The BIG moment!

All is working! The pump started to work on Friday evening - the water was at 11°
Hugh braved the water today at 15° and swam all afternoon when the temperature reached 17°. I'm not sure when I will go in yet ....

Filling up No 2

The water ran for 17 hours and about half filled the pool last night. The water was then stopped so that the holes could be cut out for the skimmers, return valves and lights - this is so that the liner could stretch with the weight of the water, thus ensuring that the holes were made in the right place. Water is now running again and it should be up to level for the test of the filtration unit and the heating started tomorrow morning.

Filling up!

The liner is finished and the water is going in (the bubbles under the liner are designed to be flattened by the tension made by the weight of the water).... It may take a while to fill - the pictures with Hugh (he was promised the first swim!) were taken when the water had been running for two hours. A picture of Jeff and me sitting on the steps happy that it has been finished (Jeff, a friend of mine, has been working with me on the pool since the beginning)

Progress !

No blogging for a while now - I've been so busy. To cut a long story short, I had some problems with my pool supplier and so had to go and find someone else who could finish the job for me. We had to redo the concrete bottom of the pool, as it had been badly affected by the frosts in the winter - this was done with a self leveling solution or ragreage.




Following this I needed to lay a felt underlay before the liner could be laid - a complicated task because of the rounded form of the bottom - there cannot be any overlapping pieces, or any folds - lots of cuts and gussets!












The slots for hooking the liner into at the top of the walls have been protected up until now by a plastic strip - this needed to be removed before the liner was fitted.





Today the liner started to go in - the first step was to solder a small strip along the top of the wall sections in order to slot it into the slots shown above.


After this the liner started to go in.

Fence posts

We have been putting in the fence posts which are held by galvanised steel brackets which need to concreted into the ground. Because of the slope of the ground we have sunk plastic drain pipes into the ground and filled them up with concrete to give them strength, then sunk in the galvanised supports with a large piece of scaffolding pole welded to the bottom to give them extra hold.

The fence slats have been put in to four high, just to ensure that we have the right spacing between the posts whilst the concrete drys.