How do you wire a pool pump timer? To install a pool pump timer, begin by finding an appropriate location for the timer, removing two knockouts, adding thermal adapters and connecting a conduit from the breaker box to the timer. You need the timer and box, mounting screws, a drill, two 1/2-inch NPT thermal adaptors, 1/2-inch electrical conduit, strong cutters, a screwdriver and wire cables. If you are not comfortable working with electricity, contact a professional. What are some tips for connecting pool pump wiring? How do you replace a pool motor? How do you read a pool pump diagram? Install the timer boxFind a location in an area near the pool equipment but away from water sources to avoid damage. Screw the box onto a hard surface with the appropriate surface mounting screws. When secure, remove the black insulator panel in the timer box. Remove two knockoutsThe knockouts are located at the bottom of the timer box. Remove two knockouts, as one leads to the pool equipment, and the other leads to the pool's breaker power box.

Attach thermal adaptersConnect a 1/2-inch NPT thermal adapter to each of the knockouts on the timer box. Connect a conduitTurn off the power at the breaker box before you begin any work. Measure the distance from the timer box to the breaker box, and cut a 1/2-inch electrical conduit to that length. Push the three wire cables through the conduit and into the timer box. Connect the conduit to the thermal adapter. Fasten the wiresAttach the green ground wire to the green screw on the pool timer. Find the input power cables that stem from the breaker box, and attach one to terminal one and the other to terminal three on the timer. Affix a second conduitMeasure a second conduit from the pool equipment to the timer box. Feed the three cables through the conduit from the equipment to the timer box. Connect the conduit to the other thermal adapter on the timer box. Connect the green ground wire to the green screw. Tighten the screw with a screwdriver. Hook up the other two cables to terminal two and terminal four.

Tighten the screws with a screwdriver on each of the four terminals. The wiring is now complete. Finish by screwing the black insulator back onto the timer. Learn more about Pools & Hot Tubs How do you hook up hoses to a pool pump and filter? To hook up hoses to a pool pump and filter, attach the other end of the hose from the skimmer pipe to the pump, connect the opposite end of the return hose... Pools & Hot Tubs How do you replace pump seals for a pool pump? To replace pump seals, also called gaskets, from a pool pump, turn off the pump and relieve the pressure inside. Remove the bolts that hold the pump assemb... How do you lower the alkalinity of a pool? To lower the alkalinity of a pool, test the pool's total alkalinity level, switch off the pool pump, dilute a total alkalinity-lowering chemical in a bucke... How do you replace a valve on an above-ground pool? Replace a valve on an above-ground pool by shutting down the pool pump and draining the valve of water.

Use PVC cutters to remove the valve, then install t... What are some typical maintenance costs for pool owners? What advantages do salt water pools have over chlorine pools? What are some styles of outdoor showers for a backyard pool? How do you lower alkalinity in a pool? How do you find a leak in pool liner? What is an above-ground saltwater pool?breaker pool cleanerIt’s the season of home-buying, so we wanted to prepare a little PSA on the actual cost of owning a pool for you guys when you’re out looking at fancy-pants pool homes.vacuum cleaner parts lincoln This is Part 3 of a three part series, so feel free to start at the beginning:carpet cleaning norfolk uk So if you’re just joining the series now, here’s a quick recap.

In Part 1, Mr and Mrs. PO (the Previous Owners of our house) ended up losing the house to foreclosure in part because of a cycle debt that began when they installed a brand new pool. In Part 2, we showed with the numbers why our pool was basically “free” to us given the craziness of the real estate crash in Florida in 2009. And now here we are in Part 3, where we’re going to see if my sister’s estimates for pool costs at $1,500 per year were right, or if we were able to DIY it and cut our costs to half that like we were hoping. insurance – pools homes are bigger risks for insurers, so you’re going to pay for it. The question is by how much? taxes – you’ll pay for your pool every year here, unless you’re like the Greeks So let’s get some calculations going: I’ve split this up into the two distinct periods that we used different methods to maintain the pool. DIY and outsourcing it for a monthly fee. We made the switch from DIY to hiring a professional when our pool vac broke after just 32 months.

Hire A Professional Era (10 months and counting) See why we outsource this now, right? Either way you slice it, chemicals and maintenance were costing us about $65/month. Remember in Part 2 when my sister said something usually breaks every year and costs $200-$300 to fix? Well, big sis was almost spot on! My sister was right on the money – this works out to a $219/year on parts that break on our pool My sister didn’t even mention these, but they definitely add up even under perfectly normal conditions The electricity is where it really starts to add up when you’re not looking, and here’s how you calculate it. Your pool pump will have a label on it that tells you how many Amps and Volts it’s using. Our 1HP motor (this is the new one, our old one was 1.5HP) is pretty standard as pool pumps go. It’s neither super energy efficient like new variable speed models, nor does it have unnecessary power like the 1.5HP pump that was more power than our pool really needed before.

So I would give its overall energy efficiency an “eh” rating – not the worst, but not the best. The label on our pump says it uses 115 Amps and 15.3 Volts, so remembering that Amps x Volts = Watts (yay for physics!), and that we buy power from the electric company in kiloWatts (1000 Watts), we’ll use this formula to calculate our hourly cost to run the pump. Plugging in values for our motor and our marginal electric cost of $0.105/kWh.  When I say marginal cost, this is because our electricity use is tiered. The first 1000 kWh are at one price, and everything after that is at a higher price – in our case ten and a half cents per kiloWatt hour. I use the marginal cost since your pool costs sit on top of the rest of the home’s electricity use. And we get that our motor costs about $0.185 / hr to run. And it runs for about 9hrs/day on average, so we get a daily cost of $1.66/day. And a yearly cost of $606.90 to run it for 365 days. And 12 months in a year gets us to the number above of $50.58 per month in electricity for the pool pump.

Seriously – did you think it would be that high? Electricity is what caught you by surprise, right? But remember, this is just for the basics. This buys you a clean pool that’s too cold to use much of the year. And if you think we’re exaggerating on the too cold bit, consider this. We live further south than 99% of US population. And our pool gets too cold to use without heat at least six months/year. We don’t really pay for fancy-pants extras. Maybe we would if we threw more pool parties, but we don’t. We have basic patio furniture that we would probably have with or without a pool, and never went out and bought the requisite inflatable alligator. The only pool specific purchase we’ve made was a $7 projection screen from the thrift store so we could watch movies while hanging out in the pool at night in the summer time. So far, we’ve never used it. =( Readers, hold us accountable to finally put it to use this summer! No heat = no frills. We live where it’s warm, and our pool still costs enough to heat that we don’t even try it.

Okay, part of that has to do with the fact that the condenser in our heat pump is broken and would cost another couple hundred dollars to fix – maybe we’ll call that the part that gets fixed in 2014! – but it’s also because it’s just flat out expensive no matter how you slice it. According to FPL (our energy company), if our pool heater were a COP (coefficient of performance) rating of 5, it would cost an average of around $100/month to heat our 15,000 gallon pool throughout the year to a measly 78 degrees. Sidebar: 78 degrees is not a warm pool. 78 degrees in the pool still gives Mrs. PoP goosebumps, but FPL’s estimate to get it up to 84 degrees is about $160/month – and goosebumps would still pop up. I am a baby and would love it to be a nice 88 or 90 degrees like cool bathwater but FPL won’t even entertain that as a possibility on their calculator. The cost estimates might make your eyes pop out of your head. Remember, these cost estimates are for a COP 5 heat pump.

While our pool heater currently has a COP of 0 (because it’s non-functioning), even if we got it working again, the maximum COP of pool pump that is 15 years old is probably not nearly that good. When it works, we estimate that it’s about $10/day to heat the pool – on par with what we pay to heat the house when it’s cold. There are ways to get cheaper per day energy costs for heat, but they all require a fairly significant investment in new technology – either with the installation of a heat pump with a very high COP (these will run about $4K – more for the most energy efficient!), or via solar systems. The cost and heat output of a new solar system will vary widely as there seem to be some that are possible to DIY for the price of PVC piping and cheap solar panels (a few hundred bucks), all the way to a new system professional installed which can easily cost as much or more than a new energy efficient heat pump. Less common around here are gas heaters, which according to Energy.gov seem like the devil incarnate, costing between 1.75 and 3x as much to get equivalent heat as you can get from a COP 5 heat pump.

No matter how you slice it, heating a pool can be a pretty pricey endeavor. So these energy costs are definitely in the fancy-pants category for us. When you get quotes to insure your house, it’s pretty rare that you’re able to compare the cost of insuring just the house compared to insuring the cost of the house and the pool. But last year, the PoPs got just that opportunity when our insurer dropped the coverage on our pool and pool cage. The full story is here in How We Decided To Self-Insure, but the gist is this. Our insurer doesn’t want to cover pools and pool enclosures. It’s too expensive and more liability than they want for what the state allows them to charge. If we wanted insurance that WOULD cover the pool and cage, it would be $2K more per year for our premiums. Ours is a fairly extreme case since we are using a state run insurance corporation and live in a coastal area of Florida, but the same idea holds for all locations. Pools represent risks to insurers.

It’s one more thing that can break or get damaged in a sudden storm, and it’s a liability in terms of someone slipping, falling, and deciding to sue the homeowner. And though tough to quantify, it’s one that you’ll continue to pay for indefinitely. Or call your insurer and see what it would save you to take your pool off your policy – if that’s even an option! While somehow the Greeks are able to get away with avoiding paying taxes on their pools, we cannot. Your county property appraiser is going to find out about your pool, and increase the taxable value of your home. Our county property appraiser puts the taxable value of a pool at $20K. Since this $20K sits on top of your home’s value, it’s taxed at your marginal property tax rate. So if your marginal property tax rate is 1% (average property tax rate in the US), then you’ll pay $200 (1% of $20K) each year in taxes for the luxury of owning your pool home. My older sister was pretty close with her $1,500 /year estimate.

But the thing is, she wasn’t counting everything. For the two aspects that she thought of as “pool costs” (chemicals/maintenance and broken parts), we were able to get our yearly average to about $1,000 by DIY-ing and searching out the best deal we could find on a pool guy. So we saved $500 (33%) on big sis’ estimate. Not the 50% savings that we were hoping for, but not bad. But she wasn’t counting everything that we still pay: So we actually pay another $843 on top of that every year, and that doesn’t include extras stuff or fancy pants heat or paying to insure it. That brings the grand total to $1,000 + $643 + 0 + calculated risk + $200 = $1,843 + calculated risk. While I don’t think we would buy just any pool house again, Mr. PoP and I have no regrets over the purchase of this house, even with its pool and all the accompanying expenses. If you own a pool – how do these numbers square with yours in different geographic areas? If you don’t own a pool, do these actual costs scare you off?