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How to Design an Indoor, Inground Swimming Pool for your UK Home

Indoor or Outdoor Swimming Pool?

You may have still not decided whether to go for an indoor or outdoor swimming pool and possibly not sure about the full implications regarding indoor swimming pool installation.

Design of the Swimming Pool House

The design of the swimming pool house or building adds a whole layer of complexity to the whole swimming pool installation process.

Should the swimming pool house be an extension to your main building or a conservatory. There are all kinds of user benefits, capital cost and running cost issues that need to be indentified, assessed, reviewed and compared.

Indoor swimming pool benefits

The benefits that an indoor pool offers are very attractive in the northern european climate because they are great for exercise, therapeutics and entertainment or fun!

And of course:-

• Swimming is the best all round exercise that you can do
• It trains more muscles than anything else
• It is much less strenuous and dangerous than jogging, cycling or sking!
• You are less likely to injure yourself
• The water keeps your body temperature down - helping with medical conditions like MS
• You can do it all year round.

The Technical Issues

While an indoor swimming pool can be of tremendous benefit the highly humid air that circulates over the pool can be very harmful to the building that the swimming pool occupies.

Because the room where the swimming pool is situated is very warm and the water is also very warm the pool water evaporates and raises the humidity levels a lot.

This has three very negative effects:-

• The atmosphere within the pool room becomes very uncomfortable
• The moisture can attack and destroy many normal building materials if special precautions are not taken
• The moisture promotes the growth of both mould and mildew that are extremely ugly and dangerous to health

However, these problems can be overcome by the use of :-

• Careful design
• Special materials and methods of construction
• The installation of a continuous vapour barrieraround the pool room
• The installation of of high levels of insulation
• The appropriate dehumidification and ventilation equipment
• And last but certainly not least the provision of an automatic pool cover.

The pool cover provides many benefits including:-

• Keeping the pool room safe for children to use without danger of drowning
• Reduction in evaporation that reduces the running cost of costly de-humidification equipment
• Reduction in the indoor air temperature thus reducing heating costs
• Reduction of heat loss from the pool thus also reducing heating costs

The automatic covers used are are similar to those used for outdoor swimming pools, and can be of the above ground or submerged variety. The latter are a lot more attractive, but also a bit more costly.

Budget

Please do not make the mistake of assuming that an indoor swimming pool can be constructed for the cost of an outdoor swimming pool plus the cost of the building over it.

Indoor pools and outdoor pools are totally different animals simply because the humidity of the air in the building housing an indoor pool must be strictly controlled whereas it is of no consequence in an outdoor pool.

Furthermore it is possible to get away with a fairly low standard of finish around an outdoor pool but in an indoor pool low quality finishes are very very unattractive.

In simple terms a properly engineered indoor pool that will provide a comfortable all year round swimming experience is probably going to cost at least 2 x the cost of similar sized outdoor pool and 3 x if you opt for a tiled pool - but more of this later.

The running costs of an indoor pool will also be many times as much as the running cost of an outdoor pool and so should also be borne in mind.

Abris or sliding greenhouse type structures

in France, many people install removable greenhouse type structures that they call abris. Do not confuse these with an indoor pool installation. I could write a book about the drawbacks of these things but I will just say at this stage they are:-

• Prone to blowing away in the first gale
• Extremely proud of corrosion
• Virtually impossible to heat
• Massively costly for what they are
• Extremely ugly
• No .............. use to man or beast!

Having said all that the low level covers do provide a useful safety device and probably do extend the swimming season for a month or so

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