On 16/07/10 7:21 PM, Glenda Copeland wrote:
On Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:47:33 -0700 (PDT), harry wrote:
It was invented years ago. Its called a float valve.

The float valve is the easy part. The hard part is where to put it so that
it will work.

You can't easily put it in the pool itself, due to wave action and damage
occuring to it from the swimming activity - it needs its own well.

If you have five feet of concrete all around the pool, you have nowhere to
put the float valve, even though it was invented years ago.

You could put the float valve in the skimmer wells but then you have to run
a hose into the skimmer above the concrete.

Basically if you have a concrete perimeter, you're hosed. The float valve
isn't your problem. The problem is how to run the hose w/o being a danger
to the swimmers.

The pool has a fill pipe built in. They added it when we resurfaced the
pool and replaced the surrounding concrete. Right now that fill pipe is
controlled by a 24VAC valve (it used to have a manual valve) which is
hooked to one station on my sprinkler timer. If I want to continue to
use that, and monitor the level with probes, I could put the probes into
the skimmer, mounted to the lid somehow. Then I need to run the wires
for the probes back to the area where the valve is. They could be
mounted pretty unobtrusively out the skimmer opening under the coping
over to the eye shaped dirt island on the right in
"http://i32.tinypic.com/xpc8rm.jpg" which has two spare wires going to
it (it's now full with plants) from the valve location.

There's also water in the island so I could run a small hose over to
skimmer as well and use a float valve rather than doing it with an
electrically activated valve. I am a bit concerned over the reliability
of using those thin hoses in this environment.

For now, I'm experimenting with different durations of opening the valve
to maintain the water level constant. It's really only during the summer
when the level goes down enough per day that it's a problem over a two
week vacation.