Tips to Ensure Your Pool is Energy Efficient

We’re passionate about safer swimming pools, and that includes helping you create an energy-efficient pool that’s safer for the environment. All of us are working with finite natural resources. While our kids, grandkids, and neighbors love their swimming pool time, it’s also important to leave a better world in which to pass on the love of swimming we instill in them every day. The good news is that you don’t have to choose between safety and conservation. With the right help from your local All-Safe Pool installer, you can build a pool area that saves you money, has a lower impact on the environment, and protects your loved ones from accidental drownings, which take thousands of lives every year.

Energy Efficiency And The Environment

Swimming pools use thousands of gallons of water, large amounts of chemicals, and electrical energy that is used to heat, circulate, and filter the water. Combined, this can represent a huge draw on natural resources at a time when all of us are coming to understand the impact of our day-to-day choices on the world around us and its climate. Energy-efficient pools–with features like solar pool covers–help you decrease your pool’s usage of these resources, limiting your environmental impact.

Energy Efficiency And Your Wallet

Using fewer resources does more than just impact the environment. It has a positive impact on your bank account. Water, chemicals, and electricity all cost money, and with a swimming pool, those costs are regular, constant expenditures to keep your pool operating. Owners with a pool safety cover have likely already noticed their upkeep costs dropping, but creating an all-around energy-efficient pool can increase your savings even further. That leaves more money in your bank account for better pool parties, vacation planning, or any other family priorities.

Water, Chemicals, and Power, Oh My!

Your swimming pool is an artificial environment created in your backyard and maintained by carefully balanced mixtures of water, chemicals, and power. Optimizing their usage is at the heart of creating a more energy-efficient pool.

• Water – You’ve probably seen recent reports of drought and water scarcity around the world. Swimming pools use fresh water, which has been cleaned and treated, often by municipal authorities, before reaching the swimming pool. An energy-efficient pool should help you use less water, protecting this natural resource and lowering the demand on these water treatment and delivery systems.
• Chemicals – As artificial water systems, pools lack many of the natural processes that keep water fresh. Chemicals work to limit the growth of unwanted organisms like algae and bacteria while also conditioning the water to be more pleasant for our bodies to relax, exercise, or play in. These chemicals take energy to manufacture in factories that also use large amounts of water. In addition, entering the environment in too great of a concentration can further damage ecosystems.
• Power – Electricity costs money and is often sourced from resources that either may not be renewable or leave a large carbon footprint. Even clean energy sources are often transported on a grid that is aging, inefficient, and maintained by equipment or vehicles that contribute to pollution on their own. A more energy-efficient pool lowers the monetary and environmental cost of power delivery.

Creating a Safe and Energy-Efficient Swimming Pool

When it comes to creating a more efficient swimming pool, choosing items that focus on one or more of these three key factors will give you the largest impact, often with the least cost and disruption to your existing pool lifestyle. With a few smart equipment decisions, you will save money, protect the environment, and have the peace of mind that comes from knowing your pool is healthy and safe.

Keep It Covered

Swimming pool covers directly affect the rate of evaporation of your pool’s water, maintaining both its water volume and chemical balance. Pool covers come in many shapes, sizes, and styles, but not all of them will help you create an energy-efficient pool or help you protect against unsupervised pool access. 

• Swimming Pool Safety Covers – A swimming pool safety cover uses a strong rip and chemical-resistant material anchored around the edge of your pool to help prevent access to the water. Strong enough to hold the weight of a full-grown adult, these pool safety barriers are some of the best protection you can get for your loved ones.

This mesh material also helps prevent evaporation by creating a pocket of warm, moist air under the cover. Instead of escaping into the atmosphere, the water condenses and returns to your pool, lowering your need for replacement water volume and more treatment chemicals. It also helps trap heat, reducing the energy required for heated pools to maintain a comfortable temperature.

• Solar Pool Cover – Solar covers are different from pool safety covers in that they aren’t designed to prevent accidental drownings. They can play an important part in creating an energy-efficient pool, however. Solar covers are designed to limit evaporation and retain the heat of the sun, passing it onto the water they float on. Solar covers should only be used when an effective pool safety barrier, like a removable mesh pool fence, is in place.
  

As an example, our Solar ring system is a flexible solar cover option. Inflatable rings around the outside perimeter keep the covers afloat and protect the water’s surface from evaporation. Even with enough rings to cover the pool’s surface area, they don’t become entanglement hazards that increase the risk of drowning. They’re a smart, cost-effective way to make sure your energy-efficient pool uses less water, power, and chemicals.

Set A Timer

Timers are a popular and easy-to-install way of managing energy-intensive pool tasks as efficiently as possible. They let you set these systems to run at a set time, on specific days, for the optimal amount of time to get the job done right without overusing resources. Timers are available for your pool heater, filter pumps, lights, and even chemical management systems. One of the easiest ways to reduce the environmental impact of your pool and make real changes that lead to cost-saving energy efficiency is pool automation which limits your consumption to just what is needed. That’s less water, less power required, and a reduction in chemical overuse while also saving you the time of manually operating and monitoring these systems and processes.

Consistency is Key

One of the benefits of automation is that it helps you with the third step in creating a more energy-efficient pool: consistent maintenance. It is far easier and more cost-effective to keep a pool healthy than to enter into a repetitive cycle of mitigating issues and restoring a pool to proper functionality and levels. This means making proper maintenance a priority. Keep your water’s chemistry balanced, flush your pool filter medium regularly to keep it operating at peak efficiency, and make sure your pool safety cover stays clean and in good repair. 

Get Started On Your Energy-Efficient Pool

Your local All-Safe Pool installer is ready to help you protect your pool with a safety cover or install a solar pool cover that fits your needs. Whether you just need increased efficiency or want to add a pool safety barrier to your pool area, they’re ready to tailor a solution to your unique pool. They’ll take measurements, talk to you about your goals, and give you a written estimate that gives you detailed information about your pool’s options. Request your free quote from All-Safe Pool today.