Detailed comparison of Pool Cover Types

What are the benefits of using a Pool Cover?

Before exploring the different types of swimming pool cover, it is important to understand why a pool cover is necessary in the first place.

Using a pool cover brings a host of benefits which are described below:

Pool covers help keep heat in the pool. Equally, if a user desires some sort of cold plunge pool, they help keep the pool cold too. Although seemingly contradictory, what the pool cover is doing is insulating the water from the air, and stopping heat conducting from one side to the other. For most users, that means keeping any pool water heat locked up in the water. (Some pool covers can also allow radiated solar heat energy to pass through them warming the water, while also keeping any locked up retained heat within the pool - more on that further down.)

Pool covers significantly reduce evaporation. This can amount to hundreds of litres per day on some pools, requiring regular topping up of what is becoming an increasingly precious resource. Large amounts of pool heat can also be lost through evaporation, and up to 90% of this can be stopped with a pool cover.

In addition to loosing heat through evaporation, pool chemicals are also lost to the air when a pool cover is absent. By using a pool cover when the pool isn't in use, chemical usage falls dramatically, which is kind on the environment and your pocket.

By preventing heat being lost through conduction and evaporation, any heating requirements for the pool are reduced, as when using a pool cover, you are only heating the pool water and not the sky above it.

Using a pool cover will keep your pool cleaner by reducing the amount of debris that makes it into the water. This obviously makes the pool a more pleasant place to swim, but it also reduces chemical usage as there is less organic detritus for the chemicals to try and deal with.

In all, even if you don't choose to automate your swimming pool with a Titan Pool Reel, you should at least be using a pool cover!

Different Types of Pool Covers.

Although there are others types (like winter covers, slatted covers, mesh cover, net covers etc.), this page will focus on the main two types, being Bubble Covers and Foam Covers.

Bubble Pool Covers.

Far and away the most popular and readily available type of pool covering is a floating bubble cover. Rightly so, these are becoming the 'must have' addition to almost every pool, as they bring all the benefits described above and they are low cost.
They are best described as looking like a large swimming pool shaped piece of bubble wrap.
Amongst the various types and flavours of bubble cover, there are an increasing number of sub-groups of them, each of which tend to focus on one or more of the features above. Prior to the explosion in their use, once upon a time they were all just blue in colour and only a handful of companies made them. Now though, we have multiple manufactures, different colours, patented bubble shapes and various thicknesses. Each come with a generous helping of marketing to extol their virtues and it can get a bit confusing. Through all at that though, they can be summarised.

• Thickness: It tends to follow that pool covers made of thicker plastic will last longer than thin ones. Thicker ones do weigh more, and the weight per square meter (or square foot) is a good way to tell which ones are using thicker plastic to suround the bubbles. The Titan Pool Reel is designed to work with all known material thicknesses of bubble pool covers.
• UV stability: When choosing a bubble pool cover, ensure it is designed for outdoor use and is made of UV stabilised plastic. UV protection is a must for an outdoor pool cover, and the lack of it is the primary reason for a short pool cover life. Good quality items will use more UV inhibiting ingredients in the plastic when making the raw material, but as these UV inhibitors are expensive, cheaper pool covers can use less of it to save on cost.
• Colour: This is an area where there is a big difference between types. As mentioned above, some pool covers will also allow the suns radiated heat to pass through them into the water. A good example of this would be a clear or transparent bubble cover. Such a pool cover would allow IR, UV and visible light to pass through it and therefore it will add radiated heat to the water. These clear or highly transparent types are sometimes called solar pool covers and they are a good place to start, as not only do they retain heat like all pool covers do, but they also add heat via the sun.
  At the other end of the colour range would be a black or fully opaque pool cover. These can also add some heat (as the pool cover itself warms up in the sun and it is touching the water), but their main benefit is to darken the water so as to keep algae from blooming. Opaque pool covers that block light also tend to reduce chemical usage overall.
  Ranging from fully transparent at one end of the scale to fully opaque at the other, there is then a myriad of colours in-between. The benefits of these various colours and colour pairings (one colour on top, one below) can start to drift into more of a marketing type world, than a science based one, however when considering any bubble cover, remember the clear verses opaque reasoning above as that will help cut through the hype.
• Bubble shape: The purpose of the bubbles on a bubble pool cover is to contain pockets of air that help make the cover float and trap a layer of air between the water and the sky. The air in the bubbles and the air between them acts as an insulator which keeps the heat locked in the pool. The shape of the bubble is considered to be crucial by some (actually patented in some cases), however the benefits of different shapes are debated by others. Obviously, the robustness of the bubbles is important, as having 95% of them be popped and full of water after 6 months will not aid in its floatation or thermal properties, so once again, the thicker the plastic, the more durable it is likely to be over time.
• Lifespan: The life of a swimming pool solar or bubble cover will vary depending on several factors. A good quality, thick and heavy, UV protected cover, in a mild climate where the sun never gets too outrageous might last a decade. While at the other end of the scale, a cheap, thin, horrible thing, located in California sunshine might only last 6 months. A 3 to 5 year lifespan is quite common for a good quality item in most locations.
• Cost: Bubble covers are relatively inexpensive and will often pay for themselves in reduced heating and chemical costs within a year or two.
• Application: Bubble covers can be used on indoor and outdoor swimming pools.
• Disadvantages: Far and away the biggest downside of using a bubble pool cover is useability. As great as they are, with all the many benefits they bring, nobody wants to mess about putting one on and taking one off the pool. Little wonder than that many pool owners don't own a pool cover, and of those that do, many of them stay off the pool unused. This is where the Titan automatic pool reel comes in, transforming your pool by making pool cover handling as easy as pushing a button.
  With a Titan, you can get all the benefits of using a pool cover, but without all the hassles.

Foam Pool Covers.

Unlike a bubble pool cover, foam pool covers are used exclusively on indoor pools. As such, manufacturers of foam covers make their products perform really well in terms of insulation, while not having to worry about other things like UV sunshine exposure.

Knowing that an indoor pool will not be subject to harsh summer sunshine, enables the design of a foam pool cover to focus tightly on its insulation properties, rather than having to be good at lots of other things as well. This improved insulation is achieved by making the foam contain billions of tiny air pockets trapped within it which greatly reduces heat flow through the material.

Foam thermal blankets therefore improve upon some of the benefits of a bubble cover, like heat retention, lower pool heating cost, cleaner pool, lower chemical cost etc., while sacrificing the ability to be used outdoors. Once the need to work outdoors is removed from the design aims of the cover, there is also no benefit in making the cover transparent for solar gain, so foam covers are exclusively opaque, typically being blue in colour.

• Thickness: Most foam covers range between 5mm and 10mm in thickness. They tend to be more difficult to roll up than a bubble cover, and handling can be more tricky because of this. The Titan Pool Reel is designed to work with foam pool covers up to 10mm in thickness, assuming the foam cover actually rolls up and is designed to work on a reel (which most are).
• Lifespan: With a much reduced exposure to solar UV radiation, the life of a foam cover used indoors will often be between 5 and 8 years.
• Cost: Foam covers are more expensive than bubble covers, partly due to the lower number of them in use (as most people use a bubble covers for both indoor and outdoor pools).
• Application: Foam covers can only be used on indoor swimming pools.
• Disadvantages: Like bubble covers discussed above, poor usability dominates the low use of foam pool covers. The Titan Pool Reel addresses this issue and is available for both bubble and foam pool covers, used on either indoor or outdoor pools.