How much does a pool cost?

This is a question that’s often asked, and the honest answer is that I can’t tell you! Now that’s not because I don’t know how to price a pool, its just that there are too many variable that affect the price.

Let me give you a bit more of an explanation of that statement. Lots of things will affect the cost, but the main considerations are as follows:

• What is the purpose of the pool?
• Is it to be just for family fun or is it to be for serious swimming training or perhaps hydrotherapy to help recover from an injury or help with a disability of some sort?
• Is it to be an indoor or outdoor pool?
• What is its size to be?
• Will it be a freeboard pool (where the water is lower than the paving and where it has skimmers)
• Will it be a deck level pool (where the water runs into grids in the pool surround and the water is flush with the surround? Maybe it would be best to have a fibreglass pool or an Endless Pool?
• Is it to be a tiled pool or a liner pool
• What is the access to where the pool is to be built- can we get a full size excavator and dumper into the site?
• Does it need to incorporate a safety cover?
• How is the pool to be heated?
• How much paving are you having around the pool?

All of these questions will lead to the thinking about what sort of pool to have, but in my experience, there are three factors that guide me in helping a client to make the right choice.

1. Most folks have an aspirational vision of what they want their dream pool to be like.
   
   
2. Most will have an expectation of what they want to use the pool for (pleasure, children, grandchildren, rehabilitation or exercise.
   
   
3. However, the driving force in deciding what pool is best for our client will be assessing those two items to find a compromise that meets the final factor- budget! Everyone whether wealthy or not has a budget that they don’t w. ant to exceed, so the skill is designing a pool that will meet the aspiration and expectation, and yet is still affordable to the client and within their budget. That’s where We at Azure try to help. We weigh up what the clients wants and needs are, then we can suggest options that are affordable yet match their expectation and aspiration.

There are lots of other questions, but they are all sub questions within those main categories. To illustrate, if you are choosing a tiles pool, will you spend £35 per sq metre for ordinary ceramic pool blue tiles, or will you spend 3100 per sq metre for iridescent glass tiles which transforms the pool from the mundane to the spectacular!

If it’s to be a liner pool, will it be a standard ‘bag’ liner, or will you have a ‘Tailored Onsite’ liner to add quality and longevity to the pool?

If you are having an outdoor pool and you decide to heat it using an air source heat pump, will you opt for one that performs best for the standard summer season (may-September), or do you want to have the freedom to use the pool April- October, which requires an extended season model. Or maybe you want to use the pool all year? In this case, you would need to invest in a heat pump that is designed to work all year in cooler temperatures. Those choices would naturally lead onto other decisions such as which brand heat pump to buy, as all claim to produce heat down to minus 10 degrees, but what’s the truth about that? That’s a whole different subject and you need to look at the heat pump section on our website for the answers to that one!

So, coming back to the original starting point of this section, the question remains, how much does a pool cost? The answer is simply, whatever you want it to! We can build you a simple 6 metre above ground wooden pool for as little as £15,000 plus vat or we can build you a breathtakingly gorgeous basement pool for a £1,000,000 – the choice is up to you which one of those suits your budget. The reality is most clients will spend what they can afford to get the pool they dream of with a typical cost for outdoor pools being £40-100,000, and £200,000 to £500,000 for an indoor pool, though in reality there is no such thing as a typical cost, for as you’ve seen, your choices and your budget will determine the actual cost.