ENGINEERING TOOLS & HEATING LOADS

Engineering Tools

In the course of developing this website, we uncovered a variety of resources for those wishing to investigate the engineering and the economic analysis of solar swimming pool heating projects. We’ve listed them below.

Energy Smart Pools software: This is the tool we used to determine the annual energy saved by using a pool cover, a solar hot water heating system, or both. That information, in turn, helped us build our Solar Calculator. The Energy Smart Pools software was developed by the Department of Energy as part of its Reduce Swimming Pool Energy Costs! (RSPEC! ) Program. The drawback of the Energy Smart Pools software is that it only runs under a Windows ’98 operating system. Nonetheless, here is a link you can follow in order to download a self-extracting copy of the program. (Click here to download the RSPEC! Energy Smart Pool software.)

Sandia’s Solar Pool Economic calculator is a spreadsheet-based tool to facilitate the pursuit of solar swimming pool projects involving third-party financing. Note that the pool heating load is an input variable in this tool. This spreadsheet provides a good estimate of the energy produced by the a solar hot water system and goes a step further to provide a Private Ownership Rate of Return analysis. It will allow you to evaluate how interesting your project might be to a Third Party. The (Excel) sheets include a 20-year cash flow analysis and measures of “goodness” for the project such as Simple Payback, Internal Rate of Return, and the levelized cost of energy. Click here to download Solar Pool Economic Calculator. (click here)

RetScreen International: This Canadian organization has built a wide suite of tools for engineering and economic modeling of solar systems that are available and downloadable from the web. Solar heated swimming pools is one such available tool. (click here for RetScreen).

F-chart software: F-chart method is universally known and employed by solar technologists, and the F-chart program, a commercial product, allows one to predict the thermal performance of a variety of flat-plate solar thermal systems, including solar systems for swimming pools. F-chart does not model the performance of pool covers, but it is a good tool for 1) determining the month-to-month energy load of a swimming pool, 2) sizing a solar collector system and 3) predicting the solar system’s month-to-month energy performance. F-chart can be purchased and downloaded on-line (go to https://www.fchart.com/index.shtml).

FindSolar: If the pools you are heating are small, the website FindSolar is worth visiting. This site’s content is much broader that solar pools. Their logo is “Connecting You to Renewable Energy Professionals.”

About heating loads:

Sizing the solar collector requires knowledge of how much heat is required to maintain a pool at the desired temperature. We used the RSPEC! software as our load estimating tool; we also compared RSPEC to these other tools and found considerable variation in the predicted load. We evaluated the various load predictions and came to the conclusion that the best load predictions are obtained using either the RSPEC! software tool or the RetScreen tool.