Popsy1

Has anyone made a solar pool heater ?
If so how affective was it. And how did you go about making it ?

EMR

We made a prototype using black irrigation tube and an old pond pump.

The tube was placed in a coil in the sun and the water from the pool pump through it.

There was a noticeable and significant temp rise in the water.

The question is how many metres of tube would be required to process sufficient water to raise the temp of the pool and how if the tube was fixed to the south facing roof area what power of pump would be needed to take the water from the pool up to the roof and through the tube.
There are commercial flexible solar mats on the market which do the same job with the theory being that the area of the matt needs to be around 50% of the pool area.

Popsy1

Hi.. Thanks for the reply. I have seen the long heating mats and they do seem to work very well even in the UK. So as long as the cost is comparable to say 200 m of irrigation hose it might be a good option. And yes a low output pump with a good head pressure. I was thinking of a small domestic central heating pump to do the work as they comfortably push water up 4 or 5 meters.
And yes about 50% of the pool size sounds good.
Some people suggest setting the pump on a timer with say 2 mins on 5 mins off to allow the water to heat to max temp then send it down into the pool. Others say it makes no difference and just leave it running as the suns energy is the same either way. Other peoples thoughts on this would be much appreciated.

Maybe1day

I made a panel using 6 Atm PVC tubing. It uses 50m of tubing in a 1metre square wooden frame with a transparent plastic cover. It is set up to point roughly at the sun at 1pm. An acquarium pump (10W) is switched by a circuit which compares the tank temperature to that of the water at the top of the panel. The tank holds 250 litres and the temperature rise is around 25C in a normal day. Insulation of the tank is almost non existant so during the night the temperature drops to what it was before heating... Calcs from measuring flow and temperature rise show that it produces something over 800W. favourably comparing with the Novosol products on a size by size comparison.
If the tank was insulated and the panel increased to 2sqm it would work very well indeed. Cost of the whole project was 100 Euros. As for heating a pool the tubing could be laid on the ground with some insulation, 10sqm would give a very useful heat output of the order of 6KW if flat on the ground and would cost little more than the bare tubing and joints plus pump etc.

johnfisher

using solar power is so cool . It saves us a lot on our monthly electricity bills.

pwwm

we use a solar cover it sits over the water (not on it), apart from initial cost which was not a lot it costs nothing and we were in the pool last year on 16th April temperatur was a lovely 28º

Rosemary

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