New Post has been published on Mirage Pools
New Post has been published on http://www.miragepools.com/blog/?p=22
Heated Pools
Our climate may tend toward tropical temperatures for more than six months out of the year but for serious swimmers, our brief and sometimes balmy winters aren’t brief enough. Whether your backstroke is Olympic material or you just want to get more use out of your aquatic investment, there’s more than one way to heat a pool. There’s also more than one way to convert a chilly standard pool into a heated one. The main factors to consider when you want to warm a pool are usability, price and environmental efficiency.
In order to heat a pool, you might use electricity, gasoline or natural gas. You may even heat a pool naturally using solar energy. Aptly, the most popular pool heating mechanism is called a heat pump pool heater. Heat pumps use electricity to capture heat and move it from one place to another. They don’t generate heat on their own. The process of heating a pool is a bit more complicated than heating water for household use, but not by too much.
As the pump circulates the pool water normally, the water drawn from the pool passes through a filter and the heat pump heater. The heat pump heater has a fan that draws in the outside air and directs it over the evaporator coil. A liquid refrigerant within the evaporator coil absorbs hot air from outside and changes from liquid to gas. The warm gas in the coil then passes through your pump’s compressor. The compressor increases the heat, taking the gas from warm to hot. This then passes through a condenser which transfers the heat from the hot gas to the pool water circulating through the heater. The water then returns to the pool at a warm, pleasant temperature. The hot gas returns to its liquid form and flows back to the evaporator so the whole process can begin again.
Heat pump pool heaters work efficiently as long as the outside temperature remains above 45 degrees. The cooler it is, the more energy they use. However, since most people don’t use outdoor swimming pools in near freezing temps, this usually isn’t an issue. One way to conserve energy is with solar cover. A “solar cover” or “solar blanket” is a floating swimming pool cover that insulates the surface of the pool water. The majority of the water’s heat is lost through the surface but a solar blanket drastically reduces heat loss. It also allows some of the sun’s energy to go through the cover and into the water, where it turns into heat. As a result the swimming pool heater runs less often and for shorter periods of time, resulting in significant savings on energy costs. Heating a pool can actually be pretty affordable and we think the weeks (or months!) of pool time added to your calendar certainly offset the costs.
