Last summer friends of ours were upgrading their above ground pool and asked us if we wanted their old (used 2 years) one. We'd never had one and never even thought about getting one, but for $150 we couldn't say no.
Once it was finally up (nightmares unrelated to today's story) it was simply too cold at first. I got us a set of
solar heating panels as an experiment. They were right next to the pool in a horribly shaded spot, but you could see the potential- sticking your hand in the pool and waving it past the jet, the difference in temperature was noticeable. We decided it was worth sticking with and wanted to do it right this year so we bought another panel set to have ready- less flow restriction and more heat collection.
We did more site prep this spring and set the pool up two weeks ago (the kids couldn't be kept out of the pool that day). Last Thursday I had the day off and my project was setting up the heater. I spent the whole morning at Big Box Depot desperately trying to figure out how to get a long run of pipe that I could step down to seal to the proprietary pool hose connectors. A 100 foot roll of 1.25" tubing from the sump pump aisle did the job, moving the panels out to where they get full sun all day long and I had about 10 feet of tubing left over.
Thursady night, everything fit but I wasn't happy with some of the seals. Friday night after work I redid them and was only unhappy with one seal. Saturday after work I fixed it to good enough. Sunday morning the water temp was 54 degrees. Late Sunday afternoon when I was done with my yard work it was 64 degrees. Still cold, but tolerable after a day of working in the sun. It was down to 61 this morning, but today and tomorrow are full sun.
Overall, I'm thrilled- June 1st and the pool is up and filled with the heater running and all four of us in it. Last June 1st we hadn't even thought of owning a pool. Now we've got one and we're heating it with the filter pump that was going to be running anyway.
