Thanks to my wife I now have to fix this little problem...

[Stay@HomeDad]

My wife wanted us to have this great house with this great pool and now I have to figure out how to get rid of this not so great electric bill…

From what I understand there was at one time a big issue with pool companies overselling things like pool pumps to homeowners here in Southern California.

The pool I have out there is right about 20,000 gallons. The pool pump that is running it and from what I have tried to figure out is a min. 1.5 if not a 2hp running on 220. I am just guessing here. As you can see from the pics the motor tag is no longer readable…


Question 1: Would a 1hp (running on 110 I am hoping for) pump be big enough to run this pool? (From what I have read it would be. The skimmer intake is almost 30 feet from the pump and the vacuum intake is about the same).

Question 2: If I can run a 1hp pump can someone help a fairly handy guy with some directions on what I would need to buy for building a Solar Powered system to run this pump.

Keep in mind please we are only here in this house for 2 years. I am not as much concerned about product life as I am cutting this power bill down while we are here for the next 2 years.

I saw this system on youtube, video is below.

I see harbor freight has a 1000 Watt Continuous/2000 Watt Peak Power Inverter for $79.00 and I think I can pick up a pump for a couple hundred or less. Judging by my kilowatt usage already, the total cost above is going to be less or about that on my power bill. I just don’t know enough about this to know if that inverter would work and if it will, what size panels and how many would it take to run all this.

Where I live at and the placement I am thinking about the panels would be able to get direct sun from 8am till almost 7pm almost year round except for the time change and all.
Thank you for reading this and thank you in advance for any help I might be able to get with this.

Don't get me wrong I wanted the pool to.

Rob
Stay @ Home Dad

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[SunEagle]

[QUOTE=Stay@HomeDad;81119]My wife wanted us to have this great house with this great pool and now I have to figure out how to get rid of this not so great electric bill…

From what I understand there was at one time a big issue with pool companies overselling things like pool pumps to homeowners here in Southern California.

The pool I have out there is right about 20,000 gallons. The pool pump that is running it and from what I have tried to figure out is a min. 1.5 if not a 2hp running on 220. I am just guessing here. As you can see from the pics the motor tag is no longer readable…


Question 1: Would a 1hp (running on 110 I am hoping for) pump be big enough to run this pool? (From what I have read it would be. The skimmer intake is almost 30 feet from the pump and the vacuum intake is about the same).

Question 2: If I can run a 1hp pump can someone help a fairly handy guy with some directions on what I would need to buy for building a Solar Powered system to run this pump.

Keep in mind please we are only here in this house for 2 years. I am not as much concerned about product life as I am cutting this power bill down while we are here for the next 2 years.

I saw this system on youtube, video is below.

I see harbor freight has a 1000 Watt Continuous/2000 Watt Peak Power Inverter for $79.00 and I think I can pick up a pump for a couple hundred or less. Judging by my kilowatt usage already, the total cost above is going to be less or about that on my power bill. I just don’t know enough about this to know if that inverter would work and if it will, what size panels and how many would it take to run all this.

Where I live at and the placement I am thinking about the panels would be able to get direct sun from 8am till almost 7pm almost year round except for the time change and all.
Thank you for reading this and thank you in advance for any help I might be able to get with this.

Don't get me wrong I wanted the pool to.

Rob
Stay @ Home Dad


You are at a misunderstanding that it will be less expensive to run your pool pump from solar panels then from the Utility. If you know what your $/kWh costs are it is a simple math problem to show how much more you will spend going with solar than staying the way you are currently connected.

Also depending on the head pressure of the water system and filter going to a smaller motor may not be enough to get the proper flow to keep your pool clean. The motor can also burn up if it is too undersized.

[thastinger]

Our saltwater pool is 18K gallons and it has a 1HP 120V superflow pump which works fine. On initial install, the pool installers had set the pump to run 10hrs a day, I played with the times over the next couple of seasons and found that I only need to run the pump 4 hrs a day to keep the pool clean and clear, that is the way to cut your energy consumption, not solar to power the pump.

[SunEagle]

Our saltwater pool is 18K gallons and it has a 1HP 120V superflow pump which works fine. On initial install, the pool installers had set the pump to run 10hrs a day, I played with the times over the next couple of seasons and found that I only need to run the pump 4 hrs a day to keep the pool clean and clear, that is the way to cut your energy consumption, not solar to power the pump.

I also have a 1hp pool pump with about 15k gallons system. It runs about 8 hr per day in the summer and 4 hr in the winter.

The problem with the video that Stay@home dad had in his post is that it is very misleading. It makes you think that you can throw up a few pv panels and use a cheap inverter so you can run your pool pump as long as it normally does using house power.

There is no way you will even get a solar pv system to run your pump more than a few hours per day without a constant voltage output which usually involves some type of expensive battery system. The panels will only put out the correct voltage only if you never get any clouds otherwise without full sunlight the pump will be start and stopping all day long. The video also shows a very expensive variable speed pump which is much different from the one stay@home shows.

Overall the cost to replace the pump & motor and purchase; panels, inverter, cabling, batteries, etc will be more than it costs to run his old pump for years even at $0.25/kWh.

[Robert1234]

Have you got a timer on your pool pump? If not, you are probably running it 24/7. It'll eat you alive like that. Put a good timer on it and run it 15 min or so every hour for 8-10 hours a day. It'll cut your pump running cost by 90%.

[russ]

Run it at night and the chemicals last a lot longer - especially chlorine.

[SunEagle]

Have you got a timer on your pool pump? If not, you are probably running it 24/7. It'll eat you alive like that. Put a good timer on it and run it 15 min or so every hour for 8-10 hours a day. It'll cut your pump running cost by 90%.

Based on the picture of his timer it looks like the first "on" trigger is around 9 am (there is a second "on" trigger at Noon) and the first "off" trigger is at 6 pm with a second "off" trigger at 8 pm.

The way the second "on" and "off" trigger are placed they are redundant and really don't affect the length of time the pump runs. You can move those triggers around to have 2 separate on/off control time periods if you desire.

[daz]

Keep in mind please we are only here in this house for 2 years. I am not as much concerned about product life as I am cutting this power bill down while we are here for the next 2 years.

As a lot of the chaps have said above...going solar will not save you money! You end up paying more, and especially as you only have a 2 year time-frame.
A better option is to rather reduce your load (ie pump runtime).

I saw this system on youtube, video is below.

There are a lot of misleading videos on youtube, so it is best not to rely on youtube as a credible source of information....
Go have a look at the stickies in the off-grid section of the forum, and you will get a much better idea of what is involved!

[thastinger]

Based on the picture of his timer it looks like the first "on" trigger is around 9 am (there is a second "on" trigger at Noon) and the first "off" trigger is at 6 pm with a second "off" trigger at 8 pm.

The way the second "on" and "off" trigger are placed they are redundant and really don't affect the length of time the pump runs. You can move those triggers around to have 2 separate on/off control time periods if you desire.

I agree, which means that pump runs for 11 hrs a day, likely way too much runtime. He could cut the run time down to 6 hrs and see how that works, if the pool stays clean and clear at 6 hrs, he cut is energy cost by 40% and didn't spend a dime to do it.

[inetdog]

Run it at night and the chemicals last a lot longer - especially chlorine.

And if you happen to have time-of-use electric rates it will cost less per hour too.

[Texas Wellman]

You can cut your electricity usage by 50% or more far cheaper than going solar. Although looking at your pump you might consider just buying a new one. Also make sure your chemicals are balanced (pH, Free Chlorine FC, Alkalinity, Calcium hardness, and CYA). Keeping the pool balanced keeps the pumps more efficient.

{cut-n-pasted from another thread}

Replace the motor on your current pool pump with a 2-speed motor. This can cut your electricity usage in half.

Here's the information I learned when I did mine. My 1-HP Pentair Whisperflo pump uses about 8 amps and pumps about 50-60 GPM. When my motor went out I opted for a dual-speed motor that fits right onto the same pump. At full speed (3450 rpm) I get full flow, about 50-60 GPM. The motor consumes about 8 amps. At 1/2 speed, about 1725 rpm, the pump pumps about 1/2 the water but only consumes 1/8 of the electricity.

3450 RPM about 8 amps 50-60 GPM
1725 RPM about 1 amp 20-30 GPM

I have a BW flowmeter on my pump discharge that verifies this fact. Since you are not pumping as much water as before you will need to run the pump longer, but I found that I only had to increase my daily usage by 3-4 hours, which still cut my power usage by 50% or more.

You will need to upgrade your timer to be compatible with a 2-speed pump. Mine starts on high speed and then switches to low after a pre-set time. You need to start on high-speed to ensure that the pump is fully primed, it may not prime fully on low speed. The other negative is that my skimmers don't work quite as well so I plugged one and simply run off one skimmer now. The flow detector for the SWCG (salt water chlorine generator) is a switch that works off of flow and sometimes they won't work well when the pump is on low speed (it flutters).

Good luck!!