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River Pools & Spas Blog
The most educational swimming pool blog in the country, providing fiberglass pool articles and videos, as well as information on inground concrete and liner pools.
Fiberglass Pool Information | Installation & Construction | Pool Design Guides
It’s hard to go wrong with fiberglass pools. They’re easy to maintain, they use very few chemicals, and they have the lowest lifetime cost of any type of pool. However, there is one way fiberglass pool owners can screw all that up: by draining the pool without professional help.
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Finding A Pool Contractor | Options and Accessories
Note: This is a guest post from Bob Ault, the man I consider ‘The Father of Fiberglass Pool Tiling’. For quite some time now, I’ve been pestering Bob about contributing a guest post here to our blog because I know he’s informed, opinionated, and GREAT at what he does. Over the past few years Bob and I have developed a friendship stemming from our desire to help elevate the education and information levels in the fiberglass pool industry. Despite the fact that we may disagree on a few points here or there, I truly believe Bob is one of the great ones in this industry and feel honored to have his thoughts on our platform here at River Pools.
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Don't blindly wonder if a fiberglass, concrete, or vinyl liner pool is right for you. Our educational ebook does a deep-dive comparison of the 3 types, all while noting the advantages and disadvantages of each.
Fiberglass Pool Information | Installation & Construction
How long does it take to install a pool? Now, that depends on what type of pool we’re talking. Doing a search for “how long does it take to install an inground pool from start to finish” will likely yield some wide ranges of answers if you don’t specify which type of inground pool. A little fun fact about us (or maybe a big one): we at River Pools manufacture inground fiberglass pools, but our time in the pool industry has helped us learn tons about inground pool types far and wide. So that brings us to the main focus of today’s article and let me say it’s one of the most mistaken and sometimes misunderstood parts of having a fiberglass inground pool installed in your backyard. Though fiberglass is where our expertise lies, we’ll also briefly go over some facts for concrete (gunite) and vinyl liner pools, just so you have all your options laid out in front of you. Let’s start with the ever-familiar concrete pools. These bad boys are built from scratch in your backyard, so they can be practically any shape and size you dream of (folks dreaming about a never-before-seen pool shape – we’re talking to you). With the excavating, rebar placement, plumbing, concrete-shooting, curing, coping and plastering, installing an inground concrete pool may take three to six months on average. Vinyl liner pools, also often referred to as just “liner” pools, also offer customization options and can be appealing due to their lower upfront costs and smooth texture. Keep in mind that the more custom the design, the more money you’ll likely have to pay. This goes for concrete, as well. These pools also require excavation, along with lining with metal wall panels, plumbing, creating the pool base/floor (this is often done with vermiculite or grout) and installing the liner itself. This process can take six to eight weeks on average. I find it a little funny when I look online and I see companies with the headline ‘We will install your pool in one day!’. Actually, I’m a little bothered by these statements because the task of installing a fiberglass pool in one day is nearly impossible. Why? Well here are the different phases of an actual complete installation:
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Fiberglass Pool Information | Pool Maintenance
We’ve all seen an increase in the “blow-up ring” pools peppering backyards across the country. Heck, I’d say that at least half of the time when we show up to install an inground fiberglass pool, there’s a circular imprint on the ground where a blow-up pool used to be.
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Such was the question a customer asked me recently and so I figured that being we’d not broached this subject here on the blog, as well as the fact that November is upon us, now was the perfect time to address the idea of year-round inground swimming pools.
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In interesting industry news, Viking Pools/Latham International has purchased Blue Hawaiian pools. For those of you unfamiliar with BH, they have plants in Florida and North Carolina and have been a significant manufacturer of fiberglass swimming pools for quite a few years now. This news was confirmed to me yesterday by more than one current BH dealer and the transition appears to be happening over the coming month or so.
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DIY Fiberglass Pools | Finding A Pool Contractor | Installation & Construction | Retaining Walls, Fence, and Landscaping
Lately it seems that a lot of homeowners I am meeting with have slopes in their backyards. Some of these slopes range in a grade difference of 1’ to 6’ from where the pool deck starts and finishes. What this means is that your fiberglass pool, when set in the ground, may be even with the ground on one end or side and 1 to 6 feet out of the ground on the other end or side. In such occasions, retaining walls are often the necessary solution, although moving the pool to another more flat location can at times work as well. I had one customer who could have moved their pool to an area in the backyard that would have alleviated any walls, but they wanted the added visual effect the walls would give them.
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Options and Accessories | Pool Videos
Check out this quick video of a custom security cover installation on an inground fiberglass pool with an 18" poolside wall and elevated paver patio. As you will see, the cover anchors into the elevated patio then stretches taut across the pool.
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DIY Fiberglass Pools | Finding A Pool Contractor | Installation & Construction
This article is going to be short and sweet, but it’s the result of a disturbing email I received the other day that made me realize we hadn’t covered the following subject in our blog. The email read: Hi Marcus, my builder says it’s OK to build a fiberglass pool on top of fill dirt, is this true? As you can very well imagine, any pool, whether it’s concrete, vinyl, or fiberglass, needs to be built on solid, undisturbed soil (concrete pools can use pillars, but that’s another article for another day). Why?
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Fiberglass Pool Information | Installation & Construction | Pool Design Guides
I had an interesting experience last week with a gentleman who was considering a pool. As we were standing in his backyard and doing a general lay-off of the pool, he quickly dismissed the idea of fiberglass because it simply wasn’t wide enough. After a few minutes of Q & A though, the customer decided he really just needed to talk to some of our existing clients who own a pool and get their take on the matter.
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