Okay I have a small 8' Wide and 3' deep above ground pool and I would like to warm it up a bit. I have seen this way to heat it and it seems like a good idea. The problem I have is it seems like it would be best not to have the tube wound tight together. What do you guys think about this DIY project.

http://ffaat.pointclark.net/blog/archives/...ool-Heater.html

I would like to do it this way since its simple and cheap.

Looks very interesting especially if you had a limited area. My only concern would be the friction losses in flow with the small bore hose. I think the suggested addition of a sheet of UV stabilised plastic sheet would be a good idea to cut losses from the wind flowing over the pipes.

The other issue would be emptying it when the season was over.

Very good idea in the use of cheap readily available polypipe to make this.

well as far as emptying it people suggested to blow it out with a compressor. I have mine setup but I just wish it was warmer of course when it first fomes out it will burn your hand off its so freaking HOT but once the water gets moving its not to warm at all I think my pump is pushing it out so fast it has no time to heat up I have no way to regulate the pump. I am thinking about getting more pipe i have 100ft now and may add 200 more so total of 300 anybody else have any other suggestions cheap ones

one guy wanted to put his pipe in a car and I thought thats a good idea but I dont have a car just hanging around to stick a bunch of pipe in

Back in the 80's my Dad did something similiar for our 26' foot pool.
He used 3/4" copper pipe on the 1st story roof.
You're right, it did burn your hand off at the start then got cold.


If we slowed the pump down too much it couldn't pump the water to the roof.
We tried using a large bucket as a resrvoir to allow the water to seep into the copper at the top of the roof but we found we would of had to install a float switch to keep it from over flowing.

We scrapped the idea eventually.

Well this is what baffles me. I have a 50ft black hose connected to the spout we can fill up a really small pool and play in the water and its nice and warm. Why is it that when this shorter black hose is getting water from the house it stays warm what seems like forever, and my pump and hose on the roof seems a lot colder???????????

sister-inlaws ex:
Was at his dad's house because he has a plasma cutter ( :drool: ) and was checking out his pool heater set up. 8x8' ply ( 2 sections of 4x8') black hose, ruffley the size of garden hose that was fed by a pump. I'm unsure if the feed was at the top or bottom, what I did notice is the 8x8' ply was painted black, and the hose wasn't coiled at all. each length of hose had, at a guess, 6 or so inches between them.

The pool was always warm.

would sujest coper pipe painted black, you will want something that is not an insulator as rubber is, wind it tight, the more tubing in the largest space possable will give you better results, use some aluminum pannels on each of the 4 sides to help direct the sun from the largest possable source. retain heat with this project placing a black tarp over the pool may help


on the pld tech tv now g4 thay had on a computer show, one segment was using 108 or so pocket mirrors on a circle aranged 15 deg from the center on a board. thay were able to burn soda can and other stuf. you may want to research that.

then again reply 3 from the origional thread indicated a possable 1 degree increase per day, not sure if he calculated the loss at night. good luck

Float a piece of black plastic or foam covering most of the surface of the pool; you'll have a hot tub.

Yeah thats another thing I will try. I just have been working on my pj box so I need to get back to that pool. I really need to finish one project before working on another.

I made one of these a few years ago. I used an old book case with the shelves removed. With it laying on its back I added two inches of rock wool (loft insulation). Then a sheet of copper over the top of the rock wool. The copper was in fact an old copper water tank openend, cleaned and flattened. Then a 20 m coil of 10 mm micro bore copper piping clipped to the copper. And finally the whole lot was sprayed black. You can take this further by adding a sheet of glass (not PVC sheeting) to cover the copper piping. I didn't because of the risk to the kids.

This worked a treat for two years, then next door's dog had a chew on the pool after it was emptied and folded, and I couldn't be bothered after that.

We had one of these also.
They call them solar covers in my area.
worked great, they were just a serious pain to take out & put back in alone.

I went down this road a few years ago but didnt have the "right" area to go DIY, I ended up with 480sqft of commercial panels. Total $$ was just over 500 for everything to heat my 16x32 inground pool.

Best, simplest approach is a trickle collector. A sheet or two of galvanized roofing, paint it black and frame it up. Your pump pushed water to the top, water is allowed to trickle down the valley of the galvanized, picking up heat as it flows along and literally falls into the pool. CHeck ome Depot and Lwoes commercial desk for "special order" gal-V where the valleys have a closer on center distance (minimized heat transfer distance)

It is an automatic drain down, no blowing out the lines issues.
You are not relying on lousy heat transfer efficiency values by running it thru plastic pipe.

To improve performance, glaze it.
Trapped air will heat, warming the surface of the trickle

Google Thompson trickle collector

Perhaps You could roof over your pool deck, mod your garage roof with the trickle on top, draining down into a gutter, and feed that into the pool.

Can be made to look nice and will not look ghetto

Copper pipe is going to mess up yor pool chemistry
Ever see a pool with copper piping?


Envelope Math
It's all about surface area.
Figure 1000btu per sq ft
1 btu to raise 1 lb of water 1 degree

How many pounds of water you heating?
How many degrees do you want to raise it?
Divide by 1000 and there is you sq ftage

John

Unfortunately with the price of copper these days, it's hard to justify the cost... Just run some steel pipe through the back of the BBQ.

With a solar heater, so long as it's full of water, you should be able to let it circulate by convection. So long as the system is full, if the outlet is placed higher than the inlet, and both are underwater, the density change as the water heats should be enough to make the system flow.

Now, I wonder if there's a way to use a solar power system for air conditioning.

I really like this idea copper pipe. http://www.redneckpoolheater.com/
but I have a feeling that the copper pipe is going to be a good chunk of $$$$$$$
I think it would work great for what I want

I've had this idea in my head for a year now. I've got a 12ft x 3ft deep pool for the kids. I bought one of those blue "bubble wrap" plasic pool covers for $10 end of season year before last and it worked great last year ... only problem is the location of the pool was not in direct sunlight enough to make a "huge" difference. After clearing some tree's in the backyard and getting more sun, the pool was much warmer, however, I still have some double hung windews I pick up from the local transfer station, and was going to use the glass from those to create a heater much as this guy had done. All that was left was to be able to solar power the pool motor and the heater circuit motor... Another idea was using the tank from an old hot water heater, paint it black and put it in a box painted black. Glass is installed on the southern facing side and top of the box. The idea was the large tank has more thermal mass, so keeps the water hot/warm overnight....

Thanks for posting this and getting my brain going again !

Cheers.

A potential "add on" to the hot water heater idea that several do it yourself sites have suggested is to mount it in an old refrigerator shell and put a sheet of glass or other suitable material over the top. Tilt the face towards the sun and you have a very efficient heater. The refrigerator case is extremely well insulated and at night. if designed correctly, the door can be replaced and keep in the heat.

Remeber: the whole reason that you need a pool heater in the first place is that the pool itself has a very large thermal mass. Unless you're going to make for a VERY large heater system, it's highly unikely that the thermal mass of the system is going to be more than a small fraction of the pool's mass.

One reason that I like the idea of circulation my convection is that once it cools down, the circulation will simply stop, and thus your "heater" does NOT become a radiator, which will actually cool the pool down faster. Once the temperature drops, the low temperature at the bottom of the pool is likely to be consistent with the temperature in the "heater" circuit. The end result is that convection stops.

Convection is also self-regulating for speed. It slows down or speeds up the flow through the system depending on the amount of input energy. If the sun is shining strong, it'll speed up the flow, making the maximum use of the temerature differential. If it's a bit cloudy, the flow will slow down, allowing the water in the system to collect more heat from the system.

Supra can you elaborate I got so lost Thanks

On which part?

Using convection to circulate the water through the heater? Simple.

Water neither compresses nor expands, however it does change density. Water reaches its maximum density at about 4 deg C.

As the water is heated in the solar collector, it decreases in density. When it does so, the cooler water in the pool wants to displace it, since the cooler, more dense water wants to settle as low as possible, it will push the warmer, less dense water out of the way to do it. As long as the inlet to the heater is lower than the outlet from the heater, this will maintain a sustained flow.

The flow is as follows: The cooler water in the pool pushes into the lower inlet for the heater, where it is warmed up. As it warms, it decreases in density, and is displaced by more dense, cooler water. The faster the water warms up in the heater (the hoter the sun) the faster this flows.

The self-regulating part is this: When it cools off in the evening, you don't want the pool to cool off. If you leave water circulating through the heater, it will instead become a radiator, giving off heat from the pool into the air. As such, you want to stop this as much as possible. As soon as the heater is not actually heating the water inside it, the water will start to cool, becoming more dense, and wanting to flow backwards. (This is why we need the one-way valve) Since it can't, it just stays in the heater, which leaves the warm surface area being just that of the pool itself. Heat is transferred by surface area, and the heater is a way to increase the effective surface area when there is more heat energy available.

Of course, once it starts to fall below 4 degrees C at night, this whole thing stops working, but then your pool is in danger of freezing, and should be drained anyway.

I’ve made solar water heaters before and found that convection alone didn’t work that well if there were highs and lows (coiled?) in the piping. Convection worked well when there was a common pipe at the bottom feeding multiple vertical pipes to another common pipe at the top. In this way the heated water didn’t need to travel down.

DJ

When I was little my dad hooked up 5-10 car radiators and painted them black, worked ok. Or maybe you can use a car radiator and this HUGE 65" fresnel I saw on ebay

Ebay


the ad claims to have been able to heat a piece of steel to 3000F, and able to boil 12oz of water in 50 sec.

Well brainchild that solved everything. I bought a 10 dollar cover that was made for it and it works perfectly we are swimming in very warm water in the afternoon and warm water in the evening. And best of all it doesnt cost anything to run the pump.... I returned it. Thanks I am done experimenting now back to the projector.

best of all the wife swims with us now (kids and me of course)

Sweet...

My folks had a hot tub with a brown cover. They live on the Atlantic coast. For a whole season, they struggled with the temps being way too high because of the "free" energy input. You just can't get into a 110f tub unless its snowing...

There is, It is called an ammonia boil off system. The first refrigerators all had this type of system and they would last forever. If you ever find a propane fridge then it is a boil off system. They have no compressor just a heating element. The great thing about the system is it has no moving parts except a check valve. A solar reflector system would make just the right temps for that kind of system.

We had a fridge for may years at our cabin until one year Grampa punched a hole in the evaporator and filled the whole place with ammonia gas. In todays world you would need to add an ammonia detector for safety.

There is substitutes for ammonia too. The only problem is the system must cycle through the high and low pressure moments so the system can't always just make cool air. Two systems set to off set each other might let you run the blower steady.


I have spent the last week trying to cool our pool down. I made some shade and a mister. My wife put the blue cover on to "try to help" and the pool was about 95deg in one day! I may try a black cover at the end of the year to see if we can keep swimming to November .

Ahh ammonia absorbtion cycle refrigeration, a topic I am very fond of. Heck, I posted plans for a solar fridge on the boards back in '06 I think...

The cycle can run continuously though, not just biphasic. These types of fridges are still used in RVs, where they are powered by kero or propane. The contraption needed for continuous operation is hysterical, looking like some instrument from Dr Seuss...



Az, a few pieces of white foam will keep the pool temps down. Paint the other side black for when you need heat.