Solar Heating

[Celtic]

Hallo
We live near St Jean D'Angely in dept 17 and have installed an inground swimming pool 8x4x1.4m of wooden construction, which I believe retains heat better or should that be allows transfer of heat from surround. Thinking of solar heating and have been quoted for 8.25x3.25 panel with auto circulation,and temperature regulation at cost of 3900 euros. Haven't got a clue as to the correct size as have had 2 differrnt sizes given to us by installers. Have looked on archive but cannot find this particular information. So any thoughts would be appreciated as am sure some of you out there have this form of heating for your pools.

Many thanks
Patrick

[Jackie]

Like you we were interested in solar heating for our 5x10 metre pool and spent quite some time researching solar heating on the net. Most of the commercial kits seem to be made up with black plastic hoses and are quite expensive. The area of the panel required seems to be a minimum of half the area of the pool, of course larger would be better. I decided to go another route and constructed a 10x1 metre shallow open solar collector in concrete painted black. This seems to work quite well and raises the water temperature from one end to the other by a consistent three degrees Celsius on a sunny day. The flow rate has been adjusted to six gallons per minute and this means that the contents of the pool would take about 2 days to pass through it. It is only an experiment and needs to be at least three times larger than it is but as such has proved quite successful. Problems with this type of panel are: a) It is somewhat permanent being made of concrete, b) the paint needs to be able to withstand pool chemicals, c) the outlet from the panel needs to be at a level above that of the water level in the pool, d) being open it collects bits of grass and leaves which need to be filtered out. On the plus side it is a) cheap to make, b) not affected by sunlight and therefore has a very long life, c) probably as efficient as a commercial type if not more so, d) does not need a separate pump as some of the output from the pool pump can be diverted through it..........John in Dept 79