engineering
What started as a slow simmer has now come completely to a boil. Ten years ago, precious few of our clients had little or no interest in setting up outdoor cooking areas to go along with their pools, spas and waterfeatures. That's certainly not the case today, when fully 90% of our clients want us to set up some sort of kitchen amenity as part of their deck and patio areas. You don't have to be a marketing genius to see what's happening: It's great fun to
It was a rainy Wednesday morning in January when I first toured the Clearwater Marine Aquarium. I was on hand to inspect the recent installation of a pair of our horizontal sand filters for the facility's marine-mammal pool and see just how well the pool-filtration products were faring in this somewhat unusual (but not unheard of) application. Located on Island Estates in Clearwater, Fla., the aquarium was bustling with activity from the moment the doors opened at 9 a.m. On this day, a group of pre-school children had arrived to see the aquarium's newest dolphin, Presley, and his friend, Panama. The staff also explained to me that the aquarium, like other indoor attractions, is always busier when the rain falls. I joined right in with the crowd, fascinated by everything I was seeing. My guide, the aquarium's director of life support and marine facilities, Bill Meier, led me to the marine mammal pool - currently home to Presley and Panama but with the capacity to hold several more. This was the vessel on which my company, Pentair Pool Products of Sanford, N.C., had installed the sand filters. As I watched the children's faces as they in turn watched the dolphins, I began to realize that we were
Last time, we began a discussion of giving our clients the satisfying hot-water experience they crave with a review of basic design principles and coverage of a range of materials-selection issues. Translating the good on-site positioning and great materials we surveyed in February into a luxurious spa experience requires the designer to have an advanced understanding of the technology at work in hydrotherapy as well as a grasp of the spectrum of options available to drive and control hot-water systems. Before we address those key topics, however, it bears
Take the world's most prolific consumer technology company on one hand and, on the other, its desire to augment its corporate headquarters with a natural exterior environment intended to capture geological processes that span millions of years: It's a collision of present and past, of technology and nature, that is filled with meaning as well as exciting potential. Those sorts of thoughts and paradoxes were somewhere on everyone's minds as we approached the design and installation of a grand-scale watershape at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., corporate campus. Our aim: to create a spectacular and entirely
Developing a simple, reliable swimming pool alarm system offers a remarkable range of technical challenges, observes Robert Jechart of RJE Technologies - even when your point of departure is years of experience with ultra-sophisticated military and commercial sonar technology. Here, he discusses a four-year process in which his company has addressed its goal of making watershapes safe for families with small children.
For years, we at Sunshine Pools & Spas have provided high-end, custom swimming pools to a mostly affluent clientele in and around our base in Kelowna, British Columbia. Unlike many readers of this magazine, however, we specialize in satisfying those clients with vinyl-liner rather than gunite or shotcrete pools. To be sure, pools and spas of any sort are not the first things that come to mind when you think about our area, which is closer to the Arctic Circle than it is to the Sunbelt. But many residents around here do enjoy the good life and want
One of my guiding principles has to do with the fact that early decisions my clients and I make about materials have a huge influence on how my watershapes ultimately are designed and built. The project we've been following through the past few issues is a perfect case in point: The choice of the bluestone coping and of the one-inch glass mosaic tile for the pool's and spa's interiors started the wheels turning and definitely drove the early stages of the design process. As I've mentioned before, this project and its unforeseen problems (as well as clients who were at times unsure of exactly what
Since time immemorial, humans have sought out warm water for purposes of pleasure, bathing, relaxation and healing. That's a great thing for modern watershapers, almost all of whom are steadily asked to design swimming pools with attached spas or to set up stand-alone inground spas or to find ways to make portable spas work as part of a landscape or deck setting. I'd argue that hot water is even more important to contemporary lifestyles than it was to the Assyrians, Greeks or Romans of antiquity, given the stresses of modern life and the fact that we seem to have more of the leisure time required to enjoy a
Change can be both exciting and terrifying. In my experience, the biggest changes often come with the potential for tremendous rewards, but also with significant risk. During the past two years, such change has come for our company in the form of an all-encompassing transformation that has involved every aspect of the way we do business. We've gone from trying to mass-produce affordable swimming pools and hardscape designs (and fighting for every dime we made along the way) to building only high-end, custom projects where we never compromise on quality - and make generous
Last time, I described a series of unfortunate revelations that complicated the early stages of an elaborate pool renovation project in Malibu, Calif. By the time all of those enormous structural issues had been addressed, the pool project had been on hold for about six months. When we finally returned to the site to resume our work, we were greeted by a "courtyard" that was basically a neat, seven-foot-deep hole surrounded by a beautiful home in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the country. Although the most significant of the troubles were now behind us, the tasks that followed were far from simple. In the intervening six months, my clients had
