Get the best advice related to choosing a swimming pool, installing the pool, pool cost and maintenance. Everything you need to know about pools is in our “pool advice” section. This includes advice for both beginners and experienced pool owners that will help you think of all the aspects of selecting the pool shell material, colour, technologies, landscaping, planning the project, timing the pool building, etc.
Still not sure after reading our advice articles? It might be time to talk to a pool expert. Select an experienced pool builder near you and get in touch with him to discuss your pool project. All our authorised dealers are happy to talk and provide you with a free quote on your new fibreglass swimming pool.
Planning for your new pool area is extremely exciting, however, one important safety and design aspect to consider is pool fencing. Under Australian law, every swimming pool within every State and Territory must have an adequate barrier to restrict unsupervised…
Pool covers and rollers are one of the most common accessories people choose to add to their swimming pool package. They are a fantastic way to protect your swimming pool from unnecessary heat loss and debris and come in a variety of styles and installation choices to suit any budget and aesthetic. Three reasons why…
A lot of people dream about having a swimming pool in the backyard, especially when the blazing summer heat and humidity roll in. But, there are space constraints that could make a traditional pool impossible, and a new swimming pool can be very expensive. Inflatable pools can solve all of these problems in one go.…
The best pools can turn your backyard into an oasis where your family and friends can’t wait to gather. But finding the best swimming pools can present unique challenges, especially if you’ve never had one before. How do you pick the best size, and what elements do you have to consider? Since this can be an expensive investment, you must understand…
Solar pool heating has advantages and disadvantages, and with so many different systems on the market, it’s essential to choose the right system for your pool and the conditions where you live. This is why we have put together this handy guide to solar pool heating, containing everything you need to know to help you make the right purchase decision.
When you are planning your backyard swimming pool, it is important to consider which type of pool heating system to choose. There are a number of different options available, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Here’s what you need to know about the different types of pool heating to help you choose the…
At Compass, we try to provide as much information and knowledge for our customers as possible. Texts and images can be informative, however, sometimes it’s better to see and hear it in the form of a video. We already had a lot of videos on the website, but they were scattered around the site and could not always be accessed readily. From now on, you’ll find more than …
Salt chlorination is the most popular form of pool sanitation today. When you install a salt water pool, you are getting a chlorinated pool without the hassle of having to lug home drums of chlorine or using commercial chlorine which contains other products which can cause problems. A salt water pool makes owning a clean pool easy. When the system is also automated, you can be sure the chlorine needs are matched to the pool needs and that the pH levels are kept in balance as well. To find out more, phone us at Compass Pools on 1300 667 445.
The requirements and responsibilities for a first-time swimming pool owner can be quite daunting. To get an understanding of all that you will be expected to do to keep your pool in tip top shape, our Pool Owner’s Guide will benefit you greatly. Compass Pools has gone to considerable effort to produce this detailed and comprehensive guide which covers everything a pool owner would ever want or need to know. You can get your free copy by calling Compass Pools today.
I get a lot of calls throughout the day from people who are in that early planning stage. The first thing they say is, I want a quote on an eight metre pool or a six metre pool or whatever it is. Realistically it’s hard to be able to do that. Putting the pool and all of the equipment and all of your choices aside, it’s about your site.
Being able to ballpark a pool on the costs, I don’t know if you’re on a slope. I don’t know if you need to have a standard bond beam on your pool. I don’t know if your pool is going to be raised up a little bit. I don’t know if you’re in the building stages and we might have to pop the pool in prior to the house being built.
A great question we’re often asked is, if I’m going to build a house, how do I go about planning the pool? If it is such that you’ve got a block that when the house is built, you’re going to lose your access, it’s really important to consider putting the pool in first. At Compass, we call that a sleeper pool. So you can certainly come to us and talk to use about installing a sleeper pool.
The other consideration is, if you’re going to have access, we can certainly put the pool in after the house is built. But the consideration might be, if it’s going to be anywhere near the house for example, you want to make sure you consult with your builder and ensure that the footings for that house are constructed in such a way that it lets you come up and excavate near the house. So there are those sorts of considerations that must be taken into account.
When thinking about installing your pool, thinking about where it goes may come naturally. This might be, ok, that’s the spot I’m definitely going to have my pool installed. Other properties might have tremendous flexibility. There can be a little bit of consternation about where that pool is exactly going to go.
When we’re generally talking about installation of a pool and you’re thinking about it in relation to your lifestyle, what is most ideal is that the pool becomes an extension of your living area. It’s an area that is connected to your house. You may want to see your kids swimming and so forth, which is an important factor as well.
There are lots of exciting things about building a swimming pool. But one of the considerations you need to take into account is what am I dealing with on my block? In many cases, we are out at properties which have things such as easements. They are areas which you just can’t build over. It’s on your property but it really belongs to the council.
Other considerations are things like main sewer lines and so forth. There is a house sewer line that generally connects the main sewer lines unless you’re on a system such as a septic tank and that is a different consideration altogether. But where you’ve got a house sewer line that connects to a main sewer line, and you think that is in the path of the pool, that is not such a problem. Those things can be diverted. The main sewer lines for example, or any other thing that is fairly substantial, needs to have really careful consideration as to how we build around it.
I guess first off most clients have a bit of an understanding of what they want. From there I lead into what they’re going to use the pool for, how much room they think they might need, how many kids, do they entertain a lot. It’s basically finding out what they need. From there we can work out the best way to go about that.
I guess the most common questions that we’re always asked is should I lay pavers on sand or should I lay them on concrete? Traditionally, we used to lay all our pavers on sand around a pool. Most of the time they were a small format, so we could get away with laying them. These days, most people want large format pavers, large format concrete or natural stone. So nowadays you can’t lay pavers on sand around the pool purely because of the movements around the sand that washes out. You get a far better job on concrete.
We’re often told by people looking at planning their pool and installing it, I’ve got young children. I’m worried about them, they’re not great swimmers, there’s a little baby. So what I want to do is I want to create a beach area, something shallow in the pool.
One really important aspect of a swimming pool is when you install it, if you’re planning to stay in your house for quite some time, you’re really going to live with whatever you’ve got for as along as you’re in that house. The important thing is to think, they’re children for a little while, but they grow up. It’s not long before they’re incredibly competent swimmers. They’ve got all their friends home from school and they want to use as much of that pool as practically possible.
A lot of people who come into my display centre to have an early-stage think about getting a pool always want to know what is involved in getting a pool. Among a hundred different things that are important when you’re planning a pool, how long it takes comes up pretty often.
You need to, I think, nut it down into four areas. They are planning the pool, getting the approval to build the pool and having the pool built, so that is effectively the installation of the pool. That is before all the nice cosmetic, easier things like the fencing and the paving all come to fruition.
I love the question does Vantage in-floor cleaning and circulation really work? If I get asked that question, I usually know that person hasn’t been out and spoken to anybody who owns our system. We are so fortunate to have literally thousands and thousands and thousands of these systems installed right across Australia. Now if you can find someone, or certainly call us, we will put you in touch with as many people as you like to talk to, to understand how much difference the Vantage in-floor cleaning and circulation system has made in their life.
Once a customer brings their council approved paperwork into the office, usually the timeframe from receiving approvals and the pool going in the ground is between six to eight weeks. That’s a rough timeframe. Weather is something that is beyond anyone’s control but it is usually between six to eight weeks.
Filtration equipment is obviously a really important part of your pool. What we need is usually around two metres, two and a half metres but that depends on the amount of space you’ve got available in your yard. So we can customise the installation of your equipment to best suit your yard.
I talk to a lot of people have anxiety about access to their house. The first thing to let you know is just about everything is possible. Ideally, we’d turn up at a block, it would be flat, we would have no house in that spot and we could drive straight in with all the equipment. Realistically when a pool is built, we literally want to turn up with the biggest digging machine and excavator and as many tipper trucks, usually three, as we can, to keep running that fill out of that property.
Most properties that we consider have great access are properties that you can pretty much drive a car to where you want to put the pool. That is pretty much as good as it gets in most cities today. Outside of the city, on rural properties and so forth, that is an added bonus because it is often very easy to get to the site you want to put the swimming pool.
I’ve helped hundreds of people plan their new pool. I really think that the three most important things to have a bit of a think about when you’re doing that is first the purpose, what you’re actually going to use your pool for. Is it for kids, family fun, is it just something pretty to look at, have barbeques around? Does it need to be suitable for anyone elderly who is getting into the pool?
The other thing is effort – how much effort you want to put into owning it. If you’re time poor and you do not see yourself out cleaning the pool or out there testing the water chemistry, there are certain things that you can do that can take a lot of that effort out of it.
The Vantage in-floor cleaning system, what if something goes wrong with it? What a great question. I can certainly understand people having concerns about it. There is a lot of misinformation about that system out there, particularly if you talk to pool builders who are just unable to equip their pools with a Vantage system.
The Paramount Vantage system is a system that has been exclusively and specifically designed for Compass ceramic fibreglass swimming pools. There is no pipework underneath the swimming pool. Where the in-floor rotating heads are inserted into the pool, that recessed area is part of the swimming pool. They are very close to the radius of the swimming pool and that is what ensures there is no pipe underneath the floor of the swimming pool.
With ten years’ experience working with Compass Pools, probably the biggest inclusion for a swimming pool that makes the biggest difference when I talk to people and revisit pool owners is certainly the Vantage in-floor cleaning and circulation system. Everyone gets really excited by the fact that it cleans the swimming pool. That’s a great thing and we love the fact that it does. But the in-floor cleaning and circulation is so much more than that.
It’s a system that is designed to effectively circulate water. Let’s face it, a swimming pool is very similar to a bath, it’s just a lot bigger. If you get in the bath at night and make the water all dirty, when you get out you can pull the plug. You can’t pull the plug easily on your swimming pool. So some time ago, the industry determined, how do we make that pool healthy? To do it, we’ve done it through the use of sanitisers and a fairly basic circulation system.
We’re often asked how long is it going to take to build my swimming pool?
There are a couple of different elements that come together for that. Obviously we’ve worked through the time for contracting the swimming pool, designing it, doing all the bits necessary for now to be well on our way to having a pool in the backyard.
The next step for us is we need to manufacture it. Every Compass pool is built to order. We don’t build your swimming pool until we get an order for it. So it’s always your very own swimming pool, issued with its very own birth certificate. This is an important element of Compass Pools.
One of the great reasons people choose Compass Pools is we’re often told, our friends told us not to get a pool and that’s why we’ve come to you. That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, does it? But what that tells us is that they’ve been out and they’ve been heavily influenced by somebody who owns a Compass pool.
It is usually somebody who owns a Compass pool with a Vantage in-floor cleaning and circulation system. Those friends, family or the people they’ve been influenced by have told them, our pool is easy. What people are saying about owning a swimming pool in terms of it being a lot of work or maintenance to do, that can literally disappear. We’d welcome you to come and talk to us about how we can make that happen for you.
Having worked at Compass for a little under ten years now, one of the best pieces of advice I can give anybody considering or looking at putting in a swimming pool is take your time. A swimming pool is generally something that when people are considering putting one in, they’re usually pretty committed to their house. It usually means a long term investment in the property that they currently reside in.
This is not like going out and purchasing a motor car. If you went out and bought a motor car and decided, you know what, I just don’t like this car, there is something wrong with it, you can sell it. You can’t sell your pool without selling your house. So you want to be really careful when you think about all of the different options and all of the different inclusions that you can make part of that swimming pool.
As a pool planner, the number one question that I get asked nearly every day of my life is how much does that pool cost? It’s a great question, it really is, but the truthful answer is how long is a piece of string? It comes down to exactly what you want and on your site.
The things to think about in being able to even give you even a ballpark range is how big do you want your pool to be? Do you want it to be five metres or do you want it to be fifteen metres? Do you want to have a very automatic system so that you aren’t manually cleaning your pool, it’s looking after itself, it’s the easiest thing in the world to own? Do you want your pool to look spectacular at night with beautiful lights in it? Do you feel that you might want to heat this pool? Do you feel that you need to have a cover over this pool?
One of the exciting things about working here is I can’t tell you the number of times that somebody has walked in the door or I’ve turned up at somebody’s house and I’ve said, how did you hear about Compass Pools? They’ve said, Joe down the road, has one of your pools, he’s had it for eight years and he’s never cleaned it. We hear that a lot. The reason for that is that Compass Pools was the first company in the world to create the world’s first in floor cleaning and circulation system for fibreglass pools.
That’s not something you have to have but it is pretty hard for us to install a pool today without somebody giving it really serious consideration or adding it to their swimming pool.
Often people will walk into Compass or they’ll give us a call on the phone and they’ll say, how much for a swimming pool? It’s such a great question and is a difficult one to immediately answer. There are just so many different options and inclusions and site differences and things that are particular or may be particular about that pool. These will change the overall cost.
It’s not dissimilar from someone walking into a car yard where there are a whole range of cars on offer and saying, how much for a car? No one really does that because we’ve all been educated enough to know what a car is and that there are lots of different inclusions you can have.
The thing about swimming pools is that once they are in the ground they are there to stay, so the decisions you make at the purchasing stage can affect your overall satisfaction further down the track. There are plenty of factors to consider that will influence your choices as you create your ideal pool. Let’s have a look at some of the important questions/points you’ll need to think about so you end up with the best pool for you and your family.
