No work today

[Droogs]

pool and a brolly?

 

[sunnybob]

It might come to sitting inside and leaving the freezer door open, and to ell with the electric bill.
At east we have A/C in the bedrooms. Sleeping is impossible above 30.

 

[Steliz]

Wouldn't it be more manageable to empty the pool in the off season?

 

[sunnybob]

Sadly, no.

The pool liner is held in place by the water. Drain the water and the liner sags and eventually tears away from the top retaining bands. 3K a year for a new liner is not an option.
If you just turn off the pump and no filtering or dosing means you have your very own mosquito swamp outside the back door.
No getting around it, they are costly.

 

[Just4Fun]

It i government orders that all outside workers may down tools and seek shade when over 40c.

I would be stopping long before it got that hot.

The only similar temperature-based ruling that I am aware of over here is that when the temperature drops below -15C school sports (outside at least) are cancelled. Wimps.

 

[sunnybob]

You have to keep all metal tools in a bucket of water, or you can get quite nasty burns. It still amuses me when I pick a can of soup from the cupboard and its warmer than my hand is. Of course, its difficult to have a cold shower when the cold water tap produces 35c water

 

[Jonathan S]

If you just turn off the pump and no filtering or dosing means you have your very own mosquito swamp outside the back door.
No getting around it, they are costly.

Bob over in Spain people turn the pump off in the winter, have a couple of top hats floating on the top with a chlorine tablet in......this keep the water clear all winter.

 

[sunnybob]

I slowly reduce the hours the pump runs as the winter progresses, Right now its on 10 hours. If I had all the family here it would be 14 hours. Next month I shall start to reduce it a couple of hours a day each month as the water chills and it gets less use. Usually december is only 2 hours a day. Jan and feb it can be turned off because the water is down to 12 or even less. March is the start of our summer (we dont have four seasons, just summer and autumn) so the hours are increased again. Usually the first person in (NOT ME ) is early May. By june most people can use it (NOT ME ). I dont get in till ts 30c. Usually early July.

 

[Jonathan S]

I slowly reduce the hours the pump runs as the winter progresses, Right now its on 10 hours. If I had all the family here it would be 14 hours. Next month I shall start to reduce it a couple of hours a day each month as the water chills and it gets less use. Usually december is only 2 hours a day. Jan and feb it can be turned off because the water is down to 12 or even less. March is the start of our summer (we dont have four seasons, just summer and autumn) so the hours are increased again. Usually the first person in (NOT ME ) is early May. By june most people can use it (NOT ME ). I dont get in till ts 30c. Usually early July.

I think our climate is simular.
A mate of mine runs a solar company, he has a system that has a couple of pv panels and a pump, when the sun shines (about 300 days a year here) the pump circulates the water.
Here the system fitted is approximately 2k.......apparently the electric is expensive here, thankfully I'm off grid.

 

[sunnybob]

We are very slightly nearer the equator at 35th latitude. You are on 36th. our winters are usually milder than yours.
Solar powered is still in the rip off stage. A mains powered pump can be several hundred. a solar powered pump is 23 hundred. It would take a 100 years to save back the electric. I tried several of the utube heating systems with CH pumps ad 100's of feet of hose pipe. All complete nonsense.
Solar power prices are very annoying. There is absolutely no justification for those prices. I can be sure your mate has more money than he can spend. Stupid when you consider water heating by solar has been on every house here for donkeys years.
I have a cousin who has a villa in fuengirola, but he is on a gated estate with a very large communal pool.

 

[AJB Temple]

Friends have an indoor pool, heated and with a powerful jet to swim against. I think it looks horrible and the building is never free of condensation. It is heated all the time but hardly ever used. Waste of a good building.

However, as I truly hate hot weather, I briefly considered a pool this year. What we may do, if these hot summers persist, is get an above ground temporary pool for the few weeks that the weather is hot enough in the south east UK, and a hot tub. Maybe a plunge pool would do for the hot bit of the year. We do have a longish canal shaped pond big enough to swim in. But it is increasingly full of newts (common and great crested), sticklebacks, baby koi (we accidentally dropped breeding brushes in there) and god knows what else. I occasionally get in to use the pond vac and it creeps me out a bit.

Used to have a moderate hot tub when offspring was little and we used it constantly. When we moved house two moves ago the buyers offered to buy it off us for more than we paid (it was all plumbed and wired in) so we sold it and never got round to replacing. On my endless to do list is a cedar hot tub, Scandinavian or Japanese style, heated by a log burner (we have more logs available than we can possibly use, so basically free heating).

 

[HappyHacker]

I can confirm the issues of a pool in the UK. I had one of those above ground 18ft diameter things. The first one was a blow up ring around the top, the Rottweiler punctured the blow up ring. I thought I had repaired the holes but while I was working away it went down over a period of a week so >6,000 gallons of water dribbled out and caused the basement to flood. I had to build a 6ft high fence around it to keep the Rottweiler out. To keep it nearly warm I used a 9kW heater, it would take about three weeks continuous running to get it to a half reasonable temp. I had an inflated cover thingy to try to stop the heat escaping. I would spend at least a couple of hours a week cleaning it and putting chemicals in. I replaced it with an above ground frame pool. It would quite often get used only once or twice a year when the summers were cold. I did not keep it heated with such little use which resulted in less use. The maintenance continued however much it was used including in winter, removing leaves from the cover and as the cover would sometimes blow off from the pool as well.

18ft diameter is not enough to do any proper swimming in.

Never again.

An endless exercise pool seems a better idea.

 

[sunnybob]

A word of warning to all you hot tub enthusiasts.
You should research "hot tub lung"

 

[AJB Temple]

Sunnybob, you can be relied upon to find risk factor in anything!

 

[billw]

I had to smile at that. It wouldn't do for us all to be the same. I could not tolerate the heat that you crave. Twice in hot places (Morocco and Mexico) I have collapsed in the heat and have concluded it doesn't suit me. My ideal temperature is 20C to 25C but for me -40C is preferable to +40C.

I too don't like the heat, I'd much rather be cold than warm. Spending almost a year in Asia was only tolerable because I could spend it in shorts and athletic gear which let me sweat a lot without really showing it. When I was working in the UK I'd have the aircon in my office set to the lowest setting, usually 16C. I found that not only did this stop me feeling uncomfortable, but it would also make people avoid coming into my office for long periods of time, so I could get on with my work.

 

[sunnybob]

Sunnybob, you can be relied upon to find risk factor in anything!

Thats mostly true, but so is hot tub lung.
I have never owned, nor even been in a hot tub, but on another forum a man told of catching the disease and how bad it is. I still have a good memory, so things like that stick.

I've also spent 50 years working with people who mostly dont know what theyre doing, so I have a lot experience of putting things right (made my living at it for 30 years), up to and including a coroners report, so I do my best to stop other people making the same mistakes.

 

[MikeJhn]

Talking of wild life in the pool, last year I had a mole in the skimmer, that was a first for me, this year we have not been to our holiday home so it will be interesting to see how much of a pea green soup we have as its been a year with the pump on just two hours a day, I did put the chlorine up to about 20ppm last September and put on the winter cover, but a year with no maintenance is pushing the hope a bit far.

 

[sunnybob]

You might want a full haz mat suit

 

[Trainee neophyte]

I fished a scorpion out of the pool the other day - nothing unusual in that, but said scorpion had drowned along with many little baby scorpions, who all ride on mum's back to keep safe. Getting hundreds (I may be exaggerating, but it felt like hundreds) of tiny little scorpions out was was a challenge. Good job it's not my pool.

 

[sunnybob]

I presume yours was a full size one? Cyprus has miniature scorpions. I've only come across 2 in all my time here, mainly because they are so small you just dont see them.
Biggest I saw was about an inch long. I said to the Cypriot I was working with, "oh look, a scorpion!" he strode straight over and squashed it flat with a "theyre poisonous" and that was the end of that conversation.