In this article I’m going to be telling you more about electric pool heaters, and linking to a page which gives you an in-depth explanation of how it works, and also tells you where to buy one from.
While you didn’t come here to learn all about the technical details of electric pool heaters and how they work inside out, it does make some sense to find out what their working principles are so you can understand the pros and cons of the systems better. There are not that complicated — they work just like air conditioning unit, or a refrigerator, but in reverse. They suck heat from one medium and pump it into another.
In this case, the heat is moved from the surrounding air into the water from your pool. This water is circulated around the pool is ready to heat throughout the entirety of the pool.
This type of pool heater is much more expensive than a gas heater, which is why a lot of people consider them to be too expensive. However, this is not the full picture. Gas heaters are cheap to install but they are expensive to run, costing up to $3000 a year or more in running expenses.
Electric power heaters are much more economical, costing about half that price to run.
This is why it electric pool heaters pay for themselves in a short period of time. After this, they are saving you money all the way it often takes less than three years for them to become economical this way.
Under cold conditions, however, electric pool heaters do not perform anywhere near as well as propane heaters do. They can only make use of the heat that already exists in the air, and when the air is cold, it doesn’t have enough heat to warm your pool up to a nice comfortable temperature. When this happens, the heat from the heat pump is still valuable and prevents water from freezing, but it could be very unpleasant to swim in the water.
When this occurs, you have two options. One of them is to only use the pool during the warmer parts of the year. The other one is to use a secondary heater to supplement the heat from the electric pool heater to help it cope with the added load.