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Moonsail Limited
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A Backyard Oasis
Working from home is fraught with pluses and minuses. Just a few days into the school holidays and already the children were getting listless and bored. I had a stack of work to get through before the weekend and to cap things off nicely, there was also a heatwave going on - with daily temperatures hotter than Barbados. What did I do? Stuck a swimming pool in my back garden of course…
Years ago, my eldest daughter was given an interesting gift for her 2nd birthday. Not sure how to describe it best, but to call it a ‘paddling pool’ doesn’t really do it justice. It was more like an inflatable miniature waterpark complete with a palm tree that sprayed water, a water slide, and a little paddling pool. It was about 8ft square and she had hours of fun splashing about in the water... happy days.
That mini-inflatable-waterpark has long gone – upgraded to a simple but trusty paddling pool 3 years ago. But this year, in the midst of the heatwave, I stumbled across an amazing eBay bargain – a swimming pool, including filter, for a mere £40. The same item had been selling at my local garden centre for more than £100 – and they’d sold out of them – so I snapped it up.
It’s a simple idea that originated in the U.S. – imagine a child’s inflatable paddling pool only much, much bigger. With so much water to contain (and especially with a hose-pipe ban in place) you can’t just empty it and refill it every couple of days, so it needs to be filtered and the water treated with chlorine and anti-algae chemicals. In other words, you treat it just the same as a regular inground pool. The water needs checking for PH levels every day and the filter needs to be kept on for about 8 hours a day too (at night is best).
Of course, by the time you add the price of chemicals, a groundsheet, a cover and a few other bits and pieces, that £40 bargain soon creeps up to around £150… but it’s still been worth it. I should mention that I’d checked with the local water board, and yes, you can fill a pool with your hosepipe – provided the water is treated with chlorine so you don’t need to refill it during the season.
So we ended up with this ‘instant swimming pool’ in our back garden. It took about 12 hours to set up and fill – a bit longer than expected, so it’ll be an overnight job next time round. Brilliant fun in the heatwave though – go out to your backyard, jump in the pool to cool off for 10 minutes, dry off, then get back to work. Fantastic. And also a great way to keep the little ones happy and help them with their swimming practice – always under supervision I should add.
Maintaining the water quality is quite an art. When first filling the pool, it needs a huge dose of chlorine – known as a ‘chlorine shock’ rightly enough – and there’s some extremely conflicting information about what constitutes an appropriate dose and more importantly, how long it lasts. Various expert opinions ranged from 3-4 hours right up to 1-2 weeks! By luck rather than judgement I must have got it right because the pool has sustained 6 weeks of pretty hard use and is still beautifully clear and clean, thanks to regular chlorine doses and close monitoring.
Now the weather is cooling off and we’re slipping into autumn, it will be a sad day when I have to empty the pool and stash it away for next year.
I’m already thinking ahead to next summer and envisaging how the garden will look. Taking the mini-waterpark idea a stage further, I might add a couple of paddling pools and waterslides - turning the back garden into a kind of adult-sized version of the original. Or should I just go all the way and buy the full size 18ft diameter ‘instant swimming pool’ instead? That way I could actually have a proper swim in the backyard rather than just splashing about? Watch this space…
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