A few comments. It’s nice to have a waterfall, the sound of running water is great. I also like having a 6 inch deep baja shelf (tanning ledge) where you can put in an umbrella and chairs. We have this and its great.
My one of my relatives installed a mesh removable fence around the entire perimeter of the pool (he had 4 young kids and lots of young relatives). You can see through the mesh and unhook the door to have access or remove the poles and mesh entirely and then easily put it back up. It prevented anyone or anything from accidentally falling in—peace of mind). Here’s info about one such safety fence.
Its easier to put a mesh cover over the pool. A mesh cover costs about $500 for my pool, maybe double for a larger pool. In addition, the cover will prevent debries
If you are going to have small children Under 3 feet eventually use this pool consider a ledge around the shallow end. We used to swim in a pool with a pretty deep shallow end and the kids loved being able to play on that ledge walking from side to side, splashing water into buckets and laying down and practicing their kicks all by themselves without having an adult having to hold them up. That foot of water on the ledge seems really deep to a 2 year old and it gives them lots of confidence in the water.
By the way a real Olympic pool is 50 meters long and 25 meters wide. A short course pool, which is what the area swim teams use, is 25 yards or 75 feet long and usually about 6 lanes wide. You need a really big backyard for a true Olympic pool.
@Publisher I just googled “Olympic swimming pool” and they are 164’ x 82’!
Our pool was built in 1998.
We put the solar option with the heater. We use the solar to heat up the pool. Given that we are in SoCal, we rarely use the regular heater to heat the pool-during winter or evening spa times.
A large portion of our electricity bill comes from the AC we use during the day, not the pool.
@MaryBarbara58
If you did the conversion, 50 meter is 164’, not many people can afford an Olympic size pool.
@“aunt bea”
Had you used the solar to power the house, you will have a very little electric bill. Heating pool costs a lot of energy one way or the other.
@artloversplus, at the time, solar was new and most of the companies at that time are not currently in business. We couldn’t afford solar to power the house. It was more than the cost of the pool!
In SoCal, we rarely have to use the heater for the pool. We use the solar.
For the house, we don’t use our heater all that much because, when and if we need the house heated, we use our wood-burning fireplaces and they heat up the house pretty well. We have great insulation!
Residential pool builders’ “Olympic size pool” is 20 feet wide by 40 feet long.
Standard residential pools are 16 feet wide by 32 feet long.
The term “Olympic” when used in reference to residential swimming pools is much different than the pool size of one used in the actual Olympic games.
This is based on experience with residential pools several decades ago. I’ll google our family’s pool builder to see if the company is still in business & see if the term Olympic size is still used.
Our pool builders–Sylvan Pools-- are still in business as Anthony & Sylvan Pools.
Lots of information & pictures.
Thanks for all the comments about heating costs. Makes me wonder if i should even buy the heater if it is cost prohibitive to use. I’m such a miser i cant see myself willing to use it. I am going to ask around my town and ask people what it costs to heat the pool for a few days.
I have steps and a good friend has the tanning ledge. I like that I can do laps and not have the tanning ledge in the way. My friend has grandchildren and they love the ledge. I think it’s a personal preference. We do have one corner step at the deep end.
My pool is plaster (I think), I wanted a dark bottom pool but I lost that battle. The dark bottom pools I’ve been in seem to absorb heat and are warmer. We have a gas heater and usually use it just a couple of times a summer. When the kids were young we heated it for a few days at the beginning of the summer. We have a cover like this https://www.coverprocalifornia.com/underguide-installations?pgid=k1jg3xoy-8d2dc5e6-4d41-4864-9541-d6276299b1d1 ours is a dark blue and it absorbs the heat from the sun. It helps keep the pool warm and also clean. We also have a Polaris pool sweep and an auto clorinator. My H is our pool man and with the our cover and the pool sweep it’s not much work at all.
I don’t have a railing but I could see the value as I age.
IMHO gas heaters really only make sense if you’re doing a spa as well. You get a lot more use out of it that way, it costs less to heat a spa, and requires less advance planning - heating an entire pool typically takes overnight or longer.
As others have said, it’s a significant cost to heat up the water initially, and expensive to maintain the set heat. A manual solar cover (basically heavy duty bubble wrap that you lay on the surface) is much cheaper and super efficient for warming up the pool. It can be a safety risk though so you’d want to use it in conjunction with a pool fence. There’s automated covers but I’ve always assumed those were expensive and required a lot of maintenance.
@“aunt bea”
My misunderstanding, do you mean you use a “solar blanket/cover” for the pool? Not solar power for the pool? How is that blanket working? Does it keep the pool warm? Do you use a reel to remove the blanket? I have a winter cover for the pool and it is a PIA to install and remove it, considering the rain, debris, and the wind. Speaking of the wind, two or three times a year, we have real high winds and they blow the cover away. To tie down the cover become a real problem, water weight doesn’t do it. I actually use ropes to tie it down and sometimes that won’t work either. The wind was so strong that metal chairs had been blown away.
I would be interested to hear how the solar blanket does in the winds. We have hurricanes here. I am in NY, living on Long Island.
@mom60 i had a look at that photo, of the blue cover. Is that something you pull on every night? And remove in the morning? Where do you store it?
@mom60
I saw that blue cover as well, there is no way that cover can be removed and installed on a daliy basis. I have a winter cover like that and it normally takes me a day to pump the rain water from the top of the cover, remove it, dry it and roll it up for storage. It will weight around 40~60 lbs.
My folks had a 20x40 fit pool. It was nice when we were in school and then when our kids were young. My mom also used it to swim laps for several years. Ours was just a rectangle. It was 6’ at the deepest and had a diving board, metal stairs on deep end and concrete plaster steps in 3’ shallow end.
At this point, it is used very rarely by great grandkids But expensive to contemplate getting ride of it properly and filling it so it could be the backyard again. My brother’s pool was used a bit when his kids were young and not much since. My sister’s pool is used more as she entertains more.
A pool must be a minimum of eight feet deep for diving.
Solar covers are fantastic. They keep heat in, debris out. You’d have to have a heck of a wind to make it fly off, as it’s sticking to the water. However, covers are bulky, ugly and a pain to take on and off, though it depends on pool size. Some people cut the solar covers into smaller sections and store them in a patio bin. Ours is on a hideous roller contraption which has nearly caused divorce, haha. That’s a battle I lost.
Salt is far superior to regular chlorine.
Heating can be expensive if you extend your season. I live in NY. We only heat at the very beginning and end of season, if we actually want to swim early or late. If we are having people over to swim, we will top up the heat as needed. Our pool is a natural shaped 40 by 20. Using a solar cover meant that we probably spent only about $100 this year heating the pool. But we don’t swim as much as we used to, or we grit our teeth and jump. You get used to it quickly. I wish we had installed a solar heating system, but they weren’t up to scratch 13 years ago. We have propane and I hate it, because of the cost and the ugly tanks that we hide behind bushes.
I would never go with a liner personally. They tear and don’t look as nice. Maybe that’s your only option. Our pool is medium grey gunite. It looks absolutely stunning. The water is so inviting. Grey is the way to go, as it makes the water appear to be deeper blue.
Agree, we have Pebble Tec (gunite) and it looks and feels great. We live in LA and very rarely heat the pool from May - October. On typical warm days our pool averages around 80-82 degrees. We never cover it.
Also, we use our attached spa year-round.