Plenty warm enough outside at 84 degrees, but the water being at 68 it's still a bit chilly. What's remarkable is that yesterday I started with water at 62 degrees. I made a mod to the solar heater to increase its efficiency, and that's how I think I got the big boost in temps today.

What I did is that I stopped using the pool pump to circulate water through the hose. It really wasn't pushing as much water through the hose as I would like. I found a pump that I had on my old saltwater tank and found out I could rig it up to the solar heater. Besides, running a tiny little aquarium pump is much cheaper than running my 2HP pool pump. That alone quadrupled my flow through the hose. The extra flow is what gave me the BTUs to actually see a difference.

However, a cool front is scheduled to come through, so all this work will be for naught. However, I think this gizmo will put enough heat into the pool that if I get 4 days of good weather, it should be swimable.

The upside of this is that when the pool gets really warm in the summer, I can run this thing at night to get rid of the excess heat!


Michael (wireless) IM: mwsmith70