Want suppliers of reflective opaque floating pool cover

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E

edlen

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Jul 10, 2013
5
My situation located in San Jose CA is my pool gets too hot with a transparent bubble cover but is too cold with no cover. We also tend to use the pool only on weekends. Therefore I usually put the bubble cover on just a day or 2 before I need the pool. Enter 2014 and the worst water drought in bay area history. Now I want to stay covered all the time we are not in the water to cut evaporation losses. I can't do that with my bubble cover, since it will overheat. So I want a cover that will not overheat my pool when it is on for extended periods. I also want it opaque to minimize algae problems since my plaster is really old.

Can anyone suggest sources on opaque reflective floating pool covers. I am not looking for a winter cover. I actually did quite a search and surprisingly found nothing for the USA. I did find the following;

Revolution Pool Cover by FirstforPoolCovers - UK
Daisy Reflective Cover - Australia
CoolGuard Reflective Cover - UK/Australia

None of these have answered my emails so I am assuming they don't want to ship here. If anyone in USA has these covers, I would like to hear about it.

Thanks from Ed;
Nowata, CA (AKA San Jose)
 
Welcome to TFP!

I doubt those covers will help with your water temperature. Solar covers work mostly by preventing evaporation from the pool. Evaporation removes heat from the remaining water.

The covers you are looking at will also reduce evaporation and will make the water warmer.

There are heat pumps that can cool the pool that might help you.
 
taking the comment from John into account...

Not sure how cold the nights get where you are, but a small solar panel setup could run at night to cool the pool to your desired temperature if the nights get cool enough.

Since you are not seeking max sun surface area...normally key to solar...you could maybe build a cheap "cooling coil" of irrigation pipe to perform the task instead of purchasing huge commercial panels.

Again though, I am not sure if your nights get cool enough for this to work. It's essentially a solar setup operating in reverse.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk
 
The isn't ideal in every possible way, but one fairly good choice is to use a bubble cover that covers less than the entire pool. That will cut down on a good percentage of the evaporation (though not all of it) and get you less heating than you have now giving the water temperature you want. This approach has the advantage of being remarkably simple, just leave a portion of your current cover folded over (or on the deck) and you have a workable, if not ideal solution.
 
Hi JohnT

I do recognize that an enormous amount of heat is required to evaporate water which results in the pool temperature dropping. Perhaps as significant is new water is added from the tap at a much lower temperature and results in further cooling. However, I am curious as to what I should be able to achieve without the benefits of evaporation. The way I look at the situation is this:

A covered pool located in the shade with no direct sun should reach a temperature close to the average air temperature. This would be by conduction and convection heat transfer mechanisms through the cover and the walls. There would be no heating due to incident solar radiation. According to weather.com, the average high is 85 degrees for San Jose in July, while the average low is 55, yielding an average temperature for July of about 70 degrees. A couple of years ago, I did monitor a bucket of water located in the shade with a piece of my bubble cover over it and it never exceeded 75 degrees during the summer. Therefore a highly reflective cover should come close to achieving what a shaded pool can achieve.

Now, if we are talking about Fresno, with an average July high of 98 and average July low of 68, then I agree. It would be very difficult to achieve a pool temperature of less than 83 degrees even in the shade. Then I would agree some form of additional cooling would be required.
 
You are correct that a reflective cover should have your pool achieve roughly the average day/night temperature. So an opaque white or silvery reflective cover should accomplish what you want which is to virtually eliminate evaporation but not get the pool warmer by sunlight absorption. You need not have a very thick cover either -- it doesn't have to be bubble-type and can be more like a tarp so long as it floats (i.e. is lower in density than water).

I have a mostly opaque electric safety cover and noticed that when it was a light tan it would not increase in temperature very much but now that it is a dark blue it heats the pool a couple of degrees beyond what the solar was already doing.
 
Hi JasonLion;

I agree with you, that your suggestion of partially covering the pool with a bubble cover will control the temperature of the pool. However, I submit that that is substantially the same as what I did in years past. Let’s say I covered ½ of the time to achieve my desired temperature. I therefore had evaporation losses ½ of the time over the entire pool. Your suggestion would have me uncover ½ of the pool all the time to achieve my desired pool temperature. This would result in the same amount of evaporation losses for both cases.

I don’t need a way to regulate the pool temperature. I am trying to conserve water. I need a pool cover that is reflective, but I can’t find any. Do you know of any?
 
Okay this is a little "outside the box" and it may be the dumbest idea you've ever seen. So prepare yourself for disappointment.

Radiant heat insulation for attics, aka attic foil. My theory is you could adhere this to your existing pool cover, it shouldn't weigh enough to sink it (This is a guess).

OR

At least one of the attic foil brands is made out of bubblewrap with foil adhered to both sides. I see this option as less optimal, as you don't want any sort of leeching into the water from the foil product....and the foil would be on both sides, where as with using your existing cover, and simply lining the top side of it with foil, you now have a reflective surfaced pool cover.....

Like I said, possible a silly idea. But it works in my attic :p
 
Hello JasonLion;

Yes, I have visited this website and thought this might be a good choice. I was particularly interested in the fact that the cover can be used to gather heat or reflect it. However, it is a thin cover with no flotation properties apparently. Construction wise, probably very similar to a winter tarp. It must be secured all the way around with tie downs at about 1 meter spacing in order to not take on water and sink. Here is a link to a webpage that details a bed and breakfast business in France nightmare experience with this cover. It requires 2 people to remove and install the cover each time. The cover company also has never answered my emails regarding the submarine tendency.

http://www.gallagherfr.com/Pool_covers.htm
 

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Hello Mr. Crazy;
No this is not the dumbest idea I have ever seen. It is not even close.

In fact it is a great idea. This would accomplish what I want. I too have this in my attic and I agree it works great. From the website that provided my attic radiantbarrier “In theory if all of our homes were under the shade of a tree, we wouldn't need radiant barriers in our attics”. That goes for swimming pools too.

However, the obstacles to putting this on a pool by a DIYer are substantial. Consider the following;

My attic supplier said Absolutely Not for their product.
Not designed for pool chemical environment or repeated deployment 20 times each summer.
Would double the weight and thickness of my cover.
Would double the price of the cover.
Would be hard to deploy from my reel or perhaps most reels.
Would be very difficult to adhere it to my existing cover.
Doubt that I could make it adhere well to my bubble cover for 80 square feet.
Would provide who knows what contaminants to the pool including glue.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe this idea would work for me. It should stay in the attic or at least in a non-water environment. But, I repeat, this is not the dumbest idea I ever heard.

One of the dumbest was from a guy who did not believe me when I told him his idea was dumb. He retired rich and has been sailing a boat around the world for about 10 years.

Thanks, sincerely;
 
Any luck with this?

For emergency (grid down) algae control, I am looking for an opaque floating material that I can cut to size, preferably white so as to not heat up the pool too much, but not silver to cut down on glare.
 
Would a dark tarp (to reject light) on top of a floating solar cover work? And then maybe a thin sheet of some white plastic material (to reduce heating). Is the floating solar material buoyant enough to handle the additional weight?

Or maybe an opaque white sheeting material can be found to lay on top of the solar cover?
 
Thanks Sargent, White/blue would have been my preference, but that's as good as anything I've seen.

- - - Updated - - -

Well maybe not. If it lets light in from one direction I assume it will also let it in when flipped over. I want this in order to keep light out during an extended power down situation to inhibit the growth of algae.
 
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