LM swimming pools

learn me all you know. Gunnite/fiberglass/vinyl liner. Below ground, It freezes where I live. What do I need to know?

Dirt filled is best

You spend money to create it. You spend money to use it. You spend money to repair it. When you DO use it you like it. Repeat.

If you thought cars were expensive?!!!

Any local pools or country clubs close by? If so do the math on joining vs putting a pool in. Our estimate on a small inground worked out to 17 years of country club dues. We only ended up joining it for 8, so we won.

Is this for you, or for the kids?

We have a 10ft stock tank with a cheap intex filter system.   The kids love it and there is a lot less danger and worry.   Also if it gets to nasty just dump and refill.  This is a problem around her because the dog also loves it.

It is arguably more fun than a full size pool for these reasons.  

I got one of those 10' x 3' Intek inflatable pools when the kids were little.  Cost basically nothing.  Good fun.  Not too much trouble cleaning and chlorinating.  Once they outgrew that, we were fortunate to have a community pool just a few miles from the house.  I think it was $400. for the family to join for a summer.  Some years we got our money's worth, others not so much.  Pool season is pretty short. 

I can't help with the in ground other than to say I wasn't willing to spend that much money and both of my siblings that have pools hate them.

So, I put in one of these. 

That is a Intex Ultra Frame 12'x24'x52". It was about $800 from Walmart. I added the salt system to it when I bought it for another $100. All in, including the fence and deck addition I'm under $2k. 

It's on its second year and has been outstanding. Total maintenance this year has been 6 bags of salt when I filled it this spring, and 3 gallons of liquid chlorine after some heavy use or heavy rain, and a couple of pounds of stabilizer. It also gets vaccumed once a week by my youngest son, which takes about 20 minutes. 

If you have trees in the yard, the maintenance will be a good bit higher. 

I use it several times a week. The grandkids use it every time they are over here. My wife uses it for exercise. It's worth the hassel to me. If it ever gets to the point it's not, I'll wad it up, throw it away, and plant a garden. 

Edit to add link to install thread. Toyman's done gone off the deep end.

This is for me and the wife, and when the kids and friends come to visit (They are all moved out). Any country club is too far away, and I'm not doing the public pool thing. I already have some unimproved lake property that is really nice. Unfortunately its also hard to get to, no power, water or bathroom. Its hard to have friends out, and we don't get to use it enough. Its also impractical to build. You think a pool is expensive, try to build on the water.

We are thinking if we put in a pool its something we could use everyday, and I would I love to swim. I would build an outdoor shangri la around it. Just not sure, and its real hard to back out of after the fact.

What exactly would you like to know? The previous owners of my house put in a 40,000 gallon gunite pool I've been learning to take care of.

In ground pools have a couple options: Gunite, Vinyl, or fiberglass.

Pros and Cons of each:

Gunite:

Pros: Durable as hell. Can be formed into nearly any shape.

Cons: More expensive up front, surface is a bit rough so it is more prone to algae than the others.

Vinyl:

Pros: Durable. Can also be formed into nearly any shape. Smoother so it resists algae better.

Cons: Wears out (8-12 years) and is pretty expensive to reline.

Fiberglass:

Pros: Quick to install. Smooth so it's resistant to algae.

Cons: Also wear out and options are a bit more limited.

Filtration systems: DE, Sand, Cartridge.

DE is the best filtration wise as it gets down to 5 micron particles. Sand is the cheapest in the long run and gets 20 micron particles. Cartridges will filter to 10 microns but are the worst of both worlds because you need to replace them as often as DE grids, they don't filter as well, and they're expensive.

DE kind of sucks because you have to be semi careful handling it and there's various restrictions on how to dispose of it if you live in a municipality with storm drains and such. I'm going to replace mine with a sand filter next time I need to replace the grids. It's a bit slower to filter out all the crap when you open it but way cheaper to operate.

Chemical wise pools aren't that expensive. I've spent maybe 400 bucks in DE, chlorine, shock, cyanuric acid, and soda ash this year since April when I opened it. I've also spent maybe 100 dollars in seals and various other misc things as well. The trick is understanding what the items are that you're putting into the water based on what you want to achieve. Then buying it in bulk and searching for it based off the chemical name.

Pools are a pain in the ass however from the maintenance side of things. O-Rings constantly either fail or dry out seemingly with no regard to how often you lube them, you have to really watch the Ph and chlorine levels of the pool (you're somewhere the freezes so salt is bad idea becuase when you winterize the salt will destroy everything) otherwise you'll get an algae bloom, plus all the other levels of stuff to make sure you're not damaging the equipment or running into a chlorine lock situation. There's test kits and strips to monitor all that and a couple pool apps to tell you what and how much to add of something.

There's plenty of resources on taking care of a pool. Troublefree Pool has been particularly helpful for me.

Since you live somewhere it freezes you'll have to purge the return and feed lines, plug them and put in RV anti-freeze for the winter. That's the only thing I pay someone to do on pool.

Shes a beaut clark.

How old are your kids?

We spend thousands on our in-ground pool every year. I try not to think about how much that has added up to over time. Since you're starting from scratch I'd go with something like Toyman posted -- empty it and perhaps pack it up at the end of each season. Otherwise you're maintaining it year round only to use it three or four months out of the year.

In reply to The0retical :

Thanks, that's good information. I guess I don't know what questions to ask, because I don't know what I don't know. From my googling I'm feeling a gunite pool is most expensive, and will be expensive when it needs resurfaced. How long is that? A vinyl liner though cheaper to start will need a liner replacement sooner than the others at about 5K. I don't really know much about fiberglass as far as durability goes. They also say it uses less chemicals. To my mind it would seem like a good answer, but I really don't know the whole story.

In reply to nderwater :

What kind of pool do you have? Is it for your kids, or do you enjoy using it? Did you put it in or was it there when you bought the house? I assume in Georgia you use it year round?

Year round? LOL. We use it June-August. Here in Atlanta we have a pollen explosion in the spring and my wooded backyard dumps thousands of leaves a day starting at the end of summer--keeping it clean requires daily work. The pool is 18'x36' and holds about 40,000 gallons of water. It's not heated--to heat that volume of water is very expensive--and the reality is that no one wants to get in it if the temp is under 75. So yeah, year-round use is out of the question.

We had a serious leak in the plumbing over the winter, so we had to cut away about 1/5 of the deck to find and repair it (see the new white area that extends form the steps to the skimmer) .  We couldn't tell through the pool cover, but in that time the water level had been low enough for long enough to ruin the vinyl liner. The photo above was us refilling after the new liner was installed.

The corner of the pool deck was settling and cracking anyway. After mud-jacking failed to raise it we cut away the pool deck and found extensive cavities underneath due to erosion from the leak. Cutting holes around the surface revealed voids around half the pools which we pumped full of aircrete.  It was a major undertaking and consumed many pallets of concrete.

Filling the pool from empty costs several hundred dollars. Pool chemicals cost several hundred dollars per season. We've had to replace the vinyl liner every 6 years on avg--a $2,500 job that also requires a full refill and chemicals. Leaves from the giant tulip poplars and live oaks in our yard are a constant battle to keep out of the pool, out of the skimmer, and off the pool deck. We have to pressure wash the pool deck at least twice a season. 

Having a pool with small kids is a double-edge sword. They love being in the pool (...until they're not) but they can't play in the yard unattended as long as the pool is open. We had a drowning scare with my oldest daughter and now it's a constant battle to make sure that none of my younger kids (6, 3 & 2) have gotten outside without an adult with them. We have alarms on the doors, we have a pool alarm, etc, but kids are kids and the pool is a 40,000 gallon safety risk. The adults rarely do much swimming--when we get in we usually hang in the shallow with the little ones.

The pool came with the house. If we could do it over again I'd just get a modest size above-ground pool that I would set up after pollen season and take down at the end of summer. Vastly less expensive and vastly less of a PITA to maintain ;)