Just saying hello & hoping to meet other "strange" weirdo DIY people

[Dirk]

Ah. I didn't think of anti-bird wire!

If that's what the baling wire is for, it's genius. The birds can't grasp it because it's too thin... but it's just high enough above the thicker cable that it blocks it.
That's ingeniously simple! (if that's what it is for)

I left you a link in that last post to a thread where I describe the whole thing.

 

[Dirk]

What do you use to get rid of horse flies around the pool?

I don't have any.

If I'm picturing correctly how much spraying it takes to rid an area of flies, that amount of dish soap will have no ill effects on the pool. There's worse, and much more, on the skin of the folks swimming in your pool: soap, perfume, suntan lotion, and, well, "other" stuff. Spray away. That's what filtering and chlorine are for.

I like the other gizmo. It looks like something Spy vs Spy would use on each other!

I wear out my garden gloves pretty quickly. Nice idea you have for an alternate!

 

[godwinson]

Everything metal is SS, except the swag, I think that is aluminum. The block is composite (mostly plastic).

I was wondering why it wasn't rusty - so the SS is why. Brick outhouse stuff. You'se guys are good.
The block did look a bit funnily... it didn't occur to me it's composite so what looks like a nut on top is likely a tongue and groove tab?
Makes sense the materials you chose expressly because they're all out in the sun... as you noted:

the steel will far outlast the fishing line in the hot sun... Zips just don't cut it out in the sun.

As a related aside, I'll be looking for a thread on the quantum physics or chemistry of what the sun does to common pool materials...

My thread is a two-fer, well, three-fer, as it has two more of my many, many other DIY projects towards the end. It'll give you a hint about who you're up against!

Bird [not] on a wire!

I have a shade sail over my pool. Even in perfect TFP water I need to hide from the sun once in a while. But to position it where I wanted it, I needed to run a cable over the water. Now I like me some birds, and have supplied them with literally a million places to hang out (hundreds of feet of...

www.troublefreepool.com

You gotta love the brick-outhouse-simplicity & functionality of those looped anti-bird coils and nailed anti-bird spikes! Punji sticks for the birdees...

I've got to figure out a pool cover method that is cheap and effective... and which will outlast the sun (probably impossible), where that's for much later as right now I don't even have the CYA in the newly filled pool yet (it arrives later on today, supposedly).

It'll give you a hint about who you're up against!

Bird [not] on a wire!

I have a shade sail over my pool. Even in perfect TFP water I need to hide from the sun once in a while. But to position it where I wanted it, I needed to run a cable over the water. Now I like me some birds, and have supplied them with literally a million places to hang out (hundreds of feet of...

www.troublefreepool.com

I see you've battled the gophers... I gave up... but I flooded them out once... and I put those green steel wire contraptions another time... but they beat me and we don't water the lawn anymore so they can do what they will (someday I will "astroturf" the pool area though... but again... way later that's for given I don't even have the water balanced yet)...

Dirk: A shade sail will impact, to some degree, the warming effects of the sun.

I've got a problem with the mechanical solar heaters... where I'm gonna give up on them and maybe buy five or so hundred feet of thin but black rubber garden hose (with conventional old-style brass ends - not that light alumino-zinc-whatever-it-is stuff they use on them nowadays) and then a hundred-dollar 120VAC Harbor Freight waterpump to pump the water out of the pool, through the garden hoses, and then back into the pool.... to replace this super expensive cheap plastic!

The connections will all be brass (I don't think they make stainless steel hose ends, do they?).

But this $100 pump looks like it's cast iron, so it may rust a bit too much for a pool...

What I'm looking for, maybe, is a small pump & a few hundred feet of black rubber/brass garden hose that I can pump the water through to heat it up during the day instead of those huge mechanical solar panels that are filled with leaks from the sun and weather and animals.

Any ideas?

 

[wireform]

just buy a few hundred foot roll of irigation tubing.

 

[godwinson]

I left you a link in that last post to a thread where I describe the whole thing.

Yea, I read the whole thread. It was interesting as you explained WHY you did everything you did.
You are a good DIY'er, but your stuff looks too professional. People will think you paid someone to do it for you.
Mine is more rednecky... nobody thinks I paid anyone to do my stuff.....

For example, to replace these standard cheap expensive pool pole hangers (which only hold one pole per hook)


These are, for example, my redneck "bicycle hook" hangers for the pool poles (which are sturdier and hold more poles).

Speaking of those pool poles, they're another cheap expensive common pool tool.
Is there anything that we can get in a plumbing supply house that is better and still works?


I am looking for some kind of very cheap temporary pool cover though, but it has work as even a dollar spent on the wrong solution is wasted.
Does anyone use hundred-dollar cheap tarps as poor man's pool cover?
I don't think a 9mil tarp will even float, will it?

 

[godwinson]

just buy a few hundred foot roll of irigation tubing.

That is a good suggestion as it will likely be a lot cheaper as the garden hose is something like a dollar a foot (maybe half that in larger lengths).

Harbor Freight sells a 12VDC pump and a 120VAC pump (see photo above) but I don't think they are variable speed which is a bummer because you want a pretty slow speed I would think. I would guess about 20 minutes minimum at noon sunlight would be effective transit time depending on the diameter of the tubing (the bigger the diameter the slower the transit time would need to be I guess).

Anyone you know who has built his own solar water heater?
Any ideas on what's a happy medium on tubing length, pump speed, and tubing diameter?

I have all the room in the world but not the money so that's why I'm seeking a redneck solution to replace what I've got which leaks like a sieve.

 

[Dirk]

We've had many here who have tried to outsmart the physics of heat transfer by attempting to DIY a solar heater out of hose or irrigation tubing. It likely won't work and here's why. You have two things to overcome: (1) the square footage of the heat exchanger, in your case just a single hose, and (2), more importantly, the volume of water you can shove through it, which isn't going to be much with a single hose.

The heat exchanger area issue should be self-explanatory, but the volume of flow is less obvious. You will no doubt be able to get warm or even very hot water pumping out of the hose, but the volume of it, no matter how hot, will not be enough to affect the heat of your pool water. Probably not even a little. The only way to efficiently heat a pool is to push a lot of slightly warmer water into it, not a little very hot water. There is some thermo-something-or-other physics behind that, which I don't know well enough to explain, but there's a reason all commercial solar panels look and work the same.

For example, my solar panels are almost 400 square feet. Good luck trying to mimic that with garden hoses. And I need to push 40 gallons a minute through them just to get 5-10° on a good day. You're just not going to be able to get there with a single run of hose. That's why the manifolds on a solar panel are 1.5" pipe, or usually 2" pipe. They have to move a lot of water. You could try splitting the hose into multiple hoses, but the splitter, the manifold, would be the bottleneck unless it was 1.5-2" in diameter. And whatever pump you might use, has to also be capable of pushing 30-50GPM. The pump you selected can do, max, 1525GPH, which is 25GPM, which is close, but that spec is probably in the best of circumstances with very little head (resistance). Which is not what you're going to be pushing against. My 3HP pump has to run at about 2500RPM to get the flow I need through my panels. Your cast iron pump will not be able to match that.

So that's what you're up against.

 

[JamesW]

The anti-bird wire is a good idea.

Charging it with 10,000 volts might be a little bit much though...just saying.

 

[Dirk]

I don't cover my pool. Can't help there.

I too am looking for better pool pole solutions. Keep us posted. I just buy what's available at the local shops.

I DIY'ed my pool pole holders out of cut-in-half chunks of 3" ABS pipe (might have been 4"). Impervious to sun, rain, pool water and chem's. Screws are stainless. Should be a forever solution. I have them where the brush and net are mostly in the shade. But the handles and other plastic parts rot in the sun.

 

[Dirk]

Charging it with 10,000 volts might be a little bit much though...just saying.

Yah, there's not much left of 'em. I have to get some sort of rheostat so I can dial it down to get them to come out a nice medium-well. Not sure what happens to the feathers. That might be the puff of smoke I sometimes see.

 

[Dirk]

My imagineering looks too pro? I'll take that as a compliment. That's what happens when you mix DIY with OCD.

DIYOCD? OCDDIY?

 

[godwinson]

If I'm picturing correctly how much spraying it takes to rid an area of flies, that amount of dish soap will have no ill effects on the pool. There's worse, and much more, on the skin of the folks swimming in your pool: soap, perfume, suntan lotion, and, well, "other" stuff. Spray away. That's what filtering and chlorine are for.

Inside the house the soapy spray works well because the flies are those big houseflies and there usually is only one or two that gets in from outside when the doors open and there is nowhere for the flies to go and there's no wind, etc. And soapy water (only a couple of drops of dish detergent is needed) won't hurt anything in the kitchen. Once they get hit with the soapy water spray, it's like flak - it knocks them out of the sky and they're still alive so I put them outside gently (but I suspect they'll still die but at least they're outside the house).

For horseflies, I don't mind killing them. I didn't want to spray the 31.45% muriatic acid for obvious reasons of the spray getting on stuff and in eyes, but I tried the 12.5% bleach which doesn't seem to faze horseflies. The water is so pure right now (straight from the well) that I'd hate to put ANY soap in it and there are only two of us so the load on the pool is more from the flies, dust and pollen that blows in than anything else.

It's lucky for us the load is so low as the equipment hasn't been turned on except to test it but the pool isn't full enough to start it working.
Until then, I've been using this redneck "mechanical vacuum" to get the big bugs on the bottom.

(BTW, that's a pillowcase for a catchall bag -- do you have a good source for fine mesh cloth?)

And I skim the top with the kitchen strainers, which works surprisingly well to catch floating bugs.

Speaking of dust and pollen, I can't run the skimmers yet as the well keeps running out of water so I can only do a few hundred gallons a day.
I've been my own "mechanical skimmer" this entire time of filling the pool - which works reasonably well while the water is 85 degrees.
I even have a "redneck dump method" for the bugs, which is a tall rock in a plastic bucket.
The rock enables the strainer to be tapped on it to dump the bugs out into the bucket without damaging the bucket plastic.
And the rock keeps the mess from blowing back in the pool.

This is just temporary until the water gets to the level of the skimmers.
One of the skimmer flaps is broken - some things you just have to buy the correct replacement part for.

For that, is there a really good pool supply house that does mail order?

I like the other gizmo. It looks like something Spy vs Spy would use on each other!

I still haven't figured out what YOUR gizmo is yet. OMG!

That's for the BIG BOYs!
(whatever it is!)

Obviously it's hand made with PVC (some half inch, maybe, and some three quarter inch, it seems). It has TWO decks, one of which might even swivel to let the measuring cup do something. I can't figure out what the black protrusion is yet though. Maybe it's part of the measuring cup? The front bucket also seems to hold something. Probably powder? I don't see a hose gozinta, so I don't think it's water comes in and mixes with the pre-measured powder and then gozouta into the pool, but it does seem to have a handy polyethylene handle but I don't know what the green flap of rubbery vinylized material does.

Dunno. Maybe that's a garden hose in disguise (the green thing) but what I think the contraption is is some kind of chemical dispenser.
Is it?

I wear out my garden gloves pretty quickly. Nice idea you have for an alternate!

The beauty of those mig-welding gloves is they're all leather and long so they're great for poison oak and they're only about twelve bucks or so.
As such, they don't cost any more than regular leather gardening gloves do but what's great about them is the length along your wrist.
They even sell leather welding sleeves, which I don't have but they would work well for heavy brush work I would think, to protect your arms.

BTW, another piece of expensive crummy pool equipment is the standard pool thermometer.
I tried an electronic thermometer but the water killed it (duh, yeah, what was I thinking).

Why does a pool thermometer need to go from minus 20 degrees F to 120 degrees F anyway?
All I need is about 60 to about 90 degrees (if it's colder, I'm not in the water and it isn't gonna get hotter).

I'm always counting by two and I have to put whiteout on the reading just to see it with my tired old eyes.
And the thermometer inside slips down over time anyway - so you lose a few degrees each time.

There MUST be something better. But what?

 

[Dirk]

Here's the scoop on the second DIY project. It's for dispensing pool chemicals. The black thing is indeed the measuring cup's handle. The green are protective gloves. The bucket is for carrying acid jugs across my deck, which I stained with dripping acid before I came up with this solution. The link is to the post about what the thing is. That rest of that same thread is all about my quest for knowledge and how best to handle harsh pool chemicals.

#97

 

[godwinson]

We've had many here who have tried to outsmart the physics of heat transfer by attempting to DIY a solar heater out of hose or irrigation tubing. It likely won't work and here's why. You have two things to overcome: (1) the square footage of the heat exchanger, in your case just a single hose, and (2), more importantly, the volume of water you can shove through it, which isn't going to be much with a single hose.

Darn. That's what I was afraid of, although I have an advantage, if I want to use it, which is I can flip a jandy valve and pump the filtered water through a 2-inch wide pipe that goes about a hundred feet to an area where the mechanical solar panels are. They leak like a sieve. I'm told they haven't been used in years.

But I hear you and if others failed, then I'm gonna fail too. The pump I looked at for 100 bucks at HF is probably too fast and I'd need a very long set of tubes. I do have about 200 feet of that black garden hose though and it gets too hot to put on skin in the sun, but of course it's only temporary as it can't hold much water compared to what a pool needs.

The heat exchanger area issue should be self-explanatory, but the volume of flow is less obvious. You will no doubt be able to get warm or even very hot water pumping out of the hose, but the volume of it, no matter how hot, will not be enough to affect the heat of your pool water. Probably not even a little. The only way to efficiently heat a pool is to push a lot of slightly warmer water into it, not a little very hot water.

Now THAT is useful information. Makes sense too. I like that. I would NEVER have thought of that on my own. But it makes sense. Instead of aiming for hot water, you aim for slightly hotter water, and each time it gets slightly hotter. I hadn't though of it that way but it makes a lot of sense. Thanks.

There is some thermo-something-or-other physics behind that, which I don't know well enough to explain, but there's a reason all commercial solar panels look and work the same.

I think the ones I have work but they leak like a sieve. I'm told they haven't been used in ten years or more. So the elements got to them. They look like a sprinkler system when I turned the jandy valve to fill them about two weeks ago. I don't have the money to replace them and I don't think they're well made anyway.

I might have to give up... but maybe I can keep looking for a solution but I get what you're saying. It has to be a huge volume of water to make a difference.

For example, my solar panels are almost 400 square feet. Good luck trying to mimic that with garden hoses. And I need to push 40 gallons a minute through them just to get 5-10° on a good day. You're just not going to be able to get there with a single run of hose. That's why the manifolds on a solar panel are 1.5" pipe, or usually 2" pipe. They have to move a lot of water.

I have about the same. Do yours leak like a sieve though?
The rubber is so thin it's poked full of holes.

You could try splitting the hose into multiple hoses, but the splitter, the manifold, would be the bottleneck unless it was 1.5-2" in diameter. And whatever pump you might use, has to also be capable of pushing 30-50GPM.

This is good information. I didn't realize it was that much gallons per minute. My garden hose from the tap is five gallons a minute. You're talking five to ten times that. I guess I might have to use the existing ten panels (they're about ten or twelve feet long by about four or five feet wide). But they leak like there is no tomorrow.

The pump you selected can do, max, 1525GPH, which is 25GPM, which is close, but that spec is probably in the best of circumstances with very little head (resistance). Which is not what you're going to be pushing against. My 3HP pump has to run at about 2500RPM to get the flow I need through my panels. Your cast iron pump will not be able to match that.

Thanks for checking out the pump power. I actually thought I had wanted a slooooooooooowwwwwwww pump, not a fast pump. I was worried that it was too fast.
I have all the physics wrong I guess.

So that's what you're up against.

Well, my other option is to somehow plug all the holes in the ten panels that I have...

 

[Dirk]

I haven't yet posted my thread about how I solved for pool temperature. I guarantee you've never seen or heard of anything like it! I just haven't gotten around to it yet. But I'm with you: those floatie thermometers suck, hard to read, hard to find in the pool, and don't do anything for when you're inside. Wifi floating sensors suck. And the temp sensor on my pool equipment only works when the pump is running. I solved for all of that. More on that later...

 

[Dirk]

Do yours leak like a sieve though?

No. I bought the best there is (Heliocol), and they have a 20 year warranty. Sometimes it makes sense to DIY, other times not. The key is to know when to do which, but I hear ya on the budget. The panels are not cheap, and must be sky high now. I got mine for $300 each, and that was a steal back then. I saw them for $1000 each when I was shopping. I did my whole system for about $3K, and saved $7K by installing it myself. So technically my system is part commercial, part DIY!

A quickie search just now revealed about $800 per panel, so they haven't come down.

If my panels do someday leak, the manufacturer supplied me with a repair kit. You might do some research to see if the manufacturer of your panels offers something similar.

The physics of heating a pool is counterintuitive. It trips up just about everyone, so you're in good company. It seems to make sense: "The hotter the water, the better the heating." But it's: "The more the water, the better the heating." I learned what I know about it while assembling my system, and figuring out the proper flow rate. And from others here that know a lot about it. I'm just parroting...

 

[godwinson]

I don't cover my pool. Can't help there.

This one has a cover but it hasn't been used in twenty years so it's all rotted and when I turned the motor on, nothing happened.
For now, I don't have the money so I was hoping there is something that can be thrown in the pool that will float and act as an ersatz pool cover.
But not the billion dollar stuff that I saw at Leslies which was too expensive for what it was.
I'm hoping there's something cheap like a tarp is cheap but I don't know if a tarp will even work.

I too am looking for better pool pole solutions. Keep us posted. I just buy what's available at the local shops.

For the pole holders you made, I really like your half cut plastic pipe idea. I hadn't thought of that. I keep spare parts so I have lots and lots of spare pipe lying around.

For me, so far, the large bicycle hooks work pretty well as pool pole holders.
They will almost certainly rust as they're not stainless. But they won't rust in the pool as they're not near the pool. And they have rubber sleeves so I suspect I won't see the slight rusting. I'd prefer better quality of course - but they work and they don't cost much more than a buck or two each. The nice thing is they're really big loops. So they hold a half dozen poles with stuff bolted to them rather easily. That makes things easy.

I DIY'ed my pool pole holders out of cut-in-half chunks of 3" ABS pipe (might have been 4"). Impervious to sun, rain, pool water and chem's. Screws are stainless. Should be a forever solution. I have them where the brush and net are mostly in the shade. But the handles and other plastic parts rot in the sun.

I'm with you on the handles always breaking. I have a few broken poles I need to saw off and drill.
I'm sure I can find a source for fiberglass or plumbing that will work for a pool pole somewhere.
It has to be long, cheap, sturdy, and light ...

As for the nets, I think they make them not replaceable on purpose. They fall apart too easily in the sun.
I'd like to come up with an easy to make net and a pole made out of standard plumbing somehow.

 

[Dirk]

FYI: the way my solar panel repair kit works is basically just plugging up any leaking tubes. So if one tube leaks, it in essence gets taken "off line." Where are yours leaking? At the manifold? Or in the middle somewhere? You could one-by-one just pinch them off, or cut them and plug them up. You'll lose heating capacity, but maybe better than abandoning them? Of course, if they're leaking now then they're at end-of-life, and you could just be whack-a-moling: fix one leak, another pops up.

 

[Dirk]

There are the bubble wrap covers. I think they're about $100, but they only last one season, I've been told. They'll keep the pool warmer, and help with evaporation, too. Maybe leaves as well, if you can figure out how to remove the cover without the leaves sliding off in the pool. This stuff, shop around:

https://www.amazon.com/Sun2Solar-15-Foot-30-Foot-Above-Ground-Swimming/dp/B00DWABCZ2

I eat the heat loss, and the water loss. Oh well. I like to look at my shimmering TFP-clear water, and jump in whenever I want without having to mess with a cover. Just my personal choice.

 

[kimkats]

What a fun read so far!

Covers-many have tired this and that over time. The consensus is buy the cheapest you can find as none of them last more than a year or two