Villa Roquette is located in the South of the South of France – recently, to avoid confusion with the other bit of the South of France, North of us, the coast from Marseilles to Menton, including St Tropez, Cannes and Nice, the tourism people here started calling this area Sud de France. Call it what you wish, but Languedoc gets more sunny days than any other part of France and is in the same temperature belt as North Africa.

With all this sun it seems silly not to use it for heating. I have been planning to do this for years, but always had something else to do more urgently – I still have a pile of work to do, but next week (if it is not raining) I will start on a heating system for our Swimming Pool.

Thanks to the Internet I have found plans which are simple, inexpensive and work – I found a calculator online which takes into account pool size,  latitude, sun, shade, and a host of other factors and reckon I need about 15 square meters of solar heating to give me a very comfortable pool temperature and this will extend the use of the pool from April through to October.

Making and fitting the system is straightforward and materials cost abut 100 euro, but I already have most of the items in stock, piping, plastics, tubing, mountings etc – so, hopefully the cost will be very small and the befits enourmous.

I will make notes and write up the progress.

Here is our pool as it is – next time I will outline the first stages of construction and installation of the heating system.

The Pool at Villa Roquette