Solar Heating for My Pool

Last weekend, my buddy Kris and I installed my solar heater for my pool.  It’s still barely springtime here in Western Wisconsin.  We’ve only gotten above 70 degrees a couple of times.

The brand was a Sungrabber.   A Solar Pool heater is typically a flat strip of plastic with tiny tubes running horizontally for the water to flow from one end to the other.  The black plastic helps to absorb the sunlight and heat the water.  The strips look like this

The Sungrabber strips are two feet by twenty feet and two of them connected make up one unit. Our size pool called for two sets or four two feet by twenty strips. Did I mention we live in a dome house? That means the next question is where the heck do you put four strips that size on the roof. We have a closed in 3-season porch on the of the house by the pool and that was our best shot.

The first thing we needed to do was to take a look at the connections.  Our pool is 25 years old and has a Hayward pump and filter system.

We decided to cut into the existing pipe, send two pipes up to the top of the roof, one for flowing up to the inlet and the other flowing down to the pool – see the black pipes in the picture below.  We also have an existing propane heater.  We made sure to put the solar heater ahead of the gas heater so that if we needed to use both, then at least the gas heater would be heating the water that had already been heated and wouldn’t have to work as hard (i.e. spend so much money!!)

We didn’t have any piece of roof that was eight feet plus by twenty feet wide, so we did something somewhat unique with how we hooked up the panels.

Each panel hooks to the next with a rubber compression fitting inlet to outlet.  We put two of our stips on western slope of the roof and two on the eastern slope of the roof using a 1 1/2″ spa tube to connect the panels.

We also had a couple of 12 square inch vents on the roof. We built a small frame to make sure that the air could still circulate around them.

We finished up all the connections and used a set of bungie cords to tie the unit down to the roof.  When you have a dome house you want to be very careful about sticking holes in the roof.

The last thing we did was cut in to the pipe running from the filter to the pool to tie in to the flow to the pool.  This was one mean Y joint and is shown in the picture below.  We then tightened up all the joints and let it fly.  We found a couple of small leaks that were caused by joints not screwed down tight enough and were easily fixed.  We now have pool water heated by nature.  I’ll post later on how much it heats the water.

Pictures of cousin Philip and Jenny’s Wedding

Sheri took some awesome pictures of her cousins wedding last week.  Here’s a link Philip and Jenny’s Wedding Pictures.