I still have the black air hoses and the three-way split set up connected, for it offers free heat. Because of the smaller hose diameter the water coming out is quite warm, but there's not enough flow to heat the entire pool as fast as good old fire

Yeah, that wasn't very pleasant but some more wood/fire fixed that in short order. I'd have noticed the city water being on had the hose end not been below the pool water surface where I would have heard it.

Oh well, right?

Fire fire fire!

 

Excellent solution, I love it :-)

 

fredric..same problem..so I googled redneck pool heater...there is a great website just for this..at redneckpoolheater.com....even has the heat loads figured for his 8,000 gal. pool.. removable manifold on a gas grill..he he now if I was not so close to the local building dept. I'd put that old woodstve to use..of course this idea comes up after I bought a hammer mill shredder to clean up the yard..all my branches are now mulch. thanks for the post

 

I think Tom would still be working on soldering that one up-

 

Rednecks using a pool heater

 

my uncle did something like that for his hot tub....

except, it was never actully in the fire... he used an old fire place for in the home, routed copper pipe all along the top sides front and back of it, and up the chimmeny.... i dont know how well that actually worked, cause i never got tested, or not that i know of anyways....

but its still pretty cool set up

 

HAHAHHA
im going to show my dad this, my mom and my dad just forked out almost 2g's for a propane heater. i also had an idea like this but would they listen to me,,,,, nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. used 10% propane out of our big tank over night. the pool was 108 degrees though but man is that ever pricey to run.
thanks for the laugh
Mitch

 

I can tell you from this experience heating a pool with an outdoor fireplace, at least with the kind I used, is very inefficient.

Because the sides are open mesh, a lot of the heat simply blows away to the sides as well as up the short flue, not really heating the water as much as I hoped.

Don't get me wrong, this does work, but I went through a lot of hardwood to get the pool to a swimmable temperature.

I have in the basement a heat exchanger, that takes hot water from the oil furnace and feeds it through a coil inside the exchanger, and pool water flows around it, thus being heated. With oil being well over $5 a gallon at the last fill, heating my pool with that unit would be "ridiculous".

There are other ways of doing this more efficiently, for example : Greenwood Biomass and Wood Furnace - Wood Boilers

Another is to modify a closed-side cast iron furnace more or less in the same manner that I did, that would work better.

What I am thinking of doing next year is picking up many 10' sections of galvanized "black pipe" and welding them end to end for one really long piece. Then with a hydraulic bender, I'll spend what will probably seem to be an eternity bending that long pipe into a 2' diameter, 3' high coil. That coil will be turned on it's side, legs added, and a front plate with a door and a back plate with a flue fitting.

Since the coildd black pipe is the "enclosure" in a sense, all the pool water that flows through will be heated in all directions and returned to the pool, by the fire that would be built inside.

I may instead use galvanized electrical conduit just because I have a large pile of it in the garage with no specific plans of use at the moment. I hesitate only because conduit is a thin-wall type tubing and I'm concerned about the fire burning through and all the pool water being pumped onto the deck rather than back into the pool.

The advantage of conduit is simply ability to bend... since I am an electrician at the moment and have a conduit bender in my truck, making the coil wouldn't take much time at all. Thin wall conduit bends very easy.

 

My garage heater is a similar concept, but I went with recycled parts, and a full enclosure. The housing is a 100lb propane cylinder, and the coil is a heat exchanger coil from a hot water pressure washer- 1/2" SCH80 tube, two layers, and the coil fits snugly in the cylinder. I have a tent heater that I plan on running WMO through, or I can pull that out and burn chips, cutoff, and small logs. It should get the water up to near boiling with an 8gpm pump, and about 130º-140º with your setup.
Once I make some progress on this thing, I'll post up pics.

 

thats a sweet idea man, rep point from me, i really like this. with we were still at our old place and had a pool

 

my dad took a 55 gal drum. cut the ends off. put a radiator on one end. then took a torpedo heater and stuck it in the barel. that worked great. it was redneck but it got the job done, very fast to.

 

Other than the sweating, I always thought it would be a great idea to run the pool water through the attic, thus heating the water and cooling the house at the same time.

 

Yanoo Herman, that's a great idea considering my house has a slate roof thus the attic is absolutely brutally hot during the summer days (and all night too since the slate continues to radiate heat most of the night).

Maybe that's the ultimate answer, and I'd save the time/hassle of trying to mount solar panels on the roof wthout damaging the slate itself.

I like this a lot!

 

Looks good,

here is a link to my thread last year with my home built pool heater system,

https://www.ford-trucks.com/forums/6...od-boiler.html

sublime out.

 

Now if you want to do it like a true redneck, go get the largest heavy duty black trash bags that you can find. Fill each one 1/3 to 1/2 full with the pool water. Tie the top of the bag trapping as much air in the bag as you can, and just leave the bags floating in the pool. The more bags the faster the pool heats up. Works great when first opening the pool in the spring. A little aggravating in the fall if you're extending the swim season due to taking the bags in and out of the pool. Been doing this for years, and it's cheap. I got the idea from the pool supply that sell the solar fish for $12.00.