Start swimming

This week has been a very short week with respect to any constructional work. Pretty much all week starting from Monday to Saturday has been focused on the best festival in the world. I'm of course talking about Sweden Rock Festival.

Title of this weeks blog is taken from Delain, which by no coincidence happened to perform at the above mentioned venue.

Anyways the week has not been a complete loss for the ongoing project. The chemicals we dropped in last weekend took effect and we suddenly have a crystal clear water.

So I took the first dip, making me the first ever to take a swim in our pool.

The water was a bit nippy, but what the hell it woke me up...:)

Sunday was pretty much the only day we (atleast I) had time to build anything, tired as I was from a week's metal happening. We managed to get the concrete supports put into their place.

The "old" deck is now in shape again. The entire support construction is back in place.

From there we intend to first lay the outer frame and then build the support construction before laying the actual deck. One can now see things taking shape.

At one point we even enlisted our house guest staying for the festival, but honestly I much prefer his skills in the kitchen so we sent him there to prepare some food.

Warmed up the sauna to cleanse myself from a weeks worth of metal banging. For the first time in ages I jumped into water directly from the sauna. It immediately took me be back to all those summers as a kid I've spent in Finland, running from the sauna directly into a lake or the ocean. Thinking back it's probably 20 years since I've experienced that feeling....honestly what a bliss.

Title reference: Start Swimming/April Rain/Delain

Chemical Warfare

Yesterday we managed to put together the entire machine room but the PVC glue must allowed to harden for at least 12 hours before it gets into contact with water. 

So we couldn't test run anything yesterday. No clue whether the pump works or there will be fountains squirting out of each pipe connection.

To be quite honest this had me so worried that I woke up before four this morning and couldn't get to sleep again. So it became a rather early morning today.

When I popped out this morning the pool had taken on a green/brownish color, mostly looking like a duck/frog pond.

Frog pond

It was really about time to get the pump/filter up and running. There was a coating of sand and muck all over the pool bottom. Most of it since the time when we refilled. The fine grained stone flour/sand flies around in the wind. We have started to lay ground cloth to stop the sand from flying around. It's also there to stop anything from growing once we get cranking with building the wooden deck.

To help the pump a bit I loosened the cap where you inspect/clean the filter and backfilled the pump directly with a garden hose. This way I got rid of all the air trapped in the pipe from the outlet of the pool to the inlet of the pump. When starting the pump it just picked up the water and immediately started to build a bit of pressure. The pump must never suck plain air as it could take damage from that.

Oh well what a relief, things are actually working. Following the manual and backwashing the filter first. That is the procedure to run the water backwards (from down to up) in the filter to get rid of dirt caught in the sand and push that out into the waste pipe.

Then attaching the "vacuum cleaner" and sucking up all the muck in the pool. Note that if the pool is as contaminated as ours it's better to set the filter to "waste" causing the water to go directly to the waste pipe without clogging the filter. Sure a good deal of water gets wasted but considering the amount of sand in the pool there was really no option.

Some time later one could actually see the pool bottom again...hooray.

Some vacuuming later

Our local Miamipool sales representative popped by with some goodies. As a side note: This is the major reason for our choice of vendor...they have guys close by to you and they make house calls on Sundays. Anyways it was time to strike back...with vengeance. Once the pool is clean of major debris it's time for chemical warfare. All kinds of stuff such as flocking agent, Baquacil (instead of chlorine) but my favorite has to be the "Chock". It's apparently used when taking the pool into usage after winter or in our case for the first time.

Loads of chemicals were dumped into the pool making it very hazy. Guess it's the flocking agent doing it's work. We won't see the final result until tomorrow when it has done its job and major particles should have dropped to the pool bottom. 

Whilst Agneta spent some quality time with a brush trying to get rid of the algae that sticks to the walls when there's no cleaning agents.

I was busy trying to resurrect the previously demolished wooden deck.
Things didn't go quite as we planned from the beginning. The original idea was that the pool would cut into the deck but due to solid bedrock we had to move the pool so now the deck is an itsy bit too short. Don't think that'll be a problem. Though what bugged me most was that the pool got a bit lower than we had calculated so I had to spend the better part of the day lowering the framing to the old deck.  Which in an essence means cutting grooves into the framing in order to lower it on the concrete posts/supports.

As a final to the week we've also started to replant the grass hoping that in a near future the dinosaur tracks are covered and all forgotten.

Next week will be a vacation week as I'm off to Sweden Rock.

Title reference: Chemical Warfare/Show no mercy/Slayer

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