I can remember people telling me I was crazy when I took off my sand filter and put on this weird shaped “paper filter”. Recently over some Northern Harvest Crown Royal I took out the calculator and figured out how much money I had saved over a 20 year period. I stopped counting once I got over $10,000 but I had a pretty big smile on my face. I will share some of the highlights of my work sheet with you.
Water Costs
Now, I’m a proud Winnipeger but what really gets my goat is that the City of Winnipeg Water Utility penalizes people who have pools. Here is the rub, the city assumes that all households use the sanitary sewer the same way and charge a sewer levy on each ounce of water that a house consumes. So even though pool water will never go down a sewer pipe as soon as you put it in your pool you get assessed a surcharge. It didn’t take me long to calculate how much water a pool loses with backwashing a sand filter once per week. It is about 500 gallons per week. My pool runs 23 weeks per year so that was over 10,000 gallons of water per year I was discharging and replacing. I could handle paying for the water but when you add the sewer to that it ends up costing north of $200 per season just for water. With a modular filter here is the benefit: There is NO backwashing. In one easy step over the last 20 years of having this filter I have saved over $4000 in water.
Chemicals
If we stay with the same math of 10,000 gallons of water ( and by the way my pool is 10,000 gallons) lets think about chemicals for a minute, I usually spend around $400 per season to balance my pool water initially, and then about another $400 for my chlorine, shock and algicide that I put into the pool on a weekly basis. With the Phd that I don’t have I do know that there is NO chemicals that are in the water that comes out of the tap, but when I backwash I am flushing out my perfectly balanced water. So yes, it isn’t a stretch to say that I lose about $800 per year in pool chemicals each year. That is a whopping figure. Even if you cut it in half that would be 8 grand I have saved by having a Modular Filter.
Heat
It costs about 2 bucks to bring up 10,000 gallons of water by 1 degree F. It is usually a 40 degree difference from the temperature that the water comes out of the tap and what my family likes to swim in. It is a serious bummer to know you are backwashing out 86 degree F water and then putting in 45F water and then cranking the furnace up. My heart pounds enough from the house furnace consuming all that gas. This may be my favourite savings of all.
Is it worth it?
There is no doubt that switching from a sand filter to Modular Media will save you close to $1000 per year. I usually tell people that there is a 1 year payback on the cost difference (sand vs Mod media) and then after that it is making you money. It certainly has for me the last 20 year. One last thing, a Modular media filter takes out particles about 20 times finer than sand can capture so your water ends up being polished and not filtered.
