How to Size your New Pool Heater

 As of 2,000 all new pool and spa heaters in California are high efficiency and low pollution, called Low Nox. If you heat your pool to 80 degrees from May 1st to October 1st, the normal swim season, you can expect to pay $500 to $600 in natural gas for the swim season. If you heat just your spa the cost is about $2 each time. Using a liquid pool cover will help lower evaporation and heat loss.
One of the great things about living in Southern California are the warm beautiful winter days. For example, on a nice day in January you can turn on your pool heater, run it overnight (about 12 hours) and your pool will be 80 degrees ready for a pool party. The cost for this one time of heating your pool is about $30. That’s a pretty low cost for a fun day swimming with friends, not to mention how cool it is to post your pool party pictures on Facebook for your friends and family back east who are freezing and shoveling snow.
The traditional size for a pool heater has been the 400,000 BTU.  The reason was, although the heater is oversized for heating the pool, your pool builder picked this large heater so the spa would heat in about 30 to 45 minutes.  The number one reason for a pool heater to break is the heater is oversized, cannot get enough natural gas, and thus does not burn correctly.  This will soot up the heat exchange, cause the heater to run hot, damage the electronic components, and rust out the bottom of the heater.
When the pool heater manufacturers started making these high efficiency and low pollution pool heaters they all had problems with low gas supply.  The old style heaters were less stringent on the amount of natural gas they needed but for the new heaters the gas supply is critical.
There are two options to fix this problem; run a new and larger gas line, or install a 200,000 BTU heater. This smaller heater will still heat your pool and spa even in the winter, but they do add 15 to 20 minutes to the time it takes to heat your spa. For heating the pool it does not matter because both sizes will take 12 to 18 hours to heat the pool.
The down side of buying a smaller heater is the few extra minutes to heat your spa.  The upside is, the smaller heater will last much longer, it burns cleaner, requires much less maintenance, is more efficient, is more reliable, and the heater itself is about $1,000 less installed.
Next month we will talk about pool and spa automation options and how you can start heating your spa from work or at the kid’s baseball game so when you get home the spa is already at 104 degrees.
For more information, call 661-263-7503 or visit www.poolsbyben.com.