Swimming pool building hacks needed!

September 21, 2011 2:48 PM

Building an in-ground swimming pool and looking for hacks about going through the process.

It's been about 4 years since a question like this has been on the green, so I thought I'd resurrect it, especially considering the progression of technology and materials that I'm sure extends to in-ground swimming pools. We're lining up about 4-5 contractors for bids and designs; some friends have told us that there's been no better time to build a pool when you combine the season (fall) and the economy (i.e., very competitive bidding process). What advice would you offer as we go through this process? Are there any things that are absolutely "worth it" or not? Is/are there anything that spending a little bit more on makes a *huge* difference? You get the idea.

FWIW, I live in the Southwest desert and would likely have almost year round use of the pool. Solar heating will be used.

posted by teg4rvn to Home & Garden (3 answers total)

Get a salt water pool. Hire a landscape designer -- a real one, not just the person who hangs around the pool company. This is probably the decision my parents are happiest with about their pool (which they are in general very happy about) -- a few percent more on the price made things look totally fantastic, and much, much better than anyone in our family could have come up with. The design included where the pool went, where the gates went, where the cabin went, where the deck went, what would be paved and what would be grass and what would be flower beds and took into consideration all the small details you don't even know to think of. Everyone raves about the setup of the back yard, which is beautiful and useful and intelligent. I cannot recommend highly enough the use of a landscape designer who has experience working with pools.
posted by jeather at 3:20 PM on September 21, 2011 [1 favorite]

We just had a gigantic pool repair done which involved draining, resurfacing and re-plumbing our in-ground pool, so about a big a job as you can get short of building a brand-new pool. One thing that we discovered during the estimate process is that companies have differing styles of work -- that is, one company used a small crew and thus takes 2 weeks to do the work, another used a large crew and did the work in 5 days. We ended up using the large crew company (for a variety of reasons) and I have to say we really liked the speed at which they worked -- the entire process was extremely noisy and disruptive, and it was nice to have it done quickly.
posted by BlahLaLa at 5:23 PM on September 21, 2011

Make sure who ever installs the piping does NOT use nylon fittings-chlorine shrinks nylon and causes leaks later on.Unfortunately I have repaired a lot of leaks from this are a percentage of pool installers do not seem to know this.Polyethylene fittings are good. Another thing I see being done is putting silicone on threads and insert pipe fittings.Silicone does not adhere properly to plastic pipes and should not be needed -if a proper thread and thread lubricant (teflon etc) is used.
posted by plumberonkarst at 10:26 PM on September 21, 2011