This had to be one of the coolest things I have done in a long time, both litterally and figuratively. It was the mid June and it was starting to be warmer durring the days down here. Nothing like August, but enough that it was noticable.

I started out by running water into the pool from the closest hose. After a few minutes, I cheked one of the other houses and still had a good deal of presure. I ran that hose out to the pool area as well and then a third from another area in the yard. With three hoses running full out, the pressure in the house was significantly decreased.

In addition to adding water back to the pool, I also wanted to try and add in chlorine as it filled up rather then trying to add it after everything was full and desperately needing it. I dropped four Chlorine tabs into the pool surface filter and put one of the houses into it.

This was the figurative cool that you see above of a waterfall coming out of the pool filter box. People pay serious money to have a hot tub with this feature and here I had created it for free and it served a good purpose.

Onto the litteral cool. Once I added a bit of water back to the pool, I was able to get the pumps primed and pushing water through the system. Just like the chlorine, if I didn’t have to wait till the pool was full to start treating it, why would I?

Okay, there’s actually a number of reasons, primarily I am concerned that I could have taxed the pump more then it was rated and it would die, but that was an after thought… I don’t think I’d recommend starting the pump early.

The result of starting a pool pump in a half filled pool is quite coole though. Normally the returns are under water so you don’t get an idea of how much water they can move. As the water level came up, they pushed even stronger then what you see here.

The end result of all this airborne water was a major cooling of the area surrounding the pool. Probably a 10 degree drop. It also created a nice white noise for dinner with my wife, sister in law, and her boyfriend.

Once the pool was full again, it took about two days to go from whats at the left back to more or less normal. I swept a few extra times durring those days, but all the chlorine and filtering did the trick pretty quick.

You can see pictures of the concrete here and here. Nothing to unexpected there. I did it alone one moring in about 3 hours. I’d give it a reasonable rating, but not a good due to a few leveling errors. I also added rebar to connect the old concrete to the new concrete by drilling a few holes sideways and using cement in a tube to fill the hole before jamming the rebar in.