heating a small pool

[rastoma]

I see a lot of plans on Ebay for DIY heaters. Has anyone seen any of these DIY plans? Just wondering if there's any cheap and dirty ways to heat up my small 2200 gal. pool for the kids to get a few more weeks use out of it.

I haven't put in a therm. to check the temp, but our days are averaging 91F right now and low to mid 60'sF at night. With a smaller amount of water it doesn't old heat and doesn't heat well during the day so even at 90F outside temp, the water is still really cold.

I found this device on Ebay too that uses a garden hose to heat water from the sun. It holds the water until it reaches a certain temp then releases it into the pool and refills and holds it 'till it heats up again. There is a drain on the side of the pool that will take a garden hose, but wondering if there's enough pressure to push the water back up into the top of the pool of like a 100' hose. This valve/device is $20 which if it could raise the temp by 10 deg. would be great.

[RavenNS]

I had one of those dolphino easy-set pools ( 18' x 48") & I put a 20' x 4' solar panel to it. I had aprox 50' of hose ( 25' each way) & I'm not sure how many actual feet the water had to run through ( through the panel vanes). The hose that I used was about 2" diameter & so I had to use flexible pipe conectors with O-ring attachments to make it work.
The pump did not seem to have any problems handling the extra work load.

This DIY method that your speaking of could work... check out some free plans on the internet though before purchasing anything through Ebay. Generally, you can come up with some great ideas on your own... making a solar collector is very easy... ( ever leave your garden hose in the sun? water in it gets hot pretty quickly) .. I've heard of some plans for modifying old satallite dishes for this purpose as well.

Btw, my solar panel ( which I purchase at a close out sale from a store), would heat up the pool by about 12 degrees on really hot days

Good Luck!

[GraceByDesign]

A person in my neighborhood has about 5 rows of 1 1/2" PVC, about 8' or 10'long, painted black, plumbed into his Intex donut... Certainly would be cheap, but I dont know how effective it is, tho. He just has it propped up on the sunny side of the pool.

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ETA the diagram did not show up correctly... the flow goes back and forth, not just up one side, tho Matt shot this idea out of the water anyway with his post below.

[matt4x4]

Large diameter pipe will give you almost no heat gain (unless you cover your entire lot with it). So if you go that way with 50 feet, you might get one or two degrees.
What you need is a manifold setup that divides your large inlet line into numerous smaller lines (same as a store bought panel).
The reason you have to do a manifold is to keep the pressure relatively even, forcing the water into one small line only would create a ton of backpressure and wreck your pump pretty quickly.

To retain heat, put a solar blanket on it over night, it will cut down on your incurred looses greatly.

[JohnT]

The garden hose deals give you a large temperature rise, but in a small volume of water, so it isn't much energy gain. The warmer the water in the hose gets, the less heat it is able to absorb from the sun. To get max heat gain, you want to warm the water only a slight amount everytime through the panel.

[rastoma]

I thought I saw a post a few days ago, can't find it now, about one of the mods here that has a DIY heater or something.

[KurtV]

You might try one of these: Redneck pool heater.

[rastoma]

That's actually pretty awesome. With that kind of heating power I almost turn my 2200 gal into a spa LOL

And I have a gas grill exactly that same size that I just put in a new burner for but need a new grill and ceramic tiles, so it would make a great heater... BUT that copper is do dang expensive.