“We’ve always built unique, high-end projects, and it makes sense to build as green as possible. For a lot of our clients, it’s not necessarily the money that they’re going to save — they just think it’s the right thing to do. They could afford to pay a $2,000-per-month gas bill for their pool, but now they can feel good and tell their friends that they have a very energy-efficient pool.
We recently built an indoor pool that many believe to be Canada’s greenest pool. It is an indoor pool in a glass structure that can open up in the summertime. A huge cost to an indoor pool is operating the dehumidifier, so if you can turn it off by opening up the building, then you have an outdoor pool and save energy. That provided the biggest cost savings on that project.
The home and pool enclosure shared a geothermal heating and cooling system. There was in-floor radiant heat in the pool and on the decks. And everything about the entire building is insulated — the pool wall, the shell, every piece of pipe, everything connected to the geothermal system.
Lately, we’ve been using geothermal and titanium heat exchangers whenever we can. We’re building a project this year where we’re using a heat exchange system to heat the pool in the summertime, and then in winter we’re going to heat his deck and his driveway so he doesn’t have to shovel any snow. It’s a shared system, because in the wintertime we’re not heating his pool, and in the summertime we’re not heating the driveway.
— Barry Justus, president, Poolscape Inc.,Burlington, Ontario, Canada
