Brock's pool info

some pool links I have found useful

Pool Solutions Forum

The online forum

Pool Solutions

I think one of the most useful pool sights out there

the Spa Depot

loads of spa parts and supplies

Robert's Hot Tubs

great hot tub info, and great Q & A board

Pool Spa

A great sight for information. Check out the waternet section.

Spa Babes

similar to Pool Solutions but for spa's and hot tubs

Pool Works

a local pool company, they built our 1st pool

Kubiak Pools

another local pool company, they build our 2nd pool

Pool Products

a good source for pool equipment

N. W. Wholesale

another good place to purchase pool equipment on-line

West Side Wholesale

Pool & Spa and other HVAC contractor type things

In the Swim

Another good online source

Leslie's

One of the biggest on line suppliers


- We built our second house and yes we put a pool and spa in it again. We designed the house ourselves and had Bill Lund Construction build it for us, they acted as the "General Contractor", but we oversaw a lot of the building of the house. The pool was built by Kubiak from Green Bay, WI. Again we went through a lot of work and designing to keep the humidity from entering the rest of the home. There is a layer of Tyvec, a moisture barrier made for this purpose, then the walls and ceiling ended up being covered by Durock, a cement plaster board of sorts. Finally it was all covered by Dryvet, a synthetic, water resistant, stucco sort of material that is usually used on the exterior of a house. We also keep the room at a negative air pressure from the rest of the house by exhausting a minimum of 30cfm from the pool room directly outside. This causes air from the house to leak in to the pool room and not out of it. The exhaust fan is variable speed and can exhaust up to 240cfm, great in the summer. We have no exterior windows in the room, since in the winter it gets well below zero Fahrenheit regularly, but we do have a full glass door and 3 large windows (interior) to the adjacent sun room with six of it's own large south facing windows. The room will get to 90 percent humidity in 30 minutes with the pool un-covered or the hot tub jets on. Once they are both covered, with the exhaust fan at about 30cfm, it will drop to 60 percent in about four hours. The room always stays just a few degrees below the temperature of the big pool.

The pool and spa are heated by a Geo Comfort GWSR048 48,000 BTU geothermal heat pump. They use a shared Pentair 1.5 hp two speed circulating pump, controlled by a Pentiar Intelli Touch controller. Then the water is run through a Pentair CC200 cartage filter. We also have a 400 gpm Badu Swim Jet at the deep end of the pool, powered by a 4hp motor plumbed with 6" lines. The hot tub has a Pentair 2hp jet pump. Both pools are finished with 3M color quartz.

With our geo thermal heat pump setup I can choose to cool the house and heat the pool in one exchange making cooling the house very efficient. We also only run the heat pump off peak when electricity is less expensive currently about $.06/kw (spring 2008). The heat pump has no problems keeping the pool and hot tub warm. For reference per therm for heating we would pay $1.42 for natural gas, $2.53 for Propane, $3.27 for resistant electric or just $.56 for geo thermal. Our last pool had been averaging about $100 (100 therms of natural gas) a month to heat, I don't know yet how much electricity we are using to maintain the pool. Having the pool in the home did off set our heating bill quiet a bit, typically our utility bill was under $250 for our family of six. I will post info once we are in a while.

Again we installed an air to air heat recovery ventilator. The unit I bought is a Fantech VHR 1404. Basically this unit passes incoming and outgoing air without actually mixing them, no smells or odors pass between them. Since I always exhausted about 30CFM of air from the pool room I had to intake about the same amount. So in winter I was exhausting humid 80F air and taking in extremely dry 0F air. So far the coldest I have seen is 35F. At this point I had 80F air leaving the pool room, going through the exchanger and leaving the house at 60F a 20 degree drop. The incoming air was 36F and came in the house at 66F, a 30 degree increase. I assume because of the higher humidity in the warm air it passes more heat to the intake air. If the pool is open the fresh air coming in to the house is typically 1-2 degrees less then the air leaving no matter what the incoming air is, again I attribute this to the humidity in the air.

Pool facts :
- We loose about 50 gallons a week to evaporation
- The pool is 14 feet by 28 feet, depth is 3 feet to 8 feet deep
- The pool holds approximately 16,000 gallons of water
- The pool is kept at 88 degrees Fahrenheit

Spa facts :
- The spa is 6 feet by 8 feet, with and 18 inch seat and 36 inch floor
- The spa holds approximately 1000 gallons
- The spa is kept between 96 and 100 degrees, depending if children are visiting
- Oddly enough the two use about the same amount of chlorine

Here are some pictures of the pool and spa looking south during construction you can see the drop off quite well and again 3 weeks later full of water but not quite done, you can see my attempt to heat the hot tub with a small electric water heater.

Feel free to email for more detailed information comments & suggestions welcome : nevermab at uwgb dot edu
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