What About Swimming Pools?

Swimming pools are an ideal application for solar water heating, as the temperature required is quite low - under 30°C. Most installers will recommend flat plates to keep the price down - because the amount of panels required is much larger than for heating domestic hot water - however, if you can buy a high efficiency evacuated tube solar panel for the same money - you might as well enjoy solar heated pool water all year round - instead of just in July and August! If you used flat plates, a rule of thumb for calculating what you need is to fit the equivalent of 50% of the pool's surface area. For Vacuum tube panels, this is reduced to 25% - and of course, they will carry on working in the autumn, winter and spring. A 40m2 pool would only need 2x Swithenbanks 58mm 30 tube solar panels. Compare this to the cost of heating a pool for a year

Installation is very simple. If you have chlorine you will need to fit a stainless steel heat exchanger (this is because chlorine causes copper to corrode). If you don't have chlorine, you can simply put the solar panel in-line with the pool filter, so that the pump directs water through the solar panel before returning it to the pool.