How To Heat A Swimming Pool

Nobody likes a cold swimming pool! But the plain fact of it is unless you live in South America or the tropics then you are going to have to have some form of pool heating. Now when it comes to pool heating you need to be aware that heating hundreds or thousands of gallons of water is always going to cost you some money. How much depends on how hot you want the water and what pool heating system you opt for.

There are several ways on how to heat a swimming pool so let me talk about the pluses and minuses of all of these:

Electric pool heaters

Electric pool heaters are ideal for use with above ground pools as in general they are small enough to be easily moved around and should satisfy the heating requirements of your above ground swimming pool. They’re also relatively cheap to buy compared to any of the other swimming pool heating solutions listed below, however they can be expensive to run when compared to other solutions if you choose to use them all year round to heat your swimming pool.

Gas pool heaters

Gas pool heaters are ideally suited for use with in ground swimming pools whereby you can run a permanent gas supply to the heater. This is because using gas heating for large volumes of water is inherently much cheaper than using electricity. The downside is that it is not often a practical solution for an above ground pool evenfor the larger models that may remain up the whole year as you would need to create a safe covered space for the gas pool heater.

Solar powered pool heaters

Whilst in principle these offer you free heating for your swimming pool, you will find unless you live in a very sunny climate, that the majority of solar powered pool heaters will not heat the water to the temperature that you are expecting them to do. This can leave you feeling disappointed in what can be a very large investment. Also to be effective you need a very large solar powered pool heater, which will take up some considerable space, next to your swimming pool.

Heat pump recovery systems / Pool heat pumps Heat pumps recovery systems work the opposite to a fridge and instead extract the heat from the air and use it to heat the water in your swimming pool. The swimming pool heat recovery system will work best in summer when the air temperature is warm.

Air conditioning heat recovery systems / Air conditioning heat pumps

These are my personal favourite as once you have purchased them in summer you can effectively actually heat your pool for free. If you have an air conditioning unit then you can use a heat recovery system to take the heat expelled by your air conditioning pump and use this excess heat to heat the water for your pool. The downside is one of these units will cost around $2,500. However it means in summer you will actually never have to use any other form of heating for your pool. Indeed these air conditioning heat recovery systems for swimming pools work so effectively that you may well end up having to turn the heat pump off to keep the water temperature down!

By Richard Allen -