Would you run your pool differently if you had unlimited electricity?

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T

Tegguy

Well-known member
Oct 27, 2019
411
Winter Garden FL
Pool Size
17000
Surface
Plaster
Chlorine
Salt Water Generator
SWG Type
Pentair Intellichlor IC-40
Alright so I don't know if this is the right place for this but I have a bit of an odd question. My wife and I finished our pool around a year ago and increased our electric solar size to cover the operating costs and allow us to run the house cooler. Up until now we have been running the pump around 1600 RPM for 8-10 hours a day, water features 4X a week for 30 min. Unfortunately our lovely power company has implemented a new "minimum bill fee" that basically charges us $17 a month to get our bill to $30 for nothing in return so the logical thing to do is find a way to consume more power to at least get something for this fee.

My question is if power wasn't an issue is there anything different you would do with your pool? Should I run the pump faster? Water features longer? Heat the thing 24/7? Obviously this isn't me trying to find a way to consume all the power with the pool but up until this point I had dialed the pump speed back and everything in an attempt to minimize the power consumption but keep the pool cared for.
 
I read about this the other day. It was 2 parts. The first part was these fees to recover losses from so many customers using solar. Every area is different but lets say that 1/4 to 1/3 of a random had solar and produces alot/ all of their electric. But the power co still has to maintain the whole grid, so they dreampt up new fees which were applied for and approved by the government.

The second part gets worse. They were also buying your excess power at the typical wholesale rates and somehow that was too high so they reduced the buy back costs for small producers. So basically if they were giving you 10 cents for what they would charge you $1 for, now its going to be 4 cents.

Or, at least the providers i was reading about, but if one gets away with it, the rest will follow suit. Because you weren't giving them enough, and they were giving you too much. Must be nice to have that kind of lobby power.

I'd be looking to blow it all myself, for sure. I don't know a good way to do that for mid FL as all my solar friends bough electric heaters to reduce the furnace bill. I think i'd rather cook more turkeys and do double the (smaller loads) of laundry, then run the waterfall 24/7. My favorite hoodie would be clean ALL week, sometimes twice a day. :ROFLMAO:
 
Tegguy said:
My question is if power wasn't an issue is there anything different you would do with your pool?
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I'd keep my pool at 86 year-round. I wouldn't change anything else because it's already pretty cheap to run a VS pump.
 
Run your pump 24/7.

Running your water features more has the downside of causing more aeration which will raises your pH more rapidly requiring more acid additions.

Use your HP to heat/cool your pool for maximum comfort to use remaining electrical minimum.
 
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ajw22 said:
Run your pump 24/7.
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+1. The benefits are plenty here for any pool. You currently have about 16 hours that anything that falls/blows in the pool can get waterlogged and sink to the bottom. Full time skimming will catch most of the big stuff. You'll also be filtering around the clock as well and rarely get behind the ball in the spring/fall. You'll also also be topped off with FC at all times and it won't matter what happens when. An impromptu get together, a large storm, a particularly hot / high UV day mid season..... none of it. You'll be well covered. The SWG goes to a lower % to account for more hours of pump runtime but the actual time producing FC is the same. 50% runtime in 24 hours is the same as 100% of 12 hours, the cell doesn't care about the math. On is on and off is off.

It won't help the using more electricity part very much with a VS pump, but it certainly removes people's only reason not to run 24/7 to save $10 a month.
 
@Charlie Bezzina I would if we could but we only have 1 provider and it's also illegal for us to not be connected to the grid

@Newdude Yes its completely stupid and the logic of "operating" costs is stupid as well because if that's the case raise the connection fee and make everybody share the cost not just the low consumers. I don't remember what the credit used to be for the over production but this year it's $ .04 per KwH. Now I just want to put more stress on the grid and actually cause stuff to go up because of this fee. I also think it's odd how if you have an electric car you qualify for a $10 credit to drop the bill below $30....

I will consider swapping the pump to 24/7 and adjusting the SWG that's not a bad idea especially with the benefits.

Being new to pools I have to ask if I wanted to heat it 24/7 with the heat pump is that ok for the heat pump or am I putting a ton of stress on it and hurting it's life?

I also plan to keep the house cooler in the summer and a bit warmer in the winter. Don't really care about leaving lights on, ect. We ended up with around 1,800 KwH credit the end of December last year. We knew the system would be large but we didn't care at the time with how everything was setup and the payout at the end of the year.
 

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Tegguy said:
I will consider swapping the pump to 24/7 and adjusting the SWG that's not a bad idea especially with the benefits.
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It's a no-brainer for anyone ok with $20 a month in electric. It's even MORE of a no brainer in your situation.
Tegguy said:
Being new to pools I have to ask if I wanted to heat it 24/7 with the heat pump is that ok for the heat pump or am I putting a ton of stress on it and hurting it's life?
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Proper chemistry will prolong it's lifespan. The elements will do what they do to the exposed parts and electronics regardless if the HP was running or not.

Up north I'd say run it full time. In FL you may find that without the overnight heat loss, it's miserably hot during the day a good chunk of the year. But in your cooler months, let 'er rip.
 
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Yeah during the summer I probably wouldn't heat it overnight but right now it's 59 so I was thinking during the winter months heat it up and then during summer let it drop off overnight (we also have a small chill mode on the heat pump)
 
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One thing I’d look at is increasing landscape lighting. I’ve always loved how various lights all over the place make the area look “classier” and if it were free to run them, even better.
 
Leebo said:
One thing I’d look at is increasing landscape lighting. I’ve always loved how various lights all over the place make the area look “classier” and if it were free to run them, even better.
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We have some on the Tree's and want to add more around but we're using the phillips Hue lights so they're super low power consumption also
 
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Homebrewale said:
It seems to me that someone miscalculated and designed your solar system to be too large for your needs.
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We intentionally went large because with a growing family and everything (also didn't exactly know how much power the pool would consume) it's easier to consume more power than it is to reduce consumption. At the time it was something we were completely OK with because how everything worked out but this new "fee" is complete BS and is just our power company trying to partially circumnavigate net metering that failed to get erased when voted on.
 
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