Ever since 2015, I've wanted an endless pool. I had a vision of the pool being in the back yard inside of a greenhouse type structure with huge windows overhead as the roof, and huge sliding doors along the outside. Basically a see through house structure around it. Inside next to the Endless pool would be the hot tub.
Looking into the costs for such an endeavor I estimated would be
around $40,000. I got in touch with the Endless Pool people and they got back to me and allowed me to go in and configure the exact pool I wanted:
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| You can see the pre work for the pool pad behind the tree which Isaac was removing Jacob's pathetic attempt at a treehouse. |
It had to be fast. I did test swims of pools that blew bubbles at you and they sucked. I could swim breast stroke at the level of their fastest speed. They come with a tether for you to attach yourself to. What's the point of swimming into weak current while tethered? That defeats the purpose. In 2016, I went to do test swim at a pool in Kaysville and he had the thing going full blast, and I was able to keep up with it. So I wanted a pool that I would not even be able to hang with. This called for the High Performance pool which tops out at :56/100 yards.
The year before the planned purchase we had the back yard completely overhauled. Here is the step by step process in detail and broken into sections.
Concrete work
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| Our crappy back yard where we raised chickens, turkeys and even a goat. All for food. But Cathi had enough, time for a overhaul of the back yard! |
We put in a concrete deck, concrete stairs going up to the back door, and the pad for the hot/tub and pool
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| Jacob demolished the back deck, so now we need stairs. Let's go with concrete. Down to a big concrete back patio! |
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| After the gravel and compacting, in goes the concrete! |
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| This was starting to get really exciting! |
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| Just like I had envisioned. A separate pad for supporting the endless pool and the hot tub. |
Bullfrog Hot Tub
In Fall of 2018, Cathi and I went to the Bullfrog dealer in Clearfield and also the dealer in South Jordan. We found the model we wanted that was affordable. We got a deal because it was a demo at the State Park and they gave us a discount. The cool thing is we could choose what jet packs we want. The neat thing about bullfrog is that you can pick and choose these jet packs in each corner. They remove and go in within seconds. Each jet pack has unique features. We ordered the hot tub and within a month they came in and installed it. They suggested an electrician that has lots of experience with installing the electrical needed for the hot tub, and they said he could also do the electrical for the pool at the same time and save some money.
Electrical Work
Then had to fish the wire through the ceiling in the basement thru the brick wall in the back under the back stairs. Then he installed a couple of breaker boxes on the outside to turn off power to each.
Then he dug a trench to lay the electrical cabling over to the concrete pad for the hot tub and endless pool once they get purchased.
Once the hot tub arrived, they tested out the electrical and everything worked without a flaw. Great work Dave Warner!
Endless Pool Delivery - Early March 2019
To be honest, I was disappointed with the condition of the pool shipping containers. It all came in labeled boxes which was good, but the base of the shipment was lopsided and the pallets all broken up. Whoever prepared the base of the shipment was new or didn't know what they were doing because there was a great deal of weight that wasn't on a pallet at all, and the base board broke. There was only one pallet with the entire shipment balancing on that one pallet. 
Endless Pool self install - Started mid March 2019
Shortly after getting everything organized, I watched the video and read the installation manual. I'll tell you, this is why I am not a mechanic. I must have read and reread several portions before I got it. So I installed the steel walls and that took several hours. There are 6 large 7x48" panels that you have to put together just right. I actually installed the fatter end down, which after setting it up, realized the fatter end is at the top. So I had to move everything around. What a pain!
I then used the supplied drill hole to drill the holes in the walls for the lights and the hydraulic hoses. At this point I was supposed to start putting the coping in at the top. Not much instructions there at all. At this point I realized I was in way over my head.
Endless Pool Professional installation continuation - late March 2019
I called Dave Christensen a professional and trained Endless Pools installer, who is located in Salt Lake. I was desperate for his help. He came up and took a look at my customizations and what I had done so far. He said that he could get the rest of it installed (minus the insulation and skirting install, which he suggested I do if I wanted to save money) for $2500. I was like "Heck yeah!". I guarantee I would have broke something or installed it wrong so I was very glad to hand it over to him. I took some time lapse video of his work from that point on.
Pavers - Mid July 2019
I bought some pavers (166 to be exact) from Home Depot. These cost about 5.00 each and were VERY heavy. I had to make many trips to get the 2+ pallets worth of pavers to my home. Each one is over 40 pounds. They are over 2 inches thick and 16"x16". The concrete pad only allows for about 18 inches of concrete beyond the outline of the pool/hot tub base. I realized there would be some water splashing and so I figured I needed another 3 feet or so of pavers to keep the chlorinated water off the grass. This also included some gravel and sand from Travis Call. The gravel and sand base enables the pavers from moving around and giving any water between the cracks some drainage.
I bought some pavers (166 to be exact) from Home Depot. These cost about 5.00 each and were VERY heavy. I had to make many trips to get the 2+ pallets worth of pavers to my home. Each one is over 40 pounds. They are over 2 inches thick and 16"x16". The concrete pad only allows for about 18 inches of concrete beyond the outline of the pool/hot tub base. I realized there would be some water splashing and so I figured I needed another 3 feet or so of pavers to keep the chlorinated water off the grass. This also included some gravel and sand from Travis Call. The gravel and sand base enables the pavers from moving around and giving any water between the cracks some drainage.
Sprinkler System - late July 2019
Travis' brother Justin gave us a plan and estimate for the sprinkler system. 
Justin and his uncle worked many afternoons getting this work done. Cathi would often go out and give them lemonade. We gave them a tip for their hard work. They deserved it.
Justin and his uncle worked many afternoons getting this work done. Cathi would often go out and give them lemonade. We gave them a tip for their hard work. They deserved it.
Pool Tent - August 2019
After swimming thus far through the summer, I quickly realized that having the pool exposed directly to the sunlight was heating the water way beyond I was satisfied with. So I looked 
online for carports and other tent structures to cover the pool. I talked to a friend of mine, Theron Watson, who owns Olympus Fireworks. He said he had many used tents and that he'd give me a good deal on one. I took him up on it. He had a 15'x30' tent he'd sell me with walls for $500. That was a great price. That would cover the pad well enough. The kids really worked hard helping me wheelbarrow all that gravel and sand over and spread it out, and then help me lay the pavers. That was hard work. I bought twice as much sand as I needed so I gave the rest away on KSL Classifieds.The delivery of the tent took forever. It took many calls and texts to him to get his crew to come out and deliver it. Then when it got here I realized there were some missing parts which I was able to get resolved fairly quickly. I got the tent up and noticed that the water temp was no longer increasing. But it wasn't really going down either.
So I went to Smith's and bought 80 pounds of ice. I dumped it all in and watched it all melt in a matter of minutes. The water temp dropped only 1 degree! I can't afford ice for that kind of effect. So I did some googling and found that the number one way to cool down pool water in the summer is with a waterfall. So I rigged up my pump and hose to the tent poles and setup a waterfall system. I even put in a fan to blow air through the dripping water. The water temp dropped down over 10 degrees! Wow! That worked awesomely!
After swimming thus far through the summer, I quickly realized that having the pool exposed directly to the sunlight was heating the water way beyond I was satisfied with. So I looked online for carports and other tent structures to cover the pool. I talked to a friend of mine, Theron Watson, who owns Olympus Fireworks. He said he had many used tents and that he'd give me a good deal on one. I took him up on it. He had a 15'x30' tent he'd sell me with walls for $500. That was a great price. That would cover the pad well enough.
online for carports and other tent structures to cover the pool. I talked to a friend of mine, Theron Watson, who owns Olympus Fireworks. He said he had many used tents and that he'd give me a good deal on one. I took him up on it. He had a 15'x30' tent he'd sell me with walls for $500. That was a great price. That would cover the pad well enough. The kids really worked hard helping me wheelbarrow all that gravel and sand over and spread it out, and then help me lay the pavers. That was hard work. I bought twice as much sand as I needed so I gave the rest away on KSL Classifieds.
Sod Installation - August 2019
We really struggled with whether we should put in real grass (and skip the sprinkler system), or artificial grass. After getting quotes, the amount of grass we would need would have cost us between 6-10K. 
However, sod for the same amount of land, was less than $2,000 so I reluctantly went with grass. We ordered I believe 5 pallets and allowed for us to completely start over with quality grass in the back, and a good portion of the front that was weedy with dying rose bushes. It was a lot of work, but it went quickly with all the help of the boys.
However, sod for the same amount of land, was less than $2,000 so I reluctantly went with grass. We ordered I believe 5 pallets and allowed for us to completely start over with quality grass in the back, and a good portion of the front that was weedy with dying rose bushes. It was a lot of work, but it went quickly with all the help of the boys.
Lighting
One customization I got with my pool was that it comes with two underwater lights. I opted to get 2 additional lights. That was money well spent. In fact I kinda wish I did two more, for the back wall.
I wanted some ambient lighting for those night swims or hot tub soaks, so I bought some led lighting to attach to the inside of tent poles at the top and also created a "led lantern" above the hot tub. I also got some solar powered lights to got along the side of the pool. In the night time, this really looks awesome!
Swimming in Winter
Once I got to Halloween of 2019, I reached out again to Theron for tent walls. You would think that they were making them in China still. It took me months of nagging and pestering until I got the walls. Man that really was way too hard to get the tent and the walls finally here and installed. But once I got them up, it was a life saver for the pool to keep operating throughout the winter.
Throughout the winter I kept the water temperature at around 68 degrees. Which on a hot summer day would feel quite refreshing, but in winter when the air temps are down into the 20s, this made getting in a bit of a mental challenge. But with open water swimming, you need to get used to cold water and the overcoming mental and physical challenges, so I saw this as an opportunity. I kept an eye on my Sense energy monitor I have hooked up to 
my electrical system. This enables me to know in real time my electrical usage and the AI built into the app is able to not only identify the appliance types in use, but allow me to setup notifications when certain appliances turn on/off.
my electrical system. This enables me to know in real time my electrical usage and the AI built into the app is able to not only identify the appliance types in use, but allow me to setup notifications when certain appliances turn on/off. I found that over the span of several weeks in the middle of winter that the heater for the endless pool was going on approximately 4-5 times per night for 15 minutes each session to maintain the 68 degree temperature. The usage for the heater was about 300-400 watts. So that equates to less than 1 kwh per night! That's awesome. My hot tub was only slightly over that. Keeping in mind the hot tub is leaking heat into the inside of the tent which kept the internal tent temperature about 10 degrees warmer than the outside. So heating the endless pool for one day in the winter was probably about 10 cents. Just to be conservative, let's say a quarter. I can totally handle that.
Swimming in the winter though was nice, cause I'd get in my swim and at the end the hot tub soak just felt awesome.
I installed an Amazon Alexa device to the top of the inside of the tent so I could relax in the hot tub, tell Alexa to play some music, and then tell her to turn off the lights which I had connected to a smart plug.
Pool Maintenance
Owning a pool means that chlorine smell. The pool where I did my test swim in Kaysville, the guy had his pool inside his house. I could smell chlorine as soon as I walked into his house. Not a bad thing for me, I like the smell. But I didn't want visitors to have to deal with that. One of the reasons I have mine outside.
Anyway I found that with both the Hot Tub and the Endless Pool, I go through about 5 pounds of chlorine in about 3 months or so. So I buy my chlorine from Amazon in bulk. $100 per pop. However part of keeping it clean is vacuuming. I ended up getting a Dolphin E10 above ground vacuum, which for the size of the pool is overkill in a big way, but I love the convenience of turning it on and letting it just go.
I also found that I need to rinse the filter every week. I only replace the filter probably twice a year, which I also get on Amazon. In the summer I have to put water in from the hose for about 10 minutes every couple weeks. With the waterfall and the front half of the pool uncovered I lose water to evaporation and a little bit of splashing while swimming.
Other than that, the pool maintenance is a total breeze. Just make sure you have the pump system configured to keep pumping and filtering. I had originally configured it to only run the pump and filter when it was heating, and in the summer it wasn't actually filtering properly. So I had to break out the owners manual and program the system to filter to my specifications (which is 20 hours per day). Don't worry. The pump is a tiny little motor that only uses about 150w (when the heat is off).
Controlling the Endless Pool
There are two ways to control the endless pool.
- With the Fit@Home app available on Google Play Store for android, or App Store for apple devices. I have it installed on a Galaxy Tab A8 (Android), and on my Iphone 8.
- The manual remotes that come with the pool. These remotes are extremely simple. Three buttons: Start/Stop, Faster, Slower. These remotes aren't waterproof. I had it stowed away in my bucket of things stored by the pool. One day during my workout, it randomly would speed up to max, slow down, and current starting/stopping. I thought someone was messing with me. I found the remote at the bottom of the bucket and the screws on the back were rusted so I opened up the remote, and it was all corroded inside and destroyed. I took the battery out and threw it out. I didn't mind cause I never use that thing to control it. But you'd think that a remote for a pool would be super water tight. Not the case. Just use the app. (But keep your non-waterproof devices out of the pool)
Fit@Home App review
The Fit@Home app has its issues. It isn't perfect, and has some bugs, but there are workarounds. It has a ton of potential, but the app hasn't had an update since June 2018. So I don't think it'll get much attention. The setup is super easy. You need to give the app the wifi password to your network, and your device uses your wifi network to communicate to the pool.
There are two modes for operating the pool with the app:
1) Manual Mode
You simply set the pace, and how long you want it to go. It defaults to run for 30 minutes, but you can slide that setting to as low as 10 seconds, and as high as 90 minutes. While running in manual mode, you can increase the duration, or swim pace at any time. But I don't run in manual mode, because I don't want to have to mess with when I'm swimming, so I create a workout.
2) Workout Mode
You can configure workouts where you can specify 1- 20 sets. You can configure each set to be as short as 10 seconds, or as long as 90 minutes. So technically you can create a workout that lasts for 20 x 1.5 hours = 30 hours. I think the world record endless pool swim is 24 hours. Go for 30 and you got a new record! Anyway, when you create your workout, you can't create rest breaks. Your rest is considered a set, and you put the swim pace to the lowest setting (3:44 100/yd pace).
When you create your sets, you can reorder them by moving them around, and you can delete sets, and you can copy sets.
Bugs in the app:
- Once you create a workout, you give it a name. You can't rename it. So if you change the details of the workout around, and you name your workout "90 minute intervals", and you modify your workout to something other than 90 minutes, you can't go in and edit your workout name.
- Your workout listing doesn't show how long they are so that kind of requires you to put that in the name of the workout. And the workout name can't exceed 30 characters I think.
- You can edit and delete workouts and you can't order the workout listing. It puts it in case sensitive alphabetical order.
- Sometimes when you create the workout with a bunch of a different sets and reorder things, sometimes it doesn't save with the order you created, and you have to go back in to edit and reorder and try again hoping it'll save the order right.
- When you create a workout that gets to about the 9th set the little sliders to modify the pace and duration don't show up (they are hidden just below that set), so to get around that you just add another set, and the screen will slide up and you can see the sliders for the 9th set, then delete the 10 set if you don't want it.
Once you start the workout, for me it takes anywhere between 10-20 seconds for the workout to upload to the pool computer, and start. Once the workout starts, you really don't need the device anymore because the pool has been programmed to run your workout until it either runs through all the sets, or you interrupt the workout with the pause button on the app on your device. If you happen to lose wifi connectivity, the workout will resume. At that point the device isn't needed for your workout, it uploaded all that data to the pool. The pool computer actually sends the real time countdown for each set back to your device.
When I start the workout, I'll turn the device on its side in landscape mode so the display is nice and big, and then I'll put the device in a waterproof container and rest it on the side so I can see the realtime countdown for time remaining for the set. That's pretty neat.
When the workout is either cancelled, or completes you get a summary of the average pace, the total distance swam. Which is nice cause I want to know how many yards I swam. For recording purposes, I always subtract about 10% of my workout's total yards just to be conservative in my yardage totals. But if you think about it. The yards you swim in an endless pool are actually more legit than in say a pool, because there is really only one "push off the wall", intead of getting a wall push every 25 yards (which gives you anywhere from 3-10 yards depending on how good of a pool swimmer you are).
Sharing the Endless Pool with "drowning" fish during Covid-19 hype
During the spring of 2020, recreation centers and community pools all over the country were shutting down, including here in Utah. Many of my friends at the South Davis Rec center were out of the water and it was still too early in the season for them to do open water swimming. So I opened up the pool to them via Salt Lake Open Water. The only price: $25 to join SLOW.
Breakdown of Costs
Here is a breakdown of all the costs of this project. Not everything was directly related to the endless pool, so I've broken those out:
Summary
Would I do it over again? Yes! Would I do a few things differently? Definitely.
Things I would do different
I would NOT get the skirting from Endless. I would go to Home Depot and make my own cedar skirting. The synthetic skirting I got from Endless warps in the heat of the summer and looks like crap.
I'm constantly nervous about getting a hole or tear in the vinyl. I think to get around that I should have gotten a hard shelled endless pool, instead of a vinyl pool. I'm pretty sure they offer those. I originally was wary of those because they would need a crane to lift it up and over my house, but that may have ben worth it considering there really isn't much to install with it as a hard shell.
Other than that. I love my Endless Pool system. Here are the details of exactly what I got with their cost breakdowns:
I originally got a UV sanitation system, but they had safety recall on it just as it was going out, so I opted to just get a refund on it. It was overkill anyway.
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