Landscaping - Swimming pool removal?

[Quartz]

Do you have a daughter? If you do you will be better able to keep tabs on her boyfriends by keeping the pool.

 

[fatbatman]

Do you have a daughter? If you do you will be better able to keep tabs on her boyfriends by keeping the pool.

What an odd thing to think...

 

[Quartz]

What an odd thing to think...

Not at all. It's why a former neighbour had a pool installed. He had three daughters. Boyfriends came to use the pool and so he met them.

 

[psd99]

What an odd thing to think...

yer I was thinking the same lol wth?

 

[fatbatman]

Not at all. It's why a former neighbour had a pool installed. He had three daughters. Boyfriends came to use the pool and so he met them.

Ah I better invest in a pool then so I can meet my future daughters boyfriend.

 

[soundb0y]

We had a large 12m x 6m outdoor pool in out previous house and the family loved it. We had a low level pool cover put on it and that really helped with reducing the running costs. We rented the house out for a few years and the pool was no used so became very like yours in condition.

When we were looking to sell the house we did think that we might be better filling the pool and landscaping but the cost were prohibitive. In the end we spent £5k having the pool completely refurbished and the house sold very quickly with the pool being a feature.

I think that you could easily convert half of your ground into a nice garden and pay for the pool to be renovated and it would be a great feature. The fact that you have a wall around the pool area is a real bonus for privacy, etc and you could easily get pool cover that means it can be used more of the year.

It could be worth asking local estate agents what would be a better value added feature - a refurbished pool and small garden, or a larger landscaped area. I think yuo wil be shocked at how expensive decommissioning and filling the pool will be.

What did you have done for 5k? Our pool is about the same size and slightly worse condition than the OP. Lining is peeling off in places, steps need replacing, slabs all need pulling up really as they look very dated now, and the plumbing needs sorting. Oh and its full of carp.

Was going to make some calls about refurbing it this week but interested to know roughly what it may cost.

Also wanting to find out if I can somehow use our biomass to heat it. We have a 200kw unit maybe 50-60m away that is barely ticking over in summer months, and practically run on free woodchip.

 

[dale1uk]

What did you have done for 5k? Our pool is about the same size and slightly worse condition than the OP. Lining is peeling off in places, steps need replacing, slabs all need pulling up really as they look very dated now, and the plumbing needs sorting. Oh and its full of carp.

Was going to make some calls about refurbing it this week but interested to know roughly what it may cost.

Also wanting to find out if I can somehow use our biomass to heat it. We have a 200kw unit maybe 50-60m away that is barely ticking over in summer months, and practically run on free woodchip.

Providing the liner has only dropped in places/came out of the corners and it hasn't actually split or failed anywhere then it can be straightforward to get it back into the liner-lock. Just drop the water by a foot or so and gently heat up the liner (I use a heat gun at work but a hair dryer would probably be ok) once the liner is warm you can stretch it and push it back into the liner lock.

Regarding the steps then it depends if you mean the fibreglass main steps or if you have stainless anchored steps. If the stainless ones then you can replace the individual treads easily. If you mean the main steps then this is a lot more involved as they'll be set in concrete. Replacing them is possible, but another option is to do any required fibreglass repairs to the treads then paint them with chlorinated paint.

The exposed plumbing is very easy to repair/replace. Buried pipe can be a pain depending on the pipe run from the plantroom to the pool, and what pipework has failed. For example a sump line is much harder to sort than if skimmer pipe if it's failed under the shell

Can you get a heating loop from your biomass to you're plantroom? If so heating from the biomass should be fairly straightforward. How's your pool currently heated? Gas/electric/heatpump?

 

[soundb0y]

Providing the liner has only dropped in places/came out of the corners and it hasn't actually split or failed anywhere then it can be straightforward to get it back into the liner-lock. Just drop the water by a foot or so and gently heat up the liner (I use a heat gun at work but a hair dryer would probably be ok) once the liner is warm you can stretch it and push it back into the liner lock.

Regarding the steps then it depends if you mean the fibreglass main steps or if you have stainless anchored steps. If the stainless ones then you can replace the individual treads easily. If you mean the main steps then this is a lot more involved as they'll be set in concrete. Replacing them is possible, but another option is to do any required fibreglass repairs to the treads then paint them with chlorinated paint.

The exposed plumbing is very easy to repair/replace. Buried pipe can be a pain depending on the pipe run from the plantroom to the pool, and what pipework has failed. For example a sump line is much harder to sort than if skimmer pipe if it's failed under the shell

Can you get a heating loop from your biomass to you're plantroom? If so heating from the biomass should be fairly straightforward. How's your pool currently heated? Gas/electric/heatpump?

I think it'll be a case of new everything I'm afraid.

Pipework is buried so will have to be pulled up but that shouldn't be too hard if replacing all the slabs anyway. I'll have to ask the old man if he can remember what failed.

I want to say it used to be heated by diesel but maybe it was heating oil, so as you can imagine it started to get pretty costly.
Biomass should be easy to run a loop, it's about 50m of open lawn.

The question is whether 200kw will be enough. I'm assuming it will be.
I read something somewhere that a leisure pool put a 100kw biomass in for their heating. Unfortunately that ended up being pretty underpowered and they had to spend more on gas in the end as they couldn't buy in bulk. Obviously ours is a lot smaller than a leisure pool and double the heat output so Im thinking it should cope easy.

Anyway ill start a new thread when I finally get someone out to have a look.

 

[fatbatman]

Could be expensive. If it were me, I'd sell my cloth interior Merc, private plate and tiger shed office and use said money to repair the pool so I could keep an eye on my daughter's boyfriends, pay for my child's sleep consultant and my addiction to cordless Dyson vacuums

 

[dale1uk]

I think it'll be a case of new everything I'm afraid.

Pipework is buried so will have to be pulled up but that shouldn't be too hard if replacing all the slabs anyway. I'll have to ask the old man if he can remember what failed.

I want to say it used to be heated by diesel but maybe it was heating oil, so as you can imagine it started to get pretty costly.
Biomass should be easy to run a loop, it's about 50m of open lawn.

The question is whether 200kw will be enough. I'm assuming it will be.
I read something somewhere that a leisure pool put a 100kw biomass in for their heating. Unfortunately that ended up being pretty underpowered and they had to spend more on gas in the end as they couldn't buy in bulk. Obviously ours is a lot smaller than a leisure pool and double the heat output so Im thinking it should cope easy.

Anyway ill start a new thread when I finally get someone out to have a look.

Ah, yeah that looks like a full refurb, but all easily doable

Regarding the biomass, 200kw is easily enough. I look after outdoor pools of similar size running on 35 - 50kw gas heaters.

 

[LiE]

My wife keeps showing me videos on tiktok of a guy who cleans pools. They all look like this and come up almost like new with a good clean and some chemicals. Why not get someone in to take a look?

 

[Blackjack Davy]

Do you want to get rid of it? Because if it was me I'd simply turn it into an ornamental pond its pretty much taken over by wildlife as it is I can see that with waterlillies in in and maybe some koi or least goldfish. More of a problem for me is the acres of paving everywhere I'd rip up the whole lot and turn the place over to lawns/beds etc the walls are nice to have I'd have climbers and maybe trained fruit trees on those but thats just me. Either way get rid of all the concrete/paving its despressing but at least you've got space to play with.

 

[PermaChanged]

I guess waiting until we're moved in, and have a list of quotes, is our only option at the moment!

The rolling decking cover does sound like the most appealing option to myself at the moment, on the assumption it can be loaded with sun loungers and a parasol - shouldn't be too much additional weight! We could be looking at a rather hefty sum of money for that though, especially when coupled with refurbishing the pool. We would need it to be pet safe so that they can't get under the cover, but can walk over it - this would also make it child safe in the future too.

I just want to make sure we have enough garden, and the outdoor area isn't dominated by a pool and stone.

 

[Basher]

I think the cheapest option would be

1 - Pull up all the existing slabs as they seem pretty roper anyway
2 - Smash them up to fill in the swimming pool along with any free hardcore you can find.
3 - Throw soil on top of the existing concrete base under the slabs
4 - Build retaining walls to then keep the paths at the current level to use the gate


It's a shame as that area looks fairly neglected and could look alright with a bit of work to get it back to former glory.

Otherwise have you considered artificial turf just whacked down with some underlay ontop of the slabs?

Remember to smash the bottom of the pool up, first. Otherwise there will probably be drainage issues.

 

[gailjon]

What did you have done for 5k?

We had the pool company strip and replace the liner, clean surrounds and get the filter and pump refurbished. They did a good job and it looked back to new afterwards. It was the second liner we had in the 12 years we owned the property.

 

[peige]

There was a program on recently where a house had an old swimming pool that actually took up most of the back garden and the solution which looked great was to actually use the dug out part and create a lower patio and walled garden type thing, putting in stairs and re cladding the pool with stone.

 

[Siliconslave]

My parents had a crazy fish pond thing in their garden, instead of getting it filled in they got the drainage sorted and essentially put a suspended slab floor over it using beam & block floors, but if you can i'd get it fixed

 

[dale1uk]

Regarding breaking the shell, these pictures are of a domestic pool the company I work for are currently doing and will give you an idea of the amount of steel that there may be in the structure:

I'd be very surprised if there was no steel in yours. A customer of ours is currently in the process of suing his structural engineer for a 6 figure sum in order to repair his pool as it was spec'd incorrectly resulting in there being no steel in the floor. As a result, when it was filled the floor came away from the wall down one side and his 75,000 litre pool has been loosing almost 100,000 litres of water every month for the last 10 months

 

[PermaChanged]

Well at least we know the pool holds water, as it's full of ***** right now! Once pumped out we'll know more about what needs doing.

However, in other news, the survey of the property has come back valuing it at less than our offer - we need to renegotiate the amount of land, the price, or both. This could work in our favour, but could result in the sale falling through if the bank won't lend against it.

 

[PermaChanged]

So we're thinking it may be salvageable!