Avid readers of this blog may note that it started on 7 August 2007 with a piece about the new family
splash pool — it cost £150 on eBay, and has brought countless hours of joy to various people from all around over the past three years.
It gets, to put it mildly, intensive, almost daily use.
The day after it went in (2006),
Nick came back with a bunch of friends from school who jumped into the freezing water. I went down to check everyone was undrowned, and a head emerged from the freezing waves to the immortal line “
excuse me, mister; have you got a heater for this thing?” Three weeks and various old bits of washing machine linkage later we had heating but the cost of running it was not fun.
This year with the help of Ken the Swimming Pool man in High Wycombe we have bitten the bullett and upgraded to
Solar Heating. The first day temperature was up to
21 degrees. After the sun today, the water reached
31 degrees,
far higher than anything we have ever achieved with electricity. Going on Ken’s calculations, that’s payback in 6 weeks.
Is this a record?And this afternoon the pool sprung a leak. But that’s another story.
Now in its third year, the splash pool is turning out to be the best £150 we ever spent on eBay. With clergy family barbecues coming on, our whole family extends a cordial welcome to its other afficionados, hoping the weather this year will be up to it. With new solar heating the water has reached temperatures of up to 32 degrees recently, four or five degress higher than it ever managed with its original 7Kw electric heating.
With school friends etc,. it gets hours of use many days. One first this year was adoption and families workers on a staff day here using it for a teambuilding game with paper boats. On a cloudier Sunday, I just wanted to try and convey the full solemnity of the naturally Anglican way our children have been interpreting the instructions printed in six languages on the side, about not jumping in:
