WHY IS SWIMMING POOL PLANT ROOM DESIGN AND LOCATION SO VERY IMPORTANT?
Swimming Pool Plant Room Safety starts with Design and Operational Efficiency starts with Location.
Design
Before you design anything, you start with its use. Too many designers have no idea what’s involved in servicing a pool. The use component has been ignored. It gets to a point that it becomes a relief to enter a plant room where the designer has had a very good awareness of the use of a swimming pool plant room.
How often is the plant room location the very last decision made in the pool design process? Hey Frank, where are we putting the equipment room?
A good design process might be,
Consult the hydraulics engineer who is doing the filtration hydraulics and specifying the equipment for the pool. He should be able to tell you
How big a room is needed. Far too often the rooms are too small for the equipment needed which results in ridiculous installations with operational safety concerns or the use of undersized equipment just to fit everything in.
What safety requirements need to be considered and adhered to. For example, locate where you can achieve 2.1m clear headspace throughout the room after plumbing. Nothing like whacking your head on a sprinkler head or similar.
It is very important that the design process should at some point involve input from a pool plumber who has had extensive experience in swimming pool servicing. An ordinary plumber will do a beautiful job that will look great to the inexperienced eye but in fact it might well have safety (and maintenance) issues when it comes to working with the system. Pool servicemen know what equipment items they must be able to easily access for operation and maintenance. You do need to be able to easily remove a pump for servicing and you do need to be able to physically touch a chemical controller just about every visit, for example.
Have an entrance door of minimum size (6/8 door) or larger if needed, to be able to replace any item of equipment. This also applies to commercial pool plant rooms and this one is often ignored. A few years ago, I went to an apartment building to quote a heater replacement. I was struck by how tiny the sand filters were for the 80,000-litre pool. Then I realised that they were the biggest that could be got through the undersized door set in a Besser block wall with a concrete roof. We installed the new heater on the roof of the equipment room. No way that was going to fit through the door. This sort of thing isn’t rare. Good design Frank.
Guess what. Pools need chemicals and they must be stored safely. It’s no good supplying a tin cupboard. Pool chemicals are corrosive and metal rusts Frank. Liquid chlorine corrodes concrete and bricks, so that needs to be prevented. A lot of money can be saved when operating a commercial pool by purchasing pool chemicals in bulk. The fact that the stock arrives on a truck and needs to be moved to the storage shed also can be forgotten. You cannot bulk purchase without adequate and safe storage which complies with local regulations. The indirect cost savings are also substantial.
It is definitely a really bad idea to house pool equipment in a metal shed. Obvious? Yes, but it happens.
It might come as a surprise that pool service personnel do not carry a portable table around when doing their jobs. Yes, a table or bench is needed. It doesn’t have to be big. It would be nice to have a bench to put a pump on when changing a mechanical seal or to sit your testing equipment on and while standing erect.
Pipes should not run along the floor. They should be fixed to the walls, ceiling or travel overhead on strut supports.
Flooring needs to slope to the drain, but first you must have a drain. There is a plant room running alongside a rooftop pool in Brisbane that clearly demonstrates what not to do. The room itself is pretty good. The floor is ridiculous. There is no drain in the room. The pool surrounds outside the room has been tiled in a way that the tiles prevent the room from being hosed out to an outside drain. On top of that the floor slopes to the back wall. It is constantly puddled with algae clearly visible. You cannot sweep it out since the equipment is in the way. Frank, you really deserved a good award for this one.
Floors need to be sealed especially around any floor penetrations. It’s a given, that a Rolls Royce will be parked directly under a swimming pool plant room. When there is a spill or a leak (and that's guaranteed), guess where it will end up if the floor is poorly sealed.
A water tap is needed. I hate to think how much time (which is billed) is wasted by pool service techs looking for a tap. It's not a good idea if the nearest one is next to a lift well. By the way Frank, you are so good at forgetting this one.
You see eye wash sinks on commercial sites, but I have yet to see one in an apartment building swimming pool plant room. The hazards are the same.
Safety signage should also be specified, but sensibly. This is the responsibility of the pool owner. Signage requirements should be listed in the "Swimming Pool Management Plan" for the site. I have seen plant rooms with a ridiculous array of safety signs. Any blue signs must be adhered to and as such should not be displayed willy nilly but certainly when necessary.
Examples of the Blue Safety Signs
Good ventilation is very important in a room where chemicals are used and stored. Good ventilation is necessary for those that have to work in there. We have been in plant rooms you couldn't work in during the middle of the day. They are just far too hot. It's not just the workers that need good circulation. Chlorinators, heaters and pumps definitely need good air circulation to operate efficiently and to last their expected lifespan.
Adequate lighting is another area which could have been much better on some sites. You should not need to have to use a torch. We only have two hands.
Power point location needs to be decided after the equipment location has been specified. You don’t want power cords running where they can be tripped over or easily pulled (or worse, partially pulled) from a socket. You cannot run extension leads in a plant room as there is always the possibly of a water hazard. A swimming pool plant room is a wet room and power point location must be done with that in mind.
Oh! and yes, there should be no way a service tech can be locked into the room. That happened to one of our service techs a few years ago. Lucky there was mobile reception in that room which is not always the case.
Location
You cannot service a swimming pool without having to walk between the plant room and the pool, not once but several times. The walk might involve,
walking over gravel or pebbles. Why is that a good idea. It can be quite tiring especially when the stairs to the pool level are 30 meters away and you need to make this trip several times.
a lift journey to another floor. You can bet on a good wait for the lift.
Commercial pools generally are very good with the plant room location compared to apartment building pools.
Summary
Swimming Pool Plant Room design and location will have a huge effect of the long-term running costs of a pool. Bad location can add up to 30% to service costs. The pressure is always on apartment building service companies to contain costs. Service standards are compromised when you must contend with time lost thanks to bad D&L.
Some of these pools are service tech killers. It takes three years to train a pool service tech. You don’t want to be sending a good service tech to a pool where they need to crawl 2 or 3 meters on the hands and knees to empty a pump basket. True story. It also becomes a WH&S concern for Pool Service Businesses when sending staff to buildings with plant room safety issues. Why service the pool? It should also be of concern to anyone responsible for the WH&S for a pool plant room.
A well thought out plant room door - "Thanks Frank"
No service business wants to lose staff thanks to having to service bad D&L pools.
A few years back I spoke to a Brazilian fella who was the cleaning contractor in a large apartment building. He had just obtained his degree in Architecture. The brains trust of he and I agreed that maintenance service flow should be step one in building design with all the pretty stuff hung on that. What do you think Frank?
