There are 5.4 million in-ground residential swimming pools in the Unites States, and, according to Opower, the homes with those pools use 49% more electricity each year than homes without. The increase in energy use amounts to about $500 per home per year.
Pools themselves are extremely energy intensive to maintain, they collectively use between 9 and 14 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, more than 11 states plus the District of Columbia , annually.
The average pool contains about 20,000 gallons of water, roughly 5,000 gallons more than the typical human will drink in a lifetime, and pool pumps use up to 2,500 KWh per year to circulate and filter it. Outside of the air conditioner, the pool pump is the largest electricity consumer in the average pool-containing home. According to the study, at the national average of 11.8 cents per KWh, a pool pump alone can add as much as $300 a year to an electric bill.
However, Opower’s investigation revealed that its not just the actual pool that accounts for the massive increase in energy consumption of homes with swimming pools.
The average pool home is 21% larger than the average house without a swimming pool. Larger houses, by consequence of their size, are more energy intensive to heat, cool and maintain and this amounts to some of the increased energy usage. However, a comparison of similarly sized homes shows that the houses with pools still consume 42% more electricity than those without.
The main reason, it seems, is lifestyle. Homes with pools consume significantly more energy in all four seasons of the year, not just typical swimming months in the spring and summer.
Homes with pools also have 9% more children than homes without.
The most telling statistic however, is that the typical occupants of homes with pools have an income double the national average. With all this extra money, pool homes are much more likely to have extra televisions, refrigerators, and other appliances that non-pool residents can’t afford.
-Max Frankel
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Another factor: In “Reinventing Fire” they discuss how pipes for water circulation in pools (and fluids in industry) are invariably undersized and poorly routed. Because flow resistance is inversely proportional to fifth power of diameter the effect is huge and pumps and energy consumed could be far smaller if pipes sized properly – as I recall we’re talking up 1/10.
Article also implicitly shows yet another undesirable side effect of income inequality.
Swimming pools represent another unexploited efficiency gain for residential air conditioning systems in the United States. Coupling a central A/C system, something nearly all homes with a swimming pool have, with an air-to-water heat exchanger (and rejecting heat to the pool) can increase cooling efficiency by 30% while offsetting pool heating energy.
For more information, see the work done by the Western Cooling Efficiency Center (WCEC) at U.C. Davis.
Good point. I’m thinking that these pools are ready-made geothermal heat sinks. Put a cover on them and put in a geothermal heat exchanger and this energy consumption comparison will be reversed.
Lets go for a swim and gloat on our success while others (for now) succumb to high ghg emissions.
This was ok before we knew what GW meant for the world. Now we know this sort of behaviour is imoral. This is why many avoid the whole issue.
Its a ‘hard’ problem to solve because it is redefining our accepted Ethics.
As someone who grew up with a pool (that my father and my Uncle Steve built from scratch) there might be an additional factor: did anybody check for how many parties the pooled houses hosted? We had one, it seemed, every weekend during the summer and quite a few during the week. I think that might affect energy usage.
(It was 40′ by 20′ by 6′, and we had to crawl on the roof to turn on the floodlights at night, but it did wonders for our social life.)
We use 2520kWh for 3 people with pool in our house.
We live in Australia and have a pool with a very efficient pool pump. We made the house also very energy efficient. Everything in the house is electric.
That tells me that homes in the US use 4 times more electricity than necessary!!!
Please, dear US residents, get real and energy efficient.
Greetings from down under,
Diego
I have a pool but most of my electricity comes from my solar array so I use very little grid power even though I drive an electric car.
My carbon emissions are actually much lower than the typical household.