Water management

Over the last few weeks I have been getting quite a few enquiries for renovation of swimming pools and water management. Pattaya has many old swimming pools and a lot of them are suffering of old age. I am actually surprised at what I have been encountering. Mostly the band aid fix ups that have been going on. It usually boils down to the cost of renovating being prohibitive at the time of breakdown. If also amazes me at the lack of safety I see around the swimming pools. Broken tiles, loose diving boards, no warning signs, no age limits for deep pools etc. etc. It would be a lawyer’s goldmine back in Oz or other western countries.

Diving Boards

Diving boards are a big NO now in Oz and you will only see them in speciality swimming centres for learning to dive. They are a Duty of Care nightmare. But “TIT”. (This is Thailand). With renovations, if it is a committee situation, then the cost is always an issue. My company will only deal in good quality products and pumps that are built in OZ. You can skimp and save by putting inferior products in, but this just leads to maintenance issues not far down the track. A well known Pattaya resort recently had a children’s playground pool installed and good brand pumps where spec’d in. Unfortunately they had 12 cheap Chinese pumps installed instead. The pool builder was saving on costs. Within 3 months 7 of them had failed. Doesn’t take Einstein to work out what happened with the balance payment owed to the builder.

Filtration issues

We recently where asked to inspect a large swimming pool at a development that was experiencing problems with filtration and a waterfall that didn’t work. What we discovered was disturbing. The swimming pool volume was 160,000 litres; however it only had filtration adequate for approximately 70,000. On top of this the waterfall was not plumbed up, so it would not work. We remedied the situation by increasing the addition of extra filtration and pumps and we ran the waterfall off this. Over the next few weeks we noticed that the water was disappearing at a rate of 4,000 litres per day. It was at the start of the monsoon season here in Pattaya so this made our leak detection difficult. After 3 weeks we discovered it was the return pipes to the pool. This is basically impossible to fix without breaking into the pool shell as the returns came through the floor.

Solution

We opted to divorce the old system and install new plumbing that brought the returns back in through the walls. It has been quite successful. However it was a costly exercise for the developer. It should have been done right in the first place. I can understand cost savings are needed. But sometimes this can be more expensive in the short or long term.

Filter medium

More and more we are changing filter medium in swimming pools here in Pattaya and most are opting for the “recycled glass medium” that is available now. It is quite expensive when compared with sand but it has a life expectancy of around 15 years. So it will out last the swimming pool itself. Sand is by far the cheapest option. However you will only get 1 year out of this medium. Zeolite is also very good and will last for about 5 years. It is such a great medium we are now offering it with our P.O.E point of entry house filters.

Pre Filtration

On the subject of water management – pre-filtration, I recently installed the WET 5” 3 PUP water filtration system onto a client’s condo unit. My client is an engineer and has a degree in water filtration. I installed a 5 micron prefilter as I do to protect the PUP system. It was a nightmare of an install. The pipe work just wouldn’t seal. As I was turning it on and of for hours on end I probably would have run no more than 200 litres through the filters. To my amazement the pre filter was already turning black. This is a new condo with about 20,000 litres of storage on the roof and it is city supply. Luckily the pre filters are not costly. There is no filtration on this building at all. When are the developers going to wake up and install at least some form of filtration on there projects. It can be factored into the cost of the projects.

Eco Clear

CLICK HERE to see the Eco Clear Brochure the latest product to replace sand in filter medium technology

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“WET” Water Engineered Technologies (Thailand) offer a broad range of Commercial & Domestic water filtration solutions including swimming pool design, construction, equipment and consultation. Steve can be contacted on # 0848 28317 or email info@poolsasean.com