The Perils of Owning a Tiny Hobby Pool

I feel like a rant. I will try to keep it short.

I do not like swimming pools. I don’t like public pools because they’re full of pee, dissolved feces and mucus and other secretions, hair, band-aids, and God knows what else. I don’t like private pools because they’re for suckers. You give up 1800 square feet of prime lawn, and in exchange you get a tiny patio and a pathetic pool which is, if you’re lucky, 30 feet long and 8 feet deep. Your insurance company won’t let you have a diving board or a slide, leaving you with very little to do on the four yearly occasions when you actually use your glorified kiddie pool.

Pools are a pain in the butt to maintain. The base fee for a service is around $1200 per year, and that doesn’t include replacing things that crap out. If you maintain the pool yourself, you end up spending a lot of time trying to fix inferior products designed by the worst engineers in the universe.

Pool parts are made from cheap plastic that isn’t strong to begin with. It starts out bad, and then it gets worse as solar radiation eats it. The materials are crap, and the designs are so bad, good materials wouldn’t help. O-rings poop out. Handles snap off. Plastic parts that are supposed to be watertight crack. And the replacement parts, which are also garbage, are overpriced. You can pay $20 for a few O-rings to rebuild a single valve. In the real world, O-rings are nearly free, but the people who make the pool junk won’t tell you which sizes you need, so unless you want to guess, you have to pony up.

My pool has driven me nuts. A doodad that lets air out of the filter screens fell off months ago, inside the filter. I couldn’t see the problem because it was internal. The pressure inside the filter kept going up, no matter how much I backwashed. This caused cracks to appear in the pump body. This caused water to spray on the motor. The motor would eventually have failed because of this, so I had to take the entire pump apart and cover the cracks with special epoxy.

The pump’s outlet was the location of the cracks. The outlet is threaded on the inside and outside. You can choose to use a male or female fitting to connect it to the system. Originally, it had a female fitting on it. I replaced it with a male fitting which screws into the outlet. It turned out the female fitting had been holding the pump outlet together, by squeezing it after it was tightened.

I turned the pump on after replacing the pipes and fixing the original leak, and while the old crack no longer leaked, I had water coming out in two more places. Screwing the male fitting in exerted outward pressure on the crap plastic of the outlet, so it either created new cracks or opened old ones.

I spent quite a while cutting and cementing PVC to make this stupid thing work, and now I have to rip it all out, apply more epoxy, and redo the whole thing with a female fitting.

While I was having problems with the filter pressure, I kept using the backwash valve over and over. I didn’t know these valves were junk. You can probably get by with only rebuilding yours once a year if you give it light use, but when you backwash 15 times a week, the O-rings die, and then you have to get new ones. Your local hardware store doesn’t carry the right sizes, so you have to go on the web, find out which ones you need, and order them from Ebay or some other source. Either that or overpay.

I rebuilt the original valve after waiting forever for O-rings to arrive, and it still didn’t work, because the valves themselves get corrupted with corrosion and so on. I had to buy a whole new valve which is more complicated. The design is supposed to be better than the old ones, but Amazon reviews mention quality control issues and so on, so I’m sure it will give me problems eventually.

The manufacturer is a company called Pentair. I think they get their engineers from mental institutions. The worst junk imaginable.

It’s possible to get around the backwash valve problem by choosing not to get a backwash valve. You can design and build a complicated system of ordinary ball valves that will do the same thing, but it may take up a huge amount of space.

My new valve is leaking. Not much, but enough to be annoying. I believe the ends of the pipes that exit the valve are irregular, preventing the O-rings from seating well. No problem. God forbid Pentair should have to make their parts correctly. I’ll just take the whole thing apart, sand the surfaces down so they’ll seal, and make it function.

I figure I only have another 4 hours of work to go, on a system that should have lasted 30 years without repairs.

Pentair isn’t alone. I’ve also used Hayward products, and they were also unreliable. When a pool pump says “Made in Mexico” on the motor casing, you ought to know you’re in for trouble.

Get this: pool pumps have open-frame motors. OPEN, instead of totally enclosed fan-cooled (TEFC) motors. Incredible. What kills pool motors? Water. How does it get in? 1. Seals that die because they overheat if you run them for 30 seconds without water, and 2. BIG VENTILATION HOLES IN THE CASINGS. Am I the only one who sees the issue?

The next time my pump motor dies, I should get myself a beautiful surplus TEFC motor (American made) from Ebay, for $60, and I should fab up a way to adapt it to my pump. Beats paying over $200 for three-year Mexican motor made from old hubcaps.

I have never owned a large hotel pool, but my guess is that they use much better pumps and filters. Pentair makes disgraceful Mickey Mouse products which are designed to fail, and I know hotel owners and universities and so on wouldn’t rely on that kind of equipment. Somewhere out there, there has to be a competent company that makes reliable products which are, sadly, too big for my tiny, shallow 30-foot pool that has no diving board.

If you’ve never had a pool, and you can’t wait to get one, think twice. My dad got our first pool when I was 12. My family has had two relatively nice 40′ by 20′ pools with diving boards. It’s not worth it. You will use your pool rarely after the first year, and after that, it will just be a money suck that increases your insurance rates.

Spend the money on a serious brick barbecue with a pig pit and pizza oven built in. Put in some shade trees and landscaping. Forget the pool. You’ll just be buying a headache.

Okay, I feel better now. You are dismissed.