Earlier in the summer, or actually in late spring, we decided that maybe we did want a pool at the house considering we where going to spend most of the Hot summer in Houston without a brand new baby to distract us from the weather.
We where not going to dig a hole in the backyard and place a jacuzzi size cocktail pool in the yard as that tends to cost you a fortune and tends to not be reflected in any value increase of your house. Considering our yard is adequately sized for being in the centre of Houston but very small by Texas standards and we are only here short term also not an option for 'our own benefit'.
No worries, there is such a thing as an 'Above Ground Pool' which is effectively a pool which you can place ON your lawn or Patio. And there are well over 2000 choices at that - or so it appears, from the very fancy to the pretty simple and from the very temporary to the semi permanent.
If you move as often as we do you learn to make house related decisions very fast and hence we went for the model that some friends of ours with 3 kids under 5 already had and had tested extensively with plenty of play dates. Our pool is effectively 'self setting' so the walls stay up by virtue of it being filled with water and being round. To avoid it from tipping over at the smallest touch it has a huge inflatable edge.
The first main issue is the sizing. Do you want to cover your whole yard or only part thereof? Do you want your kid to be able to stand up in your pool or do you want to be able to get in to your shoulders yourself. In the end we did some measuring and compromised on 12 Ft diameter and 30 Inch Height. Meaning you can fit 4 adults comfortably to lounge in there and that kids of Rick's age can keep their head above water (except after heavy rain, more about that later) and walk around in the pool as below.
The pool itself is pretty cheap (< 150 USD incl. pump system depending on size), but soon you realize that the real cost is in the water. In Texas in summer there is regularly water shortage and hence water ain't that cheap here! So you fill up the pool with a little under 6000 L of water and don't look too close at the water bill that comes in the next month.
To avoid needing to refresh the water several times per summer you then go to the pool warehouse (of which there appears to be one in every 2nd strip mall) and have yourself informed about pool chemicals. You then buy a chemical dispenser and a few gallon of pool chemicals and float the dispenser in the pool. Depending on use you bring a test flacon with pool water to the Pool warehouse every 2 - 4 weeks and they inform you how to adjust your chemicals regime to keep the pool in 'healthy' shape. Friends of ours have had to buy new chemicals every week, as we are less frequent users and don't have 10 kids a day in the pool we have not quite encountered the same issue.
(No worries - Rick's bottle was very empty!)
One worry remains the occasional tropical storm here which puts down inches of rain in a couple of hours and can make your pool overflow quite easily. Cheap pools come with simple covers and hence Pool Man Eelco does have some work cleaning the pool every time we have had a significant storm & down poor.
Effectively then you are in business, of course you need to invest in endless supplies of pool toys (degrade within 1 month in the pool & texas sun), a pool cover against debris, a set of stairs to avoid kids climbing over the edge and emptying half the pool in doing so, plenty of spare swim gear as your visitors tend to forget theirs and a reasonable amount of lavish beach towels. But thanks to places like Wallmart, Target and cheap outlet stores that is also not a big investment. The problem is more that 'pool season' in the stores only lasts 8 weeks. Before or after that you cannot get anything pool related unless you pay 500x the price.
I can't say we are heavy users of the pool, but we have had some fun times and considering the relatively limited investment it has been definitely worth it. The only real problem remains......how are we going to empty this pool at the end of the swim season without drowning our neighbors gardens? I guess we ill take it a few hundred liters at a time -;)
No comments:
Post a Comment