Poor Man Pool Heater?

[Watermom]

Poconos (Al) has a homemade solar panel such as you are describing here and he gets lots of heat in his pool from it. I'm going to ask him to pop into this thread.

[Poconos]

Hi Bill,
I have dabbled with the garden hose long ago to see if the idea would work and it did. Wound up with 1200 feet of 1/2 inch black poly pipe configured in 12 parallel 100 foot runs. Made a couple 1x12 manifolds from PVC pipe and adapters. The pipe is layed out on black rolled roofing material in my back field. The configuration is roughly 8x50 feet. The whole assembly is located about 80 feet from the pool and fed with 1.25' buried pipe. Works like a champ. I used tarpaper initially but it soon deteriorated so went with rolled roofing material. As for flow, you actually want as much as you can get, theoretically. You get maximum heat transfer at a maximum temperature differential so the cooler the pipe is the more heat it absorbs. From a practical standpoint you can cut the flow but you don't want a big temperature rise. I forget what my numbers are but I know my flow is less than 10 GPM and I remember the rise was around 4 deg F. The 1/2 inch black poly comes in several pressure grades so use the cheapest you can find. Cheaper means thinner walls which is better too.
Hope this helps.
Al

[not2high2fly]

I live on long island ny and have a short swimming season, I'm knocking ice off the pool one day and taking off the cover the next. I have never taken a reading but we start with 30,000 gal of COLD water. I tried the hose thing even built a solar panel and considered a solar fence everything worked well. The problem was that I couldn't heat enough water to make a real difference heck I could hardly melt the icebergs. I do the work on my pool at night last year the mosquitoes were killer so I had some bricks from a wall I just knocked down and also had about 20' of 1/2" copper pipe. So kill 2 bird's with 1 stone I built a little furnace/still , made a firebox piled bricks around it hung the copper coil from a piece of tin which was also the roof no mortar no nothing a real piece of sh*t. Used my return line to pump the water to the coil my filter running anyway might as well use it. It worked awesome got rid of the bugs all the scrape wood from around my house and was by far the best heater so far and it didn't cost a dime. It worked so well this year we upgraded my new one is sweet I think my pool will actually be warm before half the summers over. The new one cost $40 and wood is free so the price is right. I know you asked about solar but you might be better off with a little fire. If your interested let me know I will help anyway I can