Innovation doesn’t always mean reinventing the wheel. Sometimes it’s just finding a new way to use an old product.
That’s what Michael Giovanone, president of Latham, N.Y.-based Concord Pools, did. The 33-year veteran pool builder constructs some of the most stunning vinyl-liner pools in the country, many with vanishing edges.
Both pool and custom home builders can appreciate one of his most recent accomplishments. Giovanone has taken a technology that the home industry has used for years now—radiant heat—and applied it to his swimming pools.
These systems are famous for heating indoor flooring, driveways, and patios. When building his own house a few years ago, Giovanone even used radiant heat under his bathtub, so the surface wouldn’t be so cold when his wife used it. He then decided to try the technique on pools and eventually perfected his own system. Giovanone found that radiant heat warms up his pools efficiently.
Bottom to Top. When a radiant heat system sends a hot liquid—water or antifreeze—through tubing embedded in the concrete pool floor, the liquid heats the tubing, raising the temperature of the concrete to about 100 degrees F.
As a concept, radiant heat is older than many of us realize. “Why, out in the Old West, did they put rocks around their campfires?” Giovanone asks rhetorically. “So when they went to sleep and the fire went out, the rocks still kept them warm. Radiant heat was on the plains back in the 1800s, when the cowboys slept around cobblestone-lined fires.”
These systems work best for frequent swimmers, since it takes two to three days to raise the water temperature from the low 50s to the high 80s. Once the water is close to the right temperature, the heater can achieve a 1-degree rise in about two hours, Giovanone says. It’s set on a thermostat, so when the water reaches the right temperature, the system maintains that temperature at a rate more efficient than regular pool heaters, according to Giovanone. The system can be used with most on-the-market controllers.
Gas, propane, or electricity can fuel a radiant heat system, which can be hooked up to a home’s boiler. And since they’re used at different times of the year, the home and pool heaters will rarely need to run simultaneously, Giovanone says, so you won’t tax the boiler system.
Giovanone and his crews assemble these systems using several components from the local heating supply house. It starts with a tankless water heater, which heats the antifreeze instantaneously as it passes through a copper heat exchanger. The space-saving unit measures about 2 feet by 3 feet, weighs approximately 50 pounds, and can be mounted on a wall. Giovanone believes they last longer than a tank system, partly because they don’t accumulate mineral deposits.
Polyethylene cross-linked (PEX) pipe carries the antifreeze through the pool floor. Water temperature is monitored by a sensor placed in the pool plumbing that’s connected to the thermostat. A circulating pump sends the antifreeze through the system, and an expansion tank is installed to hold any residual antifreeze when it expands from the heat.
