Pump

During the week the guys (Stora Vörta) that did the excavation did a great job leveling the worst of the destroyed lawn. Using some attachment to a tractor that has ground the soil into small pebbles.

Before

After

Throwing a few kilos of grass seeds on top of that hoping for the best.

The first name for this post that sprung up in my mind was Pump, with reference to the classic Aerosmith album bearing the same name.

The main goal this weekend was to was to assemble the machine room. That is the circulation pump, sand filter and the bypass. The water in the pool has started to take on a slightly...greenish tone due to algae so it's definitely time to the circulation/filtering up and running.

 One advice I'd give to anyone planning to build a pool is to make sure you have your machine room prepared before building the pool. That way you can get the system up and running as soon as you've assembled the pool. That will save you a lot of chemicals and cleaning the pool from algae which otherwise will pretty quickly start to grow in stagnant water.

In my case I was both lacking the spare parts as well as the ideas how to assemble the machine room in the most efficient manner. As much as I like building/wiring things I really....really hate water pipes. There's always something leaking somewhere, which is inevitable and I really hate that.

For the lacking spare parts we got hold of a great guy that had all we needed. If you're planning to build a pool and happen to live in the vicinity of Karlskrona the I can highly recommend a company called Saltö Aqua Konsult. Tommy seems to have most things you'll ever need with respect to pipes/hoses/bends and other thingies related to the water flow parts of a pool. And what makes it even more great is that he's pretty much open for business every day including weekends and evenings. I got hold of reinforced PVC hoses and a few bends and connections...all that I needed.

As for my lacking motivation for water related construction it was solved by enlisting a trusted friend.

Mr. Slayer

After having spent some thinking on where to put the bypass we set forth to cut/glue/assemble the pipes and hoses.
Finally arriving at this.

Spend some time admiring the beautiful bypass construction...:)

A bypass allows you to bypass (surprise) the heating system using a set of valves. If the horizontal valve is open and the vertical ones are closed then the water is short circuited/bypassed from the heating system and vice versa.  

The hoses disappearing under the house/sauna will go to the air heat pump...which is yet to be connected. It's not needed at this stage.

As can be seen from the pictures we used a combination of stiff PVC pipes and "soft" PVC hoses. In a crammed area as this running it all with pipes would have lead to a massive overuse of bends. So a hose is a much more flexible solution. 

Again if you're planning for a pool, spend some time contemplating on your machine room and what parts you'll be needing.

On the other end of the machine room the inlet/outlet previously assembled was connected to the pump/filter. The order of connection is inlet -> pump -> filter -> heating system (optional) -> outlet.

The pipe running on the wall is the waste pipe. This is where all the wastewater is sent when backwashing the filter. And by no surprise the waste pipe is connected to the ingenious stack of connections built previously connecting it with the wastewater from the rain gutters going down the drainage.

Out of the 5m of PVC pipe delivered with the pool, this was left when we finished. Not a single millimeter of pipe has been wasted. And I'll anyways probably need two short stumps of pipe when connecting the air heat pump.

All of this on the Saturday, let's see what we can get done on Sunday.

Title reference: Pump/Aerosmith