The pool opened

The swimming pool at sunset

The swimming pool has now been cleaned by the robot and filled to the correct level.

The pump still has to be started and the fine particles, stirred up by the robot, hopefully cleared by the sand filter.

But I’m getting nearer to the point of being able to go in.

It would have been nice to swim at sunset today and break through those cloud reflections!

Opening the pool!

View of the pool tarpaulin

At last the weather has become just about warm enough to take the tarpaulin off the outside swimming pool.

The weird landscape in the photo is actually the surface of the tarpaulin. The hillock in the middle  is made by one of the ice-expansion-compensators floating on the water underneath. The dark patches are fallen leaves.

When the tarpaulin is rolled back, all the water lying on top of it accumulates and is then too heavy to lift over the rim of the pool. I actually got into the pool and tried pushing it from inside, but it didn’t work. The only thing to do is to drain the water by means of a syphon.

Kepler had a wonderful time playing with the jet of water as it was syphoned off and then dashing in and out of the folds of the tarpaulin where it lay on the ground.

The pool is just too cool (literally)

The pool steps are finally finished – a builders’ finish if ever there was one. They consist of raw blocks with no surfacing or decoration of any sort, so we now have the challenge of working out how to make them presentable.

Inside steps

Clive went in for a bathe this morning. The photo is of the inside steps, borrowed from the outside pool, which were there to receive him.

The trouble is he found it very cold, primarily due to his lymphedema. The temperature of the water was between 26 and 27 degrees Celsius and I’ve since changed the thermostat so that it’s between 28 and 29 degrees, but he doesn’t think it will make a lot of difference.

I daren’t increase it much more because of the pool liner and also condensation problems in the room so I’m at rather a loss as to what to do.

Any ideas, anyone?

Serendipity

When we built the indoor pool, we intended to put the heat exchanger in the space under some fixed steps. To this end, we diverted the heating pipes, and left a hollow in the floor to expose them at their furthest reach.

It turned out that the heat exchanger could fit very snugly in the recess behind the pool where the pump was so our loops of pipe, and our rather ugly hollow in the floor, appeared to have no purpose.

But there was an unexpected twist to the tale.

The liner of the pool had a join which passed right through where we cut the hole for the skimmer and this made it difficult to get a watertight seal. The result was that the pool leaked, very slowly.

Water appeared in the hollow in the floor – nowhere else, just there. We spent a lot of time trying to work out where it came from, hoovering it up and watching which edge it seeped back from. Was it from the pipes that looped through it?

In the end we worked out its origin and by gluing a sort of gusset round the skimmer hole we fixed the problem.

I christened the hollow in the floor ‘the diagnostic hollow’ and was deeply grateful that it had alerted us.

The 'diagnostic hollow'

Now we’re about to build those long-promised fixed steps, but there won’t be a space underneath them and the loops of pipe were sticking up just enough to be in the way. So we had a plumber cut them a bit shorter and turn them back on themselves in a neat little curve of shiny copper which we hope will leave just enough space for the base of the steps.

The hollow is potentially too useful to concrete in so we will fill it with gravel and insert some kind of tube to give access to its depths so at some future point (God forbid) we can test for humidity in there.

Taking steps

Far and away the best exercise Clive can have for his now hernia-free back is movement in water, and it just so happens that we have a heated indoor swimming pool.

The problem is getting in and out, and since it’s an above-ground pool there’s the additional challenge of bridging the gap between the floor of the room and the rim of the pool.

I currently use an inclined  ladder on the outside and a vertical one on the inside, both made of white resin. When I’m in the water, I lift the inside ladder off its little resin hooks and post it onto the side of the pool so that it doesn’t get in the way, seeing as it’s a very small pool, and also so that no maverick currents are set up by the counter-current machine. 

The ladders are too precarious for Clive, however.

We also have an outdoor pool, now closed and covered till next May, which has outside steps custom-made for us by a blacksmith. The blacksmith himself and his 2 stalwart assistants struggled to move it, so for us to bring it indoors is a definite no-no.

But the inside steps are made of white resin in a ‘wedding-cake’ style (except they don’t splay like a wedding cake). They are buoyant and relatively light; immovability is achieved by placing 2 very heavy inserts filled with sand on 2 of the treads.

We always bring these steps into the house for the winter because to leave them in the pool would make it almost impossible to put the tarpaulin on with their tall rails sticking up, and if we left them just sitting outside they’d be covered in algae and hibernating snails etc by spring.

Steps on their side ready to be lowered into the pool

The inside steps from the outside pool normally sit in the passageway all winter, between Clive’s bicycle and a stack of pellet sacks, and with the rolled up garden hoses tucked into their hollow interior. They are obviously an ideal candidate for the inside steps of the inside pool.

They can’t be made into a fixture like they can in the outside pool because they would leave scarcely any room to bob up and down let alone swim. They have to be lifted in and out every time Clive goes into the pool.

The whole feasibility of the idea hinges on me being able to lift the ‘wedding-cake’ (for want of a better name) out of the pool and onto the back rim by myself when I’m in the water. Clive can’t help me because he needs the steps in position both before and after his time in the water. My old twin-ladder system, slightly relocated,  will enable me to make my own getaway.

Today we did the dry run (or should I say the wet run). It worked perfectly. A bit clumsy, but I would hope to perfect my technique with time.

Now it just remains to construct steps up the outside of the pool, and that’s Clive’s department seeing as he’s an engineer.