Greening the Pool

Even I don't fully understand why I ended up in a property with a swimming pool. Essentially I'm an introvert and none of the family are really keen swimmers. Suffice to say in a previous relationship, with a combined 4 teenagers having loads of energy, it seemed like a good idea, or at least the teenagers of both sides of the new relationship initially enthusiastically thought so.

Since that relationship passed on, left on my own now, I've even invested in pool decking, albeit as part of getting the swimming pool surrounds to compliance status, not a trivial exercise. I sometimes wonder where the rates would go if we had the same prescriptive law applied to the sea, only blocks away and just as much a danger to the very athletic 2-6 year olds the law aims to protect.

Still, as I now have my 2 year old grandson Rylan living with me, and I see him daily working his way through 999 Ways For A Toddler To Kill Himself. So the fact that the swimming pool surrounds, rather than the inviting images you tend to see in glossy magazines of blue water and beautiful happy suntanned people lying half naked; looks rather more like Colditz – and is a suitable thwart to Rylan, who has a passionate interest in escaping the house and getting into the pool area (# 698).

If you mention greening the pool people tend to make one of two comments:

1. You're nuts. What do you mean green the pool? The aim is to use loads of chemicals to get rid of the green stuff that naturally develops in still water.

2. You're nuts. Greening the Pool is an oxymoron – all swimming pools are a blight, they waste precious water and pollute the environment with nasty chemicals – and the only green thing to do is fill it in.

Given these attitudes, and many may be surprised, but in my experience having a water tight hole in the ground capable of holding 30,000 liters means rain water naturally gathers in it, even to overfilling; so that over the 8 years I've lived here I've but once had to use public water to top it up, and that was when I accidentally left the backwash running in a dry spell.

Clearly the pool does not leak, which is generally listed as one of several ways to socialize your pool. Another one, which I got onto a few years ago, is to cover it with a solar blanket. This prevents evaporation, especially troublesome with the winds that buffet the pool. It also means the sun heats the pool and -- notwithstanding the many comments that a pool is a waste of space, time and money in our climate -- the temperature gets up to around 28C by the end of the season.

The pool I inherited also has electric heating. I'm not at all sure if this works, not only practically in terms of the elements still being a goer; but I get the feeling, as sometimes on a wonderful still evening I stand near the pool, look up at the mysterious stars, and think I'd most likely waste my money (and the country's electricity) in a futile attempt to heat not only the cold night sky but the universe.

One of the other anti-social complaints about pools is that the nasty chemicals in the water are backwashed into the public sewerage system. Happily the backwash system of our pool is not connected to the public system – it is pumped to the bank beside the pool. There native trees blossom, as evidenced from the wonderful self-sown Nikau fern, Cabbage trees, and various other native bushes that grow there. And, somewhat interestingly, the hydgranga flowers are white.

Another step to green the pool is to put a timer on the motor driving the filtering system. This I haven't got, but as I care a lot about how high my electricity bill is, my internal timer is very effective, hence I never run the pump unnecessarily.

Having a relatively 'green' pool, as part of the Greenest Street competition I thought I could look into more friendly ways to prevent bacteria and algae growth. Currently the chemical of preference is chlorine and the initial thought was to put in a salt water system. However, like a lot of things, under investigation this is not so straight forward. It appears that the salt water system generates it's own chlorine and may be, assuming the backwash is connected to the public system, even more harmful to the environment, otherwise I'd be interested to find out if plants respond so well to it.

There appear to be other greener cleaning systems, like ozone, or growing certain plants, or a mix of systems; that may have varying degrees of effectiveness or at least enable a reduction in the amount of potentially harmful chemicals used. My next step is to talk to others and to outlets to see what may be on offer in New Zealand.

A final thought is, as Carolyn reminded us, as did last night's violent shake; in the event of a natural disaster having so much water on hand may put our street at an advantage over neighborhood streets, or at least enable us to carry on watering our veggies or flushing the toilets; thus we are tossing around disaster contingency plans for barricading the street entrance.

Meanwhile... Rylan has escaped and is heading down to the beach (# 821) so I'll have to chase after him -- then I'll clean the pool and, hopefully, back to my veggie garden, which I'll write about in the next blog.

Anthony (Tony) Number 6