How to cool the water?

[mtnstyne]

So summer is in full gear in the South and my pool water is 90 degrees already which makes it not so refreshing to use. Aside from putting a fountain on at night I am looking for options to cool it down without buying more expensive gear. My wife thinks I am crazy but what about getting a large tarp to stretch over it on sunny days to provide shade? Seems fairly simple so what am I missing?

Any other ways to cool it down that are obvious that I am not finding?

Thanks

 

[otter86753]

I use the fountain at night. Last night, my pool temp was 93 when I got out. I ran my fountain from 9:30 PM to 8:00 AM this morning and the pool temp was 86. I have not found a better way to cool a pool. We are in our typical summer pattern of temps in the 90's every day.

 

[mtnstyne]

I use the fountain at night. Last night, my pool temp was 93 when I got out. I ran my fountain from 9:30 PM to 8:00 AM this morning and the pool temp was 86. I have not found a better way to cool a pool. We are in our typical summer pattern of temps in the 90's every day.

Very good to know, going to do that tonight and see how the temp looks in the morning. I would be ecstatic if I can drop it 7 degrees overnight.

 

[Meadow]

Yes, I heard that a fountain that causes evaporation can be a very effective way to cool down your pool. They are most effective when running in the evening or at night. Others here claimed solar panels run at night (if you have one) is even more effective.

On the contrary, our pool water is sitting at 75 F and we haven't been able to swim yet. We're expecting grandkids today and I had no choice but to turn on our 400k btu heater. It has been running for the past 6 hours or so and temp slowly creeps up 5 degrees, so far. :sad:

 

[mtnstyne]

Yes, I heard that a fountain that causes evaporation can be a very effective way to cool down your pool. They are most effective when running in the evening or at night. Others here claimed solar panels run at night (if you have one) is even more effective.

Solar panels at night?

I have read that the aeration is what cools the water rather than the evaporation. I wonder if a fountain that sprays higher is more effective or if it simply loses more water through evaporation before it lands back in the pool. I will test my homemade aerator tonight. Current temperature is 89 (had some rain) and it's supposed to be a nice cool night. I have my fingers crossed and will try to post results in the morning. If I don't see much movement I will build a fountain that gets some elevation.

 

[mknauss]

If you aerate the water, you create the opportunity for evaporation under the correct atmospheric conditions. The evaporation is what cools the water.

 

[Yev]

aeration, fountain, or whatever. It all comes down to increasing the surface area of water touching the air. Air will steal heat from water. Normally it steals heat from the flat surface of the water, so if you had a 30'x15' pool you have 450 square feeet of surface. The water rising up from any device will increase surface area, and thus have the air steal more heat. But something else happens as well. When you get fine particles of water, it will give away its heat even easier and therefore increase the rate of cooling.

But with any device, the water will bring air bubbles down into the pool, and this is a huge factor. The air temp being less than the water temp, now you are actually building more surface area under the water, and the process of cooling gets even more expedited. It is my strong belief that more skinnier columns of water (through a fountain or aeration) will cool faster than fewer thicker columns of water

 

[mtnstyne]

So I redesigned my aerator from a downward facing spray to a fountain that has 8 jets directed at about a 45 degree angle. Results are the temp is 85 degrees this morning. Not as much as I hoped with the ambient air temp dropping to around 70 but I will take what I can get. Keeping the jet in there today and overnight again with the weather overcast with drizzling rain and highs today just under 80 so hoping I can drop it another few degrees while the weather is cooperating.

 

[blakeusa]

We can run a pipe (long run from your pool to mine in CT.

 

[Yev]

This is not a huge cooling machine that you can expect amazing cooling. This is not a refrigerator in your pool. YOu need to determine your typical pool cooling rate. FOr my pool, my temp drops about 5 degrees every night. If I added a fountain or aerator, I might get 6 or 7. But you have to remember that your pool will gain the 5 degrees the next day back, so each day, your net temp loss will only be 1 or 2 degrees.

Just as a FYI, here is a log of my pool temp versus the air temp at my house for the last week where you can see the ebb and flow of pool temp. I have no fountain, etc setup, so this is just natural heating and cooling.

 

[beachcozy]

Our water is around 94-96. It’s awful! We are making a sprayer out of PVC (like the one sold on amazon) and attach it to a return. We have a bubbler but that doesn’t really aerate much. I will be thrilled it if drops at least a few degrees.

 

[duraleigh]

What makes these "sprayers" work is evaporation......that's important to understand.....it is not the air cooling off the water, it is evaporation. When water changes from a liquid to a gas, it gives off heat, resulting in cooler temps for the remaining water that stays in liquid form.

So. each "cooler" will be different, depending on just how much water it can evaporate. Here's two principles......throw the water as high into the air as you can......the longer the droplets stay airborn, the more evaporation will occur. Secondly, make the droplets as fine as you can.....tinier droplets present more surface area to the atmosphere resulting in more evaporation.

So, you cannot predict exactly how one will perform. I could elevate my water about 30-35 feet but didn't have the finest droplets in the world. It usually took a couple of days to take the water from 92 down to around 87-88.

This process works even in the dead of the afternoon heat. The relative humidity falls a lot making more evaporation possible.....perhaps even more so than the evening when the dewpoints are much higher.

The drier your climate, the more effective these free or cheap devices will be.

 

[YippeeSkippy]

Oh lordie...first world problems, eh?

First we whined that the spring was so cool and rainy we couldn't get in. Now its too hot.

Thankful for my fountain that Skippy made for us. It is the *bomb.dot.com* !

Maddie

 

[azide999]

How in the heck are you getting 90 degrees lol! We are lucky right now to be 82 F lol and we are in Kingston 60 miles away, near ORNL - I would have thought that ORNL, Y12 and K25 would raise our water temperature together with the number of three eyed and other deformed critters, but no, no such luck lol. Ok, we have a few very large trees shading part of the pool in the afternoon ... but really, I would love a warmer pool! It must be the crazy Tennessee weather, just last week we had a tree fall on our house during a storm! It was a big tree, but fortunately only cosmetic damage. It did not hit the pool about 100' from the house so I was able to cool my temper .

You could consider sun sails, essentially fabric tarps which block most of the sun.

 

[beachcozy]

Charlotte, NC. It’s brutal here.