All Forum Posts by: Linda Weiner

 Yes, most charge $25 dollars a day. Some do actually view this as 'nickel and diming' their guests, and others look at it as an add on that others are getting paid for, so they do too. Many homes will charge for the use of a grill, they are locked up and only give you the combo if you rent it for $10/day. This would be similar to beach homes renting bikes, lawn chairs etc.

Many of my clients that have STR in Orlando and they all have pools. Most are charging a nightly rate or by the entire stay if more than 7 days, more of a flat rate. Most have app controlled heaters and only turn it on if requested/paid for. Pools are an absolute must here and typically will be warm enough, but most guest pay extra to have the heat anyway...they are on vacation and want to be spoiled.

Linda where are you getting your estimates on the electric cost being thousands of dollars just for the heat?

We have a pool in Orlando and we run it every day year round and the highest our electric bill has ever been was $750, and that was for everything (9br house included), not just the pool heat.

Granted it's a fairly small pool, how large is your pool?

It is absolutely insane to be paying to run a pool heater of any kind (gas, oil, electric) when there is an air conditioner throwing away lots of heat into the air right next to the pool.  As an engineer, this just boggles my mind when I see this being done as the level of wastefulness and money being thrown away is incredible.  All you have to do is use a water cooled condenser instead of an air cooled condenser on the air conditioner, and then the heat from the house will be dumped into the pool.

I will admit that this only works when the air conditioner is running, but that is still an enormous amount of heat that is available.  A small 3 ton A/C unit is literally pumping enough heat out of the house to equal the energy it takes to freeze a 3 ton block of water to ice every hour !

Using the pool as the receptacle for the heat from the house actually increases the efficiency of the A/C in most cases so not only do you heat the pool for free, you get cost savings on the electric bill.

I’ve always thought about starting a company to produce fully turnkey home heat pump systems that 

I have a friend that buried a tank under the driveway during construction. They use it for the pool heater range and outdoor grill. Costs like $150 to fill and they only need to do it about once a year, with living there full time. Solar heaters down here are probably the way to go, if you don't care about looking at them on the roof.

@Linda Weiner The propane heating option is something I've seen many people in Naples do with larger pools and they are all very happy with the results. One thing I would recommend before going through with that though would be to contact a pool company who does solar installations and see what temperature gains you could expect on a pool your size. There's a chance that it may still be sufficient for the temperatures that we see over the winter here and could end up saving you a ton of money in the long run

 Well of course that's the way to go, but how much money do you want to throw into this? At some point you'll never make it back.....

 I'm looking into that. Thx. 

What would you say if I told you that I heat my pool in Maryland for free using the waste heat from my air conditioner and it makes my A/C more efficient as well ?  About 7 or 8 years ago, I installed a water cooled condenser onto my existing A/C unit and it dumps all of the heat from my house into my pool when the A/C is running.  I keep my pool at 91 degrees F all summer long and it extends my swimming season significantly. I barely used my pool in MD before I did this because I don't get in pools that are under about 82 degrees as I get cold very easily.

Here's the link:

https://www.hotspotenergy.com/...

The cost of the kit was about $1000, but you are going to need to either be pretty handy or find an air conditioning / refrigeration professional that is more skilled than your average plug and chug HVAC installer.  I'm an engineer, so I did most of it myself.

I have optimized the energy consumption of my system by pairing it with a multispeed pool pump which only uses 200W when moving water through the condenser when the A/C is running.

Feel free to contact me and I'll be happy to talk with you in more detail.