Cooling the pool

[DeadAquaRite]

Please forgive the silly question... So I guess a fountain cools quicker than just throwing the hose in the pool?

Depends on your groundwater temp and whether or not you can tolerate the extra water and dilution. If your groundwater is cooler than your pool, the ideal setup would be to evaporate water (cooling the main body) and replace the loss will cooler water.

If money were no object, you could drill a well, put in a cooling coil between pump and return down the well shaft, and use the ground mass/water table as a heat sink.

 

[nlindelldc]

I have been playing around a bit. Not only have I not noticed a temp drop while running water features during the day, but when I don't run them at night the temp still drops about 5 degrees. I'm starting to get discouraged thinking that almost none of it helps

Only comfortable time to swim is in the a.m. and by late afternoon pool is 92-93 degrees no matter what I do

 

[Flbeachluvr]

Only comfortable time to swim is in the a.m. and by late afternoon pool is 92-93 degrees no matter what I do

Sounds like here in Central Florida. We've had very little rain over the past two weeks and in the afternoon our full sun pool gets to about 94 degrees. Definitely not refreshing. Thinking about trying to run the pump with the solar turned down at night and see if that makes any difference in the temp.

 

[flipr]

Sounds like here in Central Florida. We've had very little rain over the past two weeks and in the afternoon our full sun pool gets to about 94 degrees. Definitely not refreshing. Thinking about trying to run the pump with the solar turned down at night and see if that makes any difference in the temp.

FLBeach, I see you have a Pentair Solartouch. I do too, and my unit has a cooling option. I plan on trying it by running pump/solar at night. It looks like the unit has a 6 degree delta on the cooling side as well. You can download copy of manual online if you need instructions for setting cooling feature.

 

[Flbeachluvr]

FLBeach, I see you have a Pentair Solartouch. I do too, and my unit has a cooling option. I plan on trying it by running pump/solar at night. It looks like the unit has a 6 degree delta on the cooling side as well. You can download copy of manual online if you need instructions for setting cooling feature.

I did see that in the manual. Just not too handy and afraid of messing something up lol. If you try it let me know how it works.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[nlindelldc]

I don't have a solar.

I just wanted to report back for anyone that was curious. For the record I have a 2-speed pump, a medium sized waterfall, and 2 "streamers" or whatever you call them that are a pretty good size. With my pump running on high, I tried with all 3 water features running for a variety from 5 to 12 hours at night and whatever combo I tried I could not get the temp down past 85. All I got in return was a super high electric bill.

I also tried running them on high during the day and the temp would never even drop!

So to recap, my pool temp gets to 93 or 94 during the day and never gets any cooler than 85 or 86 in the a.m. no matter what I do. I turned the water features off completely last night and this morning the water temp was 85. So I'm just gonna save the electricity I guess and keep my pump on low as usual.

Short of getting a chiller, I don't see a real solution. Anybody have a chiller? Curious about them now.

 

[duraleigh]

Throwing your pool water high into the air works. There is no magic about it.

It doesn't sound like you were doing much except aeration......that won't work. You must get the droplets of water fine enough and high enough into the air so evaporation can occur at a rate that will cool your pool.

A chiller will put your electric bill right back up.

 

[pooldv]

I have a Solartouch and it is set to cool the pool to 88 degrees. It is pretty simple to enable cooling and set the temp, basically the same as enabling heating and setting the temp. It runs at night and cools the pool to the set point every night. I think I need to lower it to 87 because it still gets a tad warm some afternoons.

Glacier makes pool chillers. Many heat pumps can also run in a cool mode to cool the pool in summer and heat the pool in spring and fall.

Part of successful pool heating and cooling is consistency and building on the daily progress. If you can cool the pool 5 degrees overnight and gain only 4 degrees during the day you will make some progress over a few days. There is also a lot of mass that needs to be warmed or cooled in addition to the water. The pool, especially gunite, and the ground will slowly heat or cool and eventually help to retain the heat or cold.

We put a shade sail over my brothers pool at the beginning of the week and by the end of the week the pool went from 92/93 to 87/88.

 

[JamieP]

nlindelldc has it right. the evaporative process is the only practical way to cool a pool. Several of us have done it successfully and there is more than one thread in the forum.

A Cheap Pool Cooler for the end of Summer

Thanks Dave! I checked out your link and love the air you achieved with your fountain. I saw where you described how to make it (still trying to picture how the "uprights" fit on there) and was wondering at what speed you had to run your pump to get the water to spray that high?

We successfully made the fountain from this thread (Thanks YippeeSkippee! Skippy's New Fountain) although ours uses one of our 5 pool returns instead of a Polaris connection. If I have the pump at 2200 rpm we get some height, but maybe only 4' above the PVC which is about a foot over the water.) I'd rather run at lower speeds to save money if it's possible, so I'm wondering what I need to do to modify the design to get the height you did. Below is how you described your setup. When you added the uprights, I'm assuming you had to splice into the 2' of horizontal pipe using the reducing Tees you mentioned?

Threaded 1.5" out of the pool wall, Tee-d off 1.5" for about 2' both ways.

Then 3/4" for the four "uprights" (I used four 1.5 x 1.5 x .75 reducing Tee's to connect)

Capped off the uprights and drilled 1/4" hole in the top of each one.

No magic in that design...make it out of whatever you have. The four 1/4" holes seemed to work out pretty good as far as the height of the fountain....I would stay fairly close to that total surface area (.78 sq. in) so you can elevate the water as much as possible. If it doesn't shoot high enough, cap off one of your returns....no harm done....your psi will go up quite a bit, tho.

Also, is there any concern with losing circulation in the area where the fountain is? I've seen where people added a ball valve to the bottom of the fountain so they can chose between returning water to the pool vs the fountain. We are still trying to figure out our new pool and I'm wary of dead spots after having to SLAM once already.

 

[nlindelldc]

Throwing your pool water high into the air works. There is no magic about it.

It doesn't sound like you were doing much except aeration......that won't work. You must get the droplets of water fine enough and high enough into the air so evaporation can occur at a rate that will cool your pool.

A chiller will put your electric bill right back up.

Dang, well maybe my streamers don't go high enough. They are not quite even but on high they throw a steady stream of water about an inch in diameter up into the air and probably 4-5 ft. over the height of the pool. One of streams is quite compact, the other is a tad lower and sprays not as compactly toward the end of the stream (i.e., more spray). Don't know if that makes any sense.

 

[duraleigh]

i have a single speed 1.5 HP pump so it runs continuously at 3450. The key to obtaining the height is I cap off the other returns......all my water is channeled to that one return. That gives me a psi of something like 29 (normally 10) but, contrary to what many people think, doesn't bother a constant speed pump at all.

So I just made up some 1.5 threaded pipes about 6 inches long and glued a pvc cap on them. The eyeball fitting is unscrewed and these caps screw in place.


without capping the other returns, I doubt I would get 5 feet of elevation.

 

[JamieP]

i have a single speed 1.5 HP pump so it runs continuously at 3450. The key to obtaining the height is I cap off the other returns......all my water is channeled to that one return. That gives me a psi of something like 29 (normally 10) but, contrary to what many people think, doesn't bother a constant speed pump at all.

So I just made up some 1.5 threaded pipes about 6 inches long and glued a pvc cap on them. The eyeball fitting is unscrewed and these caps screw in place.


without capping the other returns, I doubt I would get 5 feet of elevation.

Ahhh... So that explains it! Thanks for clarifying.

 

[DeadAquaRite]

FWIW, I never glued mine. Friction fit was enough.

 

[sumi]

This is the best designed of Cooling Pool water I purchased online from Amazon and it works great to reduce 8 degree in my Pool

 

[DeadAquaRite]

Throwing your pool water high into the air works. There is no magic about it.

An important thing to remember is that heat is energy, and the energy loss (i.e. cooling) occurs when water evaporates, thus lowering the temp of the body of water it left behind. When you pump water into the air, some of the energy is lost from the water droplets, which return to the pool at a lower temp than they left thus cooling the pool. Some of the energy is lost from the AIR, which does very little to cool the pool. So there exists an ideal height and droplet size for maximum cooling. Too much height, or too tiny a droplet and you're cooling more air than water. If you want to play with it, catch the return water (a floating kiddie pool will work) and adjust to maximize the ΔT between big pool and little pool.

Another interesting idea is in place evap. In my axolotl tank I get 6°F drop from two 40mm USB fans. And that's in a 74° room. At higher temps, and lower humidity, that would increase. Would a large fan make a difference? I think it might, especially at night. That said, I also lose 5% of my tank water nightly and a 1500 gal loss is significant. For comparison my average summer water loss due to evap is 125 gallons (0.25in). 1500 gallons would be ~3in, or roughly 3hrs a day of filling. And groundwater temps here are 80-86°F, so the result would be consuming power and water with no result Nevermind...