Pool Vessel Shape

It is an old joke in the industry that you only tell your enemy to get a swimming pool! That's because it takes a surprising amount of effort to keep your pool properly maintained, and once it has been installed it is not going anywhere. So... let's start with the design of what is termed the pools vessel, or simply that part of the pool that actually contains the water.

You pool owners or professionals out there know that the most annoying part of your swimming pool maintenance program is the cleaning of the pool, it is hard to do and takes up a lot of your time. So the vessel design or shape that is going to be the easiest to clean is going to be a simple circle with the deepest part in the center of that circle, with the whole thing approaching the shape of the bottom half of a sphere, Why? Because if all of the inlets are set in one direction then the water will move with a circular "whirlpool" movement, and all of the dirt and debris that gets into the pool will tend to move towards the center and/or drop out by the deepest part of the pool, thereby concentrating the debris and dirt into a small area, making netting and vacuuming a much less time consuming process for you the pool owner. Gravity is our friend this time!

Another helpful feature of having a circular pool is that obviously that it does not have any corners! In a boxy, rectangular pool, corners interfere with the circulation of the water, and dirt and debris tend to bunch up in the corners and fall to the the bottom under each corner. You can't clean corners easily. Automated cleaners can't clean corners easily. So no corners allowed.

Now, how many of you out there have or want a circular pool? .... Nobody? Well, thats because circular pools are ugly. Proof of that statement is: how often have you seen an in ground circular pool? I have only seen a couple in my life. You do see many above ground pools in that shape but that is because it is a strong shape for that type of pool. But still, you want to avoid getting a rectangular, box shaped in ground pool, for the reasons stated above. So the compromise, one that I would recommend is a an oval. It is a pleasant shape to look at, especially one that is constructed with the Golden Ellipse in mind, http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/emt669/student.folders/frietag.mark/homepage/goldenratio/goldenratio.html. Happily, there are many of them around and you may own one. With an oval pool you will still basically get the same benefits of a circular pool, one that is esthetically pleasing.
Unfortunately, usually the bottom of an oval pool is not in the center, but off set to a large degree to make the pool more usable.

What if you already own a rectangular pool? Well that would be not be something that can be fixed easily and would come under my classification of a swimming pool with a guess what?... a "structural problem" However, an owner of a rectangular pool can still aim the inlets in a circular direction and force the water to flow in a whirlpool like motion to a certain extent, thereby modifying the structural problem somewhat. Inlet positioning will be covered later. The next post will cover skimmers.