Pools

 

Pools are notorious for losing water from evaporation and through filtration; sometimes up to 11,000 litres per year. They are also energy guzzlers, with an average sized pool's pumps and filters chewing through up to 2,200 kWh per year.

To minimise this impact on the environment have a good pool cover, which can reduce evaporation by up to 90%. Installing a cartridge filter instead of a sand filter, which uses a lot more water, will also help. And installing a rainwater tank to top up your pool is of obvious benefit. To save energy, solar pumps are available, as are solar pool heaters.

You could install a natural pool that mimics the biological "filter systems" you'd find in a natural stream and pool. Impurities like decomposing plants and bacteria are filtered out by plants and by a specially designed, multilayered gravel filtration system.

Australian natural pool designers adopt a two-pool system, where one pool is for swimming and the other is for regenerating the water via the biological filter. You can have the two pools merged in the one body of water or two separate pools; it depends on what you like and how much space you've got to work with.