On Aug 15, 5:39*pm, Duesenberg wrote:
On 8/15/2012 5:34 PM, Duesenberg wrote:

On 8/15/2012 5:17 PM, Stormin Mormon wrote:
In about 1976 or so, we moved into a house with a pool heater. Gave
about 1
degree F per hour of remp rise, hardly worth it.

Sounds like a lot of natural gas, for not much benefit. Solar cover
might do
more for you.

Already have a new solar cover.

Hit send before finishing...

Solar cover is great for keeping heat in but the water heats better when
the sun shines on it.

To answer your questions, all the gas heaters I've
seen are simple stack vent type. All the ones I
actually have familiarity with are outside, with the
stack just ending about 2ft above the unit housing.

The really, really bad news is that these things
are MASSIVE. Pool here is 48,000 gallons and
has a 400,000 BTU heater. Compare that to the
largest residential gas furnace which is probably
120K, maybe 150K, tops. Heating it is just too
expensive, so the heater isn't used. You can easily
spend thousands of dollars heating a pool. But then
here in the nyc area, in summer the pool will be in
the low 80s much of the time without heating.

I would look at solar. The ballpark guideline is that
you need about as much solar collector area as the
pool has surface area. I would think that would be
plenty to give you the summer boost that you appear
to be looking for. Maybe you can get away with less.
If you want it do more, ie extend
the season, not have it covered when not in use, etc
then you would need more. I've seen calculators
online that help in that regard.

The nice thing with solar is that you have to run the
pump a good bit of the time for filtering, so the
electric to run the pump is paid for, at least for
part of the time. They also have multispeed pumps
that can cut the cost of running it substantiallly by
using low speed . Using that approach, solar
is free compared to using a gas heater. And
greener too. However, if you don't have the south
or west exposure, no roof space or area on the
ground, or can't do it because of aesthetics, then
that's a factor too.