Swimming Pools Spain
Over 50 years ago owning your own swimming pool was a symbol of status.
Now almost every home or apartment block has a swimming pool to relax and cool down in. With temperatures in Spain reaching 30c-40c throughout the summer, swimming pools give welcome relief from the heat.
Nowdays choosing to build a new swimming pool is almost as complicated as choosing to build a dream home. Firstly, you will need to consider whether your new swimming pool will be chlorine, salt water or an eco friendly pool. After deciding the water quality, you will need to decide a shape of the pool, whether or not you want pool lighting, the tiles and whether you are going to have the pool heated.
Chlorine Pools
Swimming pools come in all shapes and sizes, but nearly all of them, from the private pool to the water park wave pool, work in the same basic way. They use a combination of filtration and chemical treatment to continually clean a large volume of water.
The basic idea of keeping your swimming pool clean is to pump water in a continual cycle, from the pool through the filtering and chemical treatment systems and back to the pool again. In this way, the pumping system keeps the water in the pool relatively free of dirt, debris and bacteria. Some pools also include heaters in the mix, in order to keep the water at a certain temperature.
Salt Water Pools
It can be complicated deciding which pool is best for your family. Many questions revolve around salt-water pools or chlorine free pools. Salt-water pools are NOT chlorine free pools.
A salt-water pool is simply one that utilizes a chlorine generator. A chlorine generator's main function is to produce chlorine for the pool so you do not have to buy it, store it or handle it. These are big advantages for many pool owners.
In a salt-water pool the water feels smooth, your skin feels smooth and many people feel more refreshed.
Eco Swimming Pools
Self-cleaning "ecological" pools use micro-organisms and aquatic plants to filter the water and prevent algal growth, and are designed to attract wildlife, such as dragonflies and butterflies. Pioneered in Austria, chemical-free pools have become increasingly popular.
How do you create a chemically free pool? By treating the swimming water through various methods and passing it through specific aquatic plants it becomes clean and healthy. The plants act as a water cleaner.
Basically, there are three different systems.
1. Where the plants are integrated in the pool.
2. Where the plants are external to the pool.
3. A hybrid system, some plants are external and some internal.
Swimming Pool Shapes
Deciding on what shape to have your pool will largly depend on where you are going to place the pool in your garden.
There are basically 4 shapes of pools:
- Rectangle pools
- Kidney Shaped Pools
- Classic Style Pool (with Roman Steps in an arc at one end)
- Freeform Pool - designed to your imagination.
Infinity Pools
An infinity pool is a swimming pool which produces a visual effect of water extending to the horizon, vanishing, or extending to "infinity". Often, the water appears to fall into an ocean, lake, bay, or other similar body of water. The effect is best captured in a pool where the liner color matches the body of water it is "falling" into.
Colors & Finishes
The color of your pool will have an impact on the pool’s overall appearance and ambiance.
Lighting
Enjoy the beauty and romance of your swimming pool by night with a fibre optic swimming pool lighting systems. Set the mood with your choice of colors. With the added luminescence of fiber optics, you will be able to capture your pool's beauty by day as well as night.
Leaving Water in the Pool all year round
An in-ground swimming pool may seem like a solid, unmovable structure, but it is actually sort of like a boat, it can float in the surrounding ground water. When the pool is empty, the ground water pressure can actually push the structure up out of the ground. This is one of the reasons why pools are filled with water year-round as there needs to be roughly equal pressure on each side of the pool.
Heating
Swimming pool heating costs can be significantly reduced by using a pool cover. Use of a pool cover also can help reduce the amount of chemicals (chlorine, etc) required by the pool. Outdoor pools gain heat from the sun, absorbing 75%–85% of the solar energy striking the pool surface. Though a cover decreases the total amount of solar heat absorbed by the pool, the cover eliminates heat loss due to evaporation and reduces heat loss at night through its insulating properties.
The heating effectiveness of a cover depends on type. A transparent bubble cover is the most effective, as it allows the largest amount of solar flux into the pool itself. A darker cover absorbs more sunlight directly, allowing temperature to rise faster, but ultimately prevents the pool from reaching as high a temperature as a clear cover.
