because they add too much stabilizer (cyanuric acid or CYA) over time. Once your CYA levels get too high, you have to drain the pool to correct it. That is an expensive proposition here in the desert. This is another reason why salt water chlorine generators are awesome - the salt in your pool provides the chloride that the SWG cell turns into chlorine...no external chlorine sources needed!

Sta-Rite and Pentair are basically the same company (Pentair bought out the Sta-Rite line of pool equipment a long time ago) and, honestly, Pentair is better. My guess is they only keep the Sta-Rite brand around for legacy reasons. That said, I would stay away from the System-3 Modular filter, some love it but other really HATE it as the internal cartridges are expensive to replace and the unit is not user-friendly to service. The Pentair Clean & Clear line of cartridge filters are top-rated and many folks here that have them, love them. I have a Pentair QuadDE-100 filter and it has performed flawlessly for me over the last 4 years.

I would also echo Patrick's comments and ditch the in-floor system. It's adding anywhere from $5k to $8k to the cost of your build and you honestly don't need it. I just got rid of my suction side cleaner for a Dolphin S300i robot and I'm bummed I waited so long. When your cleaning system is tied to your pool pump, you have to run your pool pump at higher speeds for longer periods of time thus using A LOT more electricity. Robots use about 250W of electrical power and, in a pool as small as what you're contemplating, a 2 hour cleaning cycle every other day or less will be more than enough. I use to run my suction cleaner all the time which forced me to run my variable speed pump up at 2000rpm or about 1kW electrical power. I now use my robot maybe three times per week and get the same, if not better, cleanliness in my pool and my pump now runs down at 1600RPM or about 300W of power. It's a huge savings in electrical cost.

Without some form of heating (gas or solar), your pool is going to be cold for quite some time and you won't be able to get as much use out of it. AT the very least, you're going to want to use a bubble cover on the pool to keep the evaporative water loss down. Covers are a royal PITA to work with when you have a freeform pool SO, when designing the shape of the pool, I would keep the curves to a minimum and think about how you will cover it. Even the thinnest (8 mil) covers can get very unwieldy to work with and take on and off a pool so, if possible, try to design a pool so that you can use a reel system. That's going to mean dedicating deck space to a reel and giving yourself enough margin and access on all sides of the pool to allow two people to help deploy the cover. I know it seems like a trivial thing, but I assure you if I had thought about it more, I would have designed my pool very differently to allow for the use of a cover. Just to give you an idea of what we deal with here in Tucson - the average pan evaporation rates as measured by two site run by the UofA show that Tucson typically experiences an average annual evaporation rate of over 90" of water per year. Translated into real word number - your entire pool volume evaporates away over a one year period! Putting a cover on the pool completely stops that from happening.

Good luck.

 

[juice000]

Thanks Matt for the great info, anyone else have any input before we alter our quotes and move forward?