The history of the world of Rigid Pools

If we talk about rigid pools for a moment, harking back to 1982 when there were only pools made of fibreglass. There were good and bad brands, as fibreglass pools are products that require manual skill produce. But on the whole if the pools survived the delivery and installation process, they generally lasted longer than their owners. Then came pools made from ABS and HDPE: more robust in storage at the garden centres and vastly cheaper.

When the going gets tough the liner needs to be tough too. With stonework and heavy boots coming into the pool area the liner needs to be up to taking a bit of punishment.

These seemed like a shotgun blast to the head of a business that was just beginning to boom. They were a moulded product, which although they could be produced in vast quantities at the touch of a button, their limitation was in the physics of making moulds and the sizes of the sheets of raw material. Once it was realised that you only could get small pools from these materials, fibreglass re-emerged into a new niche, offering highly durable pools that were larger and deeper than the plastic competition.

A particularly attractive proposition for people interested in creating water gardens for fish, even Koi carp keepers (especially when they were pandered to with the dimples and grooves built into the shape to take the pipe work and fittings for the very best type of biological filtration, when it is gravity fed from a sump in the bottom of the pool.)

With the liner in place, edging stones are cemented into place all around. A footing is laid for some paving and a wildlife ramp is constructed from the marginal shelf area.

 

 

Rigid pools represent the cheap and cheerful end of the market on a par with the moderately priced flexible liners in terms of price per square foot of surface area and if there is a shape and size that suits the space you had in mind they are worth considering.

They are easy to clean because of their smoothness, which on the other hand gives them a clinical look that only weathers to an extent required for a suburban patio pool. Even fully laden with plants could never be mistaken for a natural feature, and because of their size they can easily look lost or out of place if there is enough room in the garden for other distractions.

Ifs.NO BUTS

If you are looking for something to waterproof your hole in the ground the way you have designed it and if you want it to look natural or to look purpose built with brick or stone facing, not just outside, but inside as well then a flexible liner is imperative. If you have the intention of creating more than 6 square metres of water surface and a depth that suits you, the plants and the fish, again you must use a flexible waterproof sheet of some kind.

Koi ponds need the best liners that money can by. Cheap bargain products have been known to leach chemicals into the water.

 

The history of the world of flexible liners

Back again to 25 years ago the choice was easy. If you were serious about water gardens and you wanted to see water in the ground after 9 years then butyl was the only consideration. Why 9 years? I dont know but that was the guarantee for it then. PVC and polyethylene, under the glare of ultra violet rays from the sun would self-destruct after 5 years at the most, turning to crispy flakes around the exposed edge at water level.

With PVC, it was ok if the liner was completely obscured and then it would last indefinitely but then it seemed so fragile. In fact all the liners for domestic ponds seemed very thin, butyl 0.75mm and PVC only 0.3mm, but there was a huge demand for thicker longer lasting materials for huge projects from the building industry, water, and sewage industries (the channel tunnel after all was lined with PVC and it only had a 9 year guarantee then). This in turn brought about competition to supply that demand and the effects filtered down to the domestic market.

Well, the end result, if this is the end, is the range of liners that you see now, some of them with LIFETIME GUARANTEES, with 15 years as the cheap end of the market. It is my guess that retailers are banking on the natural ergonomics of people moving around and growing old and dying before they are likely to reclaim their money back for a duff liner.

Oase offer a service to take back and professionally reclaim or dispose any old liner that you give them.

Pools constructed on very uneven or made up ground will need a skeletal framework for support. This one is ready for lining with underlay and then lining with an EPDM rubber liner.

Nevertheless I think we can still regard the guarantees as the best yardstick for quality and from there we can assess the different products according to the characteristics of the individual materials. This means you are now at liberty to choose the most suitable material for the project and be confident it will do its job for as long as you want.

To cut your costs by choosing a liner with a limited guarantee for the sake of expense, particularly on a large project, is not sensible. Better to shrink the size of the project to a size where you afford the best materials. Also ignore the bargains that may come from the building trade or off the back of a lorry. Some formulations of these products leech chemicals into the water that will kill wildlife and fish (generally slowly and painfully). They are made for roofing or tarpaulins not pools. Characteristics that suit water garden styles...