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Help how to re-use a swimming pool I don't want

 
Posts: 46
Location: S.W. France
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I'm hoping for some cool ideas and technical info from you guys.

As retirees, we are trying to buy a house with more space for growing, raising chickens and so on, but many of the homes we see (and the one we're interested in at the moment) have swimming pools. Of course these houses are more expensive, and when we first started looking we just wouldn't look at any with a swimming pool.

Problem is, there aren't many on offer with all the features we want, and COVID is not helping (the people from town are fleeing to the countryside and people aren't feeling it's the moment to sell), so... we are considering buying one that has this unwanted and expensive feature.

- We've thought about using it as an underground, if not very deep, storage for rainwater to use in the garden and, after the proper treatment(s), the house. But swimming pool lining is probably not the kind of material you want your water sitting in, and how do you close it up and get the pump in and all ? And it's below the level of the house on a sloping site.

- We've thought about using it as an underground, if not very deep, cool cellar for storing produce, but we'd probably only be storing enough for our personal use and it would be far too big, plus it's situated in a very sunny spot.

- We've thought about using it as part of a greywater and sewage treatment, but again it would probably be completely oversized and far too deep for that, and how would you create drainage from it ? (ps Yes I would like to put in a dry toilet and do humanure but we will no doubt have a poor water "flushing" toilet too)

- We've thought about using it as a pond for wildlife and perhaps ducks or fish/aquaponics, but would that work ?

We're really a bit flummoxed by the whole thing, and don't have enough technical knowledge about all these options, furthermore we are not handy (or now fit) enough to envisage doing anything more than really basic DIY.

I'd rather just pay a professional who knows what they're doing to put in a water collection tank and a reedbed system, (which is what I'd hope to do if we find a house without a swimming pool)  However I'm sure they'd want to put in their standard systems and not do a complicated conversion.

If we DO buy this house with a swimming pool we'll have to do something useful with it, but what ?

 
gardener
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The aquaculture / aquaponics is tempting to me, but so is an in-ground greenhouse. Probably not the optimal design for that, but I think it would be cheaper to heat, or be easier to use for season extension without heat, compared to above-ground.
 
rocket scientist
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Hi Sonya;
I added your thread to rainwater catchment and ponds.
If there is another you would like it in just ask.
 
Sonya Noum
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Oh thanks !
I'd completely overlooked the option of an in-ground greenhouse, that makes a lot of sense and sounds much easier than all the other stuff ! Tho it seems like an awfully big space for a wee bit of extra seasonal stuff. Maybe I could take it further and make a solar oven or something in it !
 
Sonya Noum
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Thanks Thomas !
 
steward
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I have seen some videos where people set up floating veggie gardens on the surface of old swimming pools and put fish underneath. The water wicks up to the beds and the fish provide fertilizer but I don't have a pool, so I've never looked into how balanced they're able to get it - they probably do at least some water pumping to oxygenate the water for the fish, but it's not a full-on aquaponics set-up where there's "flooding of gravel beds".
There are definitely people doing floating plant beds in moving water systems - a fellow installed one on a lake in China and cleaned up the water in an amazingly short period of time. He grew flowers to sell because of the level of contamination he was dealing with.
 
steward
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This is a cool post from someone who has tried several different options that you might enjoy:

that same pool has been my chicken coop, compost pit, wood chip reservoir, compost tea brewer, egg making, FIRE ANT breeding, science project for the last few years.  By filling the pool with free wood chips, I am now able to make all of my compost on site.  It is a lot of labor to shovel the chips into a garbage can, haul the garbage can up the stairs of the pool, over to the screen sifter, and then sift out the bigger chunks.  All of my food scraps go in the pool, all the yard trimmings from the property (I'm on 1/3 acre urban with no lawns), and pretty much anything organic I would otherwise throw away.  I put hardware cloth over the domed area where the plastic for the greenhouse was.   The compost tea is basically just rain water that the pool naturally collects and that I can pump out with a bilge in the deep end.



https://permies.com/t/154940/Underground-green-house#1214403

The thread is also about underground greenhouses.

https://permies.com/t/154940/Underground-green-house

 
pollinator
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If the bottom's level, add some steps and a railing and you have a sunken deck. Pergola the top and you've got a great place for vines.

Do you like bamboo or other ferocious plants? Fill it in and you have a contained garden box.

If you put a roof on it, maybe a sunken greenhouse, workspace/studio, or plain old storage.

If you keep it wet: water storage, wildlife pond, aquaponics pond, duck haven.
 
Sonya Noum
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Thank you all for these wonderful ideas, I'm beginning to feel it's actually feasable (even if I still don't know quite how)
 
steward
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I've heard, in some areas, if a pool is empty it can cause problems.  I'm not sure if it was a high water table lifting the pool out of the ground or if it was some other problem.  You might want to check with pool installers in the area to see if it might be a concern.
 
T Melville
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Tho it seems like an awfully big space for a wee bit of extra seasonal stuff. Maybe I could take it further and make a solar oven or something in it !



Other (complementary) options: Chickens, rabbits, and / or fish. Chickens or rabbits would extend your season slightly farther, (body heat) and can generate loads of fertility for the plants. The downside would be a probable need to circulate air so everyone breathes better in there. Depending on your summers, they may require shade, extra ventilation or relocation when it's warm. Fish would provide fertility, the water would be a thermal mass, and could provide for watering the plants, if desired.
 
gardener
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As I love amphibes and they are in a dire situation in Europe I would opt for a pond!

My French is not good enough to do a research, but a quick search on German websites gave me some that talk about pool to pond conversion. There are DYI solutions (like lining the walls and adding stones and suitable soil) and companies specialized in that conversion.
I give you the links anyway, maybe google translate works for you, if not you can at least look at the pictures:
https://www.husmann-gartenbau.de/blog/vom-pool-zum-schwimmteich/
https://deavita.com/gartengestaltung-pflege/landschaftsbau/gartenteich-im-pool-anlegen-idee-garten-gestaltung.html
https://www.homify.de/ideenbuecher/561/vom-swimmingpool-zum-gartenteich

My garden is very small but three years ago we built our own mini-pond. It makes me so happy!
Just to sit there and look at the water with the life all around, water bugs, dragonflies, insects that drink, little spiders, sometimes a newt or even a frog, snails moving under the surface of the water. And we don't have mosquitoes. Of course mosquitoes will lay their eggs, but there is enough aquatic wildlife to feed on them. A water barrel is far more critical in that respect.
If you are lucky you even might get a visit from a kingfisher or similar.

So my vote goes out for pond.
 
Sonya Noum
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Thank you for all your wonderful creative replies.

Finally, we've decided not to buy that property, in fact the pool was new and in excellent condition so there was no way they were going to bring the price down as much as we'd have wanted, plus the place had other defaults. But the ideas are out there and are inspiring and useful anyway, whether you inherit a pool or not !

Yes an empty pool will inevitably fill with some water and become a breeding ground for mosquitos. Tropical mosquito-borne deseases have arrived in the south of France with global warming and human trafic and  transiit, so mosquitos are definately not a good idea !

And yes, I will definately have a pond whereever I end up !
 
pollinator
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Finally, I used to build inground swimming pools, if left empty they can pop out or collapse the walls.
I would use it for fish etc and veges, but also install a tank for rainfall collection in the pool as well.
 
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While living in Arizona, I heard of a guy who turned his backyard pool into a covered Aquaponic dome as an experiment and it worked really well for him. He called it a Garden Pool and has a website www.gardenpool.org

Here also is a news story done on his Garden Pool and what he was able to accomplish.
 
pollinator
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I've thought about this same thing, but I'd want to know a lot more about potential toxins in the walls of the pool, plasticizers or I don't know what...

If the walls can be removed and put somewhere far away from life to get rebalanced by nature, the remaining hole in the ground would be good for

a) a cool space to hang out in in the summer without the need for air conditioning

b) a wofati freezer experiment (?)

c) a walapini greenhouse

that's what comes to my mind.

The fact that it is in a sunny area can be changed by planting shading trees for the longterm, and temporarily by putting a canvas over it.
 
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Our pool went defunct a few years ago. We also had an otter get in our pond and eat every one of my 6 foot catfish. I wanted to put catfish back in the pond but I knew the bass would eat them before they could grow. So we put 200 baby catfish in the swimming pool to grow. The next year we used a net to move all the 16 inch catfish to the pond. Now we just have to fill in the deep end of the pool so that the bottom is level and put a retaining wall inside so the sides don't cave in. We are going to put a green house over it. I am collecting old refrigerators, freezers and dishwashers to make raised beds in it. You take the doors off, lay them on their backs and drill holes about 4 inches from the bottom so they hold a little water and don't dry out so fast. The idea is to put a row of them around the top of the pool to act as a railing to keep me or someone else from falling in. Fill with dirt and you not only have a raised bed but it is not going to fall in.

A few years ago we had to replace the wood burning furnace in the house. I kept the old one. I just need to replace the fire bricks in it and build a small shed over it to make an outdoor furnace to heat the greenhouse. Lots of work to do yet, but that's the plan
 
pioneer
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Many of the listed articles on transforming an inground pool to an aquaponics system refer back to the same article listed above. Here is a link to an article from the UK magazine "Permaculture" that says basically the same thing but using a slightly different set up, where they are quoted as being able to harvest 66 - 110 pounds of fish for their table annually.     https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/aquaponics-swimming-pool      

That would be my goal in transforming an in-ground pool I didn't want to keep running as a swimming pool. I would keep it fuller of water for the fish I wanted to grow to have plenty of room to swim, and perhaps look into what other habitat elements I might need to introduce for spawning to keep the fish flowing to my belly!

Please keep us informed about how you deal with your unwanted pool.
 
pollinator
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I live in a desert in southern arizona.

We had a pool when we bought our house, but when it had a problem that would have cost far more money that we had to fix it, we turned it into a pond.

We sealed up all the piping into the pool, made sure the plaster inner coating was set. Put dirt, rocks, and some large branches down in the bottom, had a friend help us put in bricks and stones set up on the steps and benches and made them into planters.

Then we Filled it with edible plants like cattails, baricopa, and lily pads, plus a few other small plants good for fish babies, and added some feeder goldfish that we got for just a few bucks and all the snails we could gather from other's ponds, that they didn't want. One side is about 7 feet deep, and the shallow end is 4 feet. Sealed off the little filter area that goes off from the pool, but didn't seal the cement there, so water seeps into the filter area, which works well, actually, as we filled it with dirt and made it into a small planter for a medicinal swampy plant. I was hoping to make it a swimming pond, but haven't quite managed that yet (expenses for the filters. up into a better plant filtering system.

We didn't have much money to do this, again. Originally we were hoping to try a setup more like that one couple up in Phoenix, but it turns out that their type of fish can't survive the colder temperatures in our area (we're at a higher elevation), and we had trouble finding fish that did well with our level of water alkalinity plus the temperature ranges we had. Plus, two of us developed bad food allergies to something that's common in fishfood, so we needed to have a setup where we didn't have to feed any fish that we put in there.

Goldfish worked well as we don't feed the goldfish at all; they live on the plants and the insects in the pond.

I am happy with the pond so far. I do wish that it was a bit more natural at the edges - again, we had very little money, and not too much practical know-how, so the edges are still exactly like they were for the pool, including some tiling, which is visually annoying, but still works.

The pool had bricks surrounding a cement path around the pool, which I dug up and they now have my more frost sensitive fruit trees and I'm working on adding more plants there. Goldfish make a lot of waste, so I use the water filled with fish waste on the trees an in the garden - this makes a huge difference, considering the crap soil we have here. I also let the string algae grow and then clean it out and use it for compost. And I clean it out into the pond, so the little critters inside of it get washed back into the water, which attracts the goldfish and they learn I am the source of neat bugs, so they will come up and nibble at my fingers and say hello, which is honestly kind of neat (turns out, goldfish can actually recognize voices - who knew?).

But one of my favorite things about the pond is how much it has attracted the wildlife. Where we are, there IS no water year round. No streams, no ponds, nothing. We have ended up as the water hub of our area. So we have bees, birds, rodents, lizards, snakes, rabbits, even javalinas, coyotes, a raccoon, and a bobcat or two comes by for the water. We have a family of raptors that specifically hunts in our small yard (it's about 1/2 an acre) because we have the most prey of a lot of the houses around us.

This has ended up with a lot of the smaller critters nesting/denning in our yard, and eating in our yard, which means they are defecating in our yard and that, too, is a huge boost for all the plants (we don't have any animals to help with manure). The lizards and birds eat all the insect pests from our trees and garden. The beneficial insect pollinators like the bees all get the water and end up pollinating our plants since they are in the same place. I have a little trouble keeping some of the critters out of the annuals, but the perennials in our yard do very well.

Not to mention, the pond it honestly really soothing to just watch and hang out with with the fish and watch the birds.




 
Jay Angler
steward
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@shauna carr - I would *love* to see pictures.  I've got a friend who's "sort of" trying to make a similar transition and at least has frogs and tadpoles enjoying her efforts, but I'd like her to do much more.
 
master pollinator
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As mentioned, the water in a pool is a large thermal mass. I suspect this could be utilized as part of a heating/cooling system for a residence.
 
shauna carr
pollinator
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I'll try to get some pictures up!  

We are in the middle of what seems to be a nearly week long rain event so I haven't been able to take any photos yet, eek.
 
pollinator
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Grow duckweed and raise ducks.
 
I agree. Here's the link: https://woodheat.net
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