I'm looking for advice and experience other people have regarding keeping the top layer of my pool
skimmed from insects and vegetation that fall into my 10 metre inground chlorine pool. My pool has
a Kreepy Krauly which keeps the bottom clean, and a skimmer which keeps the top clean too. The
problem is that this costs about 10 cents an hour to run. If I keep the pool skimmed myself
(manually) regularly then it only seems necessary to have the pool pump (and hence Kreepy Krauly
and skimmer) running about 8 hours per day. So I'd like to come up with a simple way to keep the
top layer of pool water automatically kept cleaner, without having to run anything as energy hungry
as the pool pump.
Here are some of my ideas, I'd be interested to know if anyone has done something like this, or
knows of someone who has. Most of the ideas basically involve "trawling" a small surface net around
the pool in some fashion. Dragging a net around should take much less energy than running a pool
pump. You don't have to trawl the whole pool since the surface debris will move around and it just
needs to cross the trawled area once. The net can be emptied once per day :-
o - Drag a net up and down the side of the pool with a boom that is attached to a tracked wheeled
vehicle that just goes back and forth. Putting rudders on the floating net could allow an oval path
to be trawled. o - Put a ring in the pool that is powered to spin around by propellers or a water
jet. Put nets on either side of the ring that will catch debris as the ring spins. o - Arrange a
boom that will move over the pool in the same fashion as a windscreen wiper. The boom trawls the
net. o - Arrange a boom that itself has a rotating arm on the end. Either end of the arm trawls a
net which catches the debris.
Details like how to get power to any of these are to be added later, but it seems feasible to get
~12V DC to them and trawl the net with less than 2 amps.