Redneck Pool Heater

It was blazing hot this weekend.  The temperature reached 95 on Sunday, and SB and the Princess spent all day in her pool.  Sorry about the crummy phone pic.  Her parents put up her pool this weekend, and filled it with water from their Rinnai on demand water heater.

Our pool is still a frigid 60something.  I've shared pics of the kids playing in our pool here before, and various pool related projects like when I made a DIY buoy line out of a dollar store pool noodle.

See that stone wall back there?  It's holding back the hillside.  Not just any hillside - a heavily wooded hillside.  

I like trees, and the boys enjoy trekking back there with paintball and airsoft guns, but all those trees mean a shaded yard.  And a shaded yard means a cold pool.  We have on the roof solar heaters, but there's only so much they can do with our limited sunlight.  We looked into gas heat, but those things are really expensive.  I checked the webosphere for cheap pool heaters, and that's when I came across the concept of a Redneck Pool Heater.  We had some copper pipe sitting in our garage after we switched to pex tubing when we did our kitchen reno.

It took several evenings and one nasty blistery burn for CG to put ours together.

Voila!  Our very own Redneck Pool Heater.  It sits in our grill, but can be removed when it's done heating up the pool.

And here it is with the lid down.  We tested it out and the water coming out was 7 degrees warmer than the water coming in.

A couple of days with this running continuously, and about 3 propane tanks, and we should be able to start using our pool.  In May.  Craziness.

Thanks for popping in and checking out our new pool heater.