White phosphorus. Of course you would have to build a container to house it and the catalyst, but if you make the container transparent you can solve your pool lighting issues as well!
First time guest to Oasis de Diosa: “Tinted swim googles?”
Diosa: “Yes. Required.”
In Michigan we used a solar blanket (as mentioned above, looks like packing bubbles, but more rugged). We left it on day and night, except in August when the pool would get above 90’ (hotter than we liked). We had a propane heater, but rarely used it (man would it go through the propane fast!)
We didn’t find the cover to have any impact on chemical balance, but perhaps that’s because we used Baquacil (long-chain biochemical agent, rather than chlorine/bromine).
The cover also helped to keep the water cleaner, avoiding blown-in dust & leaves. IIRC, we used our pool pretty regularly, May through September. Whenever the outdoor weather was warm enough to want to swim, the pool was in use.
drools
I’ll be over your house as soon as I can catch a flight.
Three Dozen Hair Dryers… done!
Thermite.
We have a 30’ diameter above ground pool in southern Manitoba and we are retiring the solar panels and purchasing a heat pump. Solar has a number of issues, such as only it really works when it’s sun is high, so not at night or when it is cloudy and when the ambient air/sunshine is warmer than the pool water.
We have also used a pool cover, it traps heat like a blanket a little, they are much more effective at reducing heat loss through evaporation. That’s where they really are worth all the hassle of taking them on and off, dealing with all the leaves, gunk and unsightly gob of plastic where sparkling pool water should be.
Good point about the cover reducing evaporative heat loss. Also correct that it’s not nearly as nice looking. But at least in Ann Arbor Michigan, between equinoxes (equinoces? hrrmph) we got a lot of heat from the solar action – this despite living in a fairly cloudy area. It’s clear that it’s not just less heat loss, because if we don’t run the pump, the layer of water under the cover (for about a foot) is like a bathtub – much more so than when leaving the cover off.
No need to worry about a cloudy day or two, or night – water has plenty of thermal inertia. But after a cold cloudy week the temp can drop a few degrees. More so if it rains, but I don’t remember any 10-degree drops in less than a few weeks (at the end of the season).
They make nice ones that roll up on a spindle, but we just got one on the cheap, a rectangle that covered about 90% of the kidney-shaped area (overlapped the corners, but we folded it back despite that not being recommended – it lasted 8 years until we sold with no noticeable issues.) We just rolled it up and pushed it up onto the cement, an easy job for two and not too much trouble alone (up to age 40-something, fit but not athletic.) Our pool was about 30K gallons, IIRC.
Okay, that looks freakin’ amazing. And, dangerous!
You ought to be able to whip up a cheap solar heater out of 100’ or 200’ of black garden hose and a simple pump. Just run the hose along the top of that trellis over your eating area and back down into the pool. Put the pump on a Christmas light timer to keep it running from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. or so. Talk to the folks at your hardware store or garden store about the right pump. In the end, two or three gallons a minute will be plenty, but you’ll need a pump that can handle that over the amount of lift you need it to do. Vegas is a great place for solar heat like that.
We had an above ground pool in SCal, and put in a solar heater–the panels on the roof kind.
It was awesome.
Completely, totally awesome.
If I ever, EVER get another pool, it will have a solar heater.
Should you decide to paint your pool interior black, check with Code Enforcement FIRST. My son bought a house with a pool, which had been plumbed with copper tubing and even when perfectly clean, the water would be green.
Code Enforcement gets aerial photos, and folks with green pools are faced with citations.
~VOW
I doubt that it would cost more, as our pump only has one speed and it is either on or off.
Yes, the pressure on the pump is initially higher when we first flip the switch to shoot the water up onto the roof solar mats (we can see the gauge go up). But then when the water finally starts coming down, the gauge goes back down to a bit over “normal”. You do have to clean the filter more often to keep that pressure down, but you can hear our pump and the difference from water up and over the roof, to not up and over the roof, is nil.
And besides, even if it costs a couple bucks extra (and I seriously doubt it would be more than that) it is still just using the hot sun on black mat on the roof to heat that pool up. And this means we can use the pool a good month earlier and probably a month later - extending the swim season by 2-3 months. In the dead of summer, we often turn the heat off.
I do have a co-worker at the school who moved into a house with both gas and solar heating…solar for the summer and gas for the winter.
He thought it might be interesting to heat his pool up to 80 degrees in January. Great fun and laughs until his gas bill arrived - close to $500 if I recall correctly. It was the first and last time he used his gas heater for the pool.