The actual purchase cost of a gas pool heater should be somewhere between about $1, 000 and $3, 000 plus about $150 to $850 for professional installation bomba-de-calor-piscina.cl. Can you install it yourself? Yes, apart from any electrical or gas connections, the rest of the installation should be fairly straightforward for any handyperson with some basic tools. Some PVC pipe modifications are all that is needed to insert the heater between your existing pool filter and the pool. Basic instructions which will give you an idea of the task can be found at the bottom of this article so you can decide if your aptitude is up to it.
There are two options when it comes to the supply of gas for your pool heater. The heater you buy is dependent on the type of gas you will be using so it is quite important. If you have gas piped to your house, this is Natural gas (or town gas) and is the cheaper option. Otherwise you will be using bottled gas which is Propane and more expensive. Propane will be up to double the cost of natural gas. Using a pool cover will cut the heating cost down by about 80% and this applies with ANY heating system. The one point which cannot be stressed enough is INVEST IN A POOL COVER.
A second running cost which is often overlooked is the cost of maintenance. Gas pool heaters are not too bad but there is still going to be some scale build-up and possibly damage from chemical imbalances. Heat exchangers are a lot better than they were as technology improves but an out-of-balance pool can still cause damage. An annual service could be good preventive measure – you will usually find a maintenance schedule in the user manual supplied with the heater. A well-maintained gas pool heater should last 5 to 10 years.
Modern gas pool heaters can run at up to around 95% efficiency. That is to say, for every $100 you spend in gas you get $95 worth of heat into your pool water. Not too long ago most gas pool heaters were around the 50% mark so there have been considerable improvements over the years. This efficiency may seem low compared to the efficiency of a heat pump pool heater at around 400% to 500% but there are other reasons for using gas heaters rather than heat pumps. For example, heat pumps stop working around 45 degrees F and below and have a shorter lifespan. Technological advances in heat exchangers used in gas heaters have made them more efficient and longer lasting.
One of the great things about a gas heater is their simplicity. There is not an awful lot in the way of electronics and other wizardry built into them. Because there is less to go wrong they tend to run for long periods problem-free as opposed to heat pumps which can be prone to faults simply due to there being more to go wrong. In very basic terms, all you have is a gas burner and a heat exchanger with a temperature control to regulate the gas flow – less electronics equals less problems.
Gas heaters are at their most efficient when heating a pool from a low temperature which makes them ideal for people who want to use a pool on an occasional basis. For example, you could raise the temperature of a 30, 000 gallon pool by about 20 degrees F within 24 hours using a gas pool heater with an output of around 400, 000 BTU. Maintaining a temperature once achieved requires a lot less output – particularly if you use a pool cover.
In summary, gas pool heaters are a very good all-round way to increase the temperature of your swimming pool. They will increase the temperature quickly on demand and will operate at temperatures below freezing. They are simple and have quite a decent life expectancy when properly maintained. They are reasonably cost-effective both to initially purchase and to run when combined with the use of a pool cover. With the right advice on selection, a gas swimming pool heater will give you a long and satisfying swimming season without a major dent in your bank balance.
If you are currently in the market for a gas pool heater to suit your in-ground swimming pool, you are quite possibly a little overwhelmed by the choices available and the terminology used to describe them as well as all the numbers which are suddenly thrown at you. How can you hope to make sense of all this? How can you be sure you are making the right decision when it comes to your pool? Read on and you will learn that it is not as baffling as it all seems at first.
There are a couple of bits of terminology you have to come to grips with before you can start to understand pool heaters. The first is BTU. This stands for British Thermal Unit and is, in simple terms, the amount of heat (energy) required to lift the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. Straight away you can see that if you know how many pounds of water your pool holds you can start working out how much heat is required to warm the water by a certain number of degrees F. It is usually used as BTU per hour although it is not normally written this way.
The second term to understand is “efficiency”. This is a measure of how well energy (such as natural gas or propane with gas pool heaters) can be turned into heat in your pool water. In an ideal world all the gas would be converted into heat which would mean efficiency of 100%. unfortunately, in the real world things are not quite so good and most gas pool heaters have an efficiency between about 80% (for example, the Hayward H-Series Millivolt heater is rated at 81%) and top out around 95% (for example, the Jandy Hi-E2 heater rated at 95%).
Getting the idea? Okay, let’s have a look at a heater and break it down. Let’s look at the Jandy LXi series of gas pool heaters. Most pool heaters come in a range of heating capacities (that’s the BTU input of the heater). So the Jandy LXi250N heater is has an input capacity of 250, 000 BTU per hour and an efficiency of 88%. This means that 88% of the gas the heater burns is turned into heat in your pool water. So 88% of 250, 000 is 220, 000 BTU and this is the figure you need to help you work out which heater will do the best job for your pool.
Generally, the more efficient a pool heater is, the higher its price will be. Will the higher efficiency outweigh the higher initial cost? In some cases it probably will but in others it won’t. For instance, the Jandy Hi-E2 is rated at 95% efficiency but is three times the price of an average 84% to 88% efficiency unit. It is also very well made but the cost is hard for the average pool owner to justify. For the “average” pool you will most likely be looking at around 85% efficiency and roughly $1, 800.
It is usually a good idea to go for a heater which has more capacity (BTU output) than you actually need because there is very little, if any, difference in the overall running cost. A larger unit will generally burn about the same amount of gas to give you the same temperature pool but will do it in less time. In fact, the wear and tear on a bigger heater is usually less than on a small heater but it is doing less work to achieve the same result.