Working on the pool

When we first arrived, the pool was quite cold. Here’s John being a goof in a wetsuit. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know why. It’s very like him though.

Our first project was to install a pool heater. The pool is our priority because the pool was the reason we bought this house. We’re postponing the kitchen remodel and the painting and all the other things we’d like to do, and we’re focusing on the pool.

In order to install the heater, we had to drain the pool. The water needed drained anyway, because it had gotten too hard over time. In year-round pools, like in Tucson, the water should be drained every 3 years or so. In our case, who knows how long it had been. The calcium build-up can damage the pool filtering and chlorinating equipment.

Here’s where it drains out. It was very pretty watching it run across the stones, although I felt guilty releasing all that water. It made me want to construct a recirculating pond someday, like we had in California (I always get these ideas, don’t I?)

Here we are refilling the pool after the heater was installed. I’m standing there for no reason – just because John asked me to for the picture. Maybe he’s trying to get back at me for the wetsuit picture, lol. The theme being: weird ways to be in a pool.

After the pool heater was installed, we went back to Albuquerque to get our furniture. On the day we moved our furniture to Tucson, we had a major windstorm. All that nice, new, clean water was a mess of dirt and leaves.

The pool came with an old pool vacuum, but it wasn’t really working. It would go for a foot or two and then stop.

Our pool guy suggested a new version of the same type of vacuum, but I was dubious. The one he suggested was expensive and I didn’t like all that ugly hose, and it’s not easy to take in and out. There had to be a better solution.

We got the worst of it out manually, with a skimmer (a net on the end of a handle). Then I did a little research and found this little guy! Isn’t he the cutest thing ever? (Not the bald guy, the little underwater robot vacuum – although the bald guy is pretty cute too, now that I mention it.)

The pool robot was cheaper than the regular hose-intensive vacuum, and it works great! (Hopefully it keeps working for awhile).

It zips along underwater, and drags a floating handle for easy removal when it’s done.

It even goes a little ways up the sides.

It doesn’t skim the top, but that’s fast and easy to do ourselves with the manual skimmer.

Next we installed a solar cover. This will help reduce dirt and leaves and it will also help keep the water warm in the shoulder seasons. In the summer we will store the cover because it would make the water too hot.

The solar cover is like heavy-duty bubble wrap, floating on the water.

Here’s John cutting it to size.

We also bought a reel so we could get it on and off easily.

The cover is clipped to the reel with straps.

It rolls right up!

It’s easy to roll up, and we just pull on it to unroll it. It’s not a nuisance at all.

The next step was to get the water heated up. In the summer the heater isn’t needed. In the middle of the winter it would be prohibitively expensive to heat the pool (although some people in Tucson do heat their pools all winter). We’re having an unseasonably warm November, and we wanted to see how the pool heater worked, so we went ahead and turned it on.

We’re not sure how expensive it will turn out to be. The heater is 400,000 BTU. In comparison, a furnace for a mid-sized house is about 100,000 BTU. So I’m estimated that hour-to-hour it costs about 4 times as much to run the pool heater as a furnace. I’ve never paid any attention to how long a furnace runs in middle of the winter, but a total of 8 hours in 24 hours doesn’t seem like too much. I’m guessing that might be equivalent to 2 hours of the pool heater.

At the moment, with temperatures still quite high (80’s) and dropping to around 50 at night, it’s taking between half hour to an hour to bring the pool heat from the low 80’s to the mid-80’s. That seems reasonable to me, but I expect we’re at the end of the season. Next week the temperatures are supposed to drop a fair amount. And before we know it, we’ll be into December.

We’re really, really enjoying the pool. I’ve used it every day since we got here except one day where I was just really busy unpacking. But I nearly always make time to take a break and get into the pool. I’m not a strong swimmer and have zero form, but I alternate between my front and my back to keep from getting too tired. I do several laps and it seems to be very restorative for me.

John enjoys the pool too.

A cold front is coming in and we probably won’t be using the pool regularly from now through mid-winter. Still, I can’t believe it’s been this warm in November. Tucson is amazing.

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