Hello, 2019!

It’s New Year’s Resolution Time, and I figured it’d be a good idea to share one of mine that’s directly related to WaterShapes.

As 2019 unfolds, it’s my intention to do what I can to guide watershapers to make green choices and conscientiously reduce the carbon footprints of pools, spas, ponds, fountains and various other waterfeatures. And I’ll also be encouraging you to reward suppliers for making green choices, too, by specifying and using environmentally friendly products they’re bringing to the marketplace.

A strange little press release shoved me in this direction. It referred me to a Web site focused on two books by an entrepreneur named David Green, the pertinent book being Zero Carbon Pool, which is described as a “roadmap for how to make money by cutting your typical pool’s carbon footprint to zero, written by someone who has done it.”

I haven’t had any luck getting through to his site to obtain a copy, which concerns me a bit. Maybe it’s just that so many people saw the same release that his site has crashed? After all, it’s a fairly enticing concept, which, according to the press release, has to do with using a heat pump, a variable-speed pump, an electric-powered pool vacuum and a few solar panels on his own swimming pool in Massachusetts.

Along the way, it reads, he managed to cut carbon dioxide gas emissions from his heated pool to zero. That’s a good goal, I figure, even if the picture he paints is an oversimplification of what it takes to make a pool so green that its carbon footprint actually drops to zero.

There’s so much to be considered with this topic that we at WaterShapes once planned on starting a separate publication just to cover watershaping’s green potentialities. The direct result of those discussions, some of you may recall, was an amazing green-themed issue we published in October 2009 – just before the Great Recession trimmed our sails to a point where tackling another start-up became impossible.

But while that new publication was never more than a dream, we came back to green concepts on the pages of WaterShapes several times before it went away in July 2011 (effectively reducing our own carbon footprint to zero) and have continued covering green-tinged concepts in our newsletter and on WaterShapes.com ever since.

It’s my intention now to get deliberate about it, so please expect to see articles about green opportunities and strategies on a regular basis in 2019 and beyond.

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To carry this resolution forward most effectively, I need your help in finding watershapers who are on the leading edge when it comes to environmentally friendly approaches. David Green swears by the magic combination of a heat pump with a variable-speed pump, an electric pool sweep and a few solar panels, but I know there’s so much more happening out there than he could ever imagine.

Some of what we’ll cover will be familiar. With heating, for example, we’ve long been discussing insulated shells and pipes, sun-soaked site selection, geothermal- and/or solar-powered water heating, covers, dark interior finishes and other strategies for keeping water warmer longer and reducing the need to draw on fossil-fuel resources.

I also think of efficient hydraulic systems – properly sized pumps, big pipes, straight runs, fewer 90-degree angles, good system planning and thoughtfully organized equipment pads – as well as local product and material sourcing and recycling. But I know you’re doing more than this, if only because your clients are demanding it. It’s time to share, so please contact me at [email protected] to get the wheels turning.

Thanks – and have a spectacular New Year!