Swimspa

If I remember right, you started this project about a year ago??  Looks like it was worth the wait. 

absolutely green with envy !!

Very cool, indeed!

Can I ask a question? Is there some sort of distance measuring mech., such as can be found on a treadmill?   If so, how does it work?   If not, I assume you simply swim for time?? 

I hope you put it to great use! Good luck.

Ok a few questions.  My pool just went live, fully functional 1 week ago, so I will get a few things ironed out as we go.  The pit for the spa is 12 by 20 by 5 foot (+ 1 foot for footings) give or take.  I put it into an existing garage (25x25 room)and finished the room to look nice.  The two windowed wall used to be garage doors and the sliding glass door wall used to be a back wall with 1 small window.  I added a garage next to it for all my junk.  

The construction price will vary quite a bit with where you are putting it.  The pool itself is quite pricey, but it has the best quality of resistance swim on the market, designed at MIT.  The water current is 24 inches (38 if you upgrade it) deep and side to side.  It moves 5x the water of an endless pool with a much wider and deeper current.  The complete pool I purchased ran 30k ish.  The rest depends on where you put it.  You don't have to sink it into the ground, I just wanted to for asthetics, ease of entry and such.  

I will eventually have a way to measure distance.  I mostly go by time now and measured the distance also by stroke count to correlate to time (60 strokes for me at setting 55 = 100 yards = 2:00) .  However, the unit has 99 speed settings and you can program intervals or whatever before stepping into the pool.  So you can go 5 minutes at setting 50, 10 minutes at 55, 2 minutes at 60, 65, 70, 65, 60, 55, 10 minutes at 50 for a wu, speedwork (100s or 50s), cd.  What I am going to do is rent/borrow a flow meter and then use that to measure the current in mph at the different settings.  I can then convert that into minutes per 100 or whatever.  So I will make a chart based on the current measurements and then I will know how far I go at a given speed setting.  I am hoping that the engine speeds are linear making the calculation for speed increase with speed setting fairly logically related.  If that is the case then 50% of 3.5 mph = 1.75 mph which is fairly close to what I have guestimated it to be by my above stated method.  By extension setting 75= 2.625 mph.  But I want to confirm that with the flow meter because well, I just want to, you know how us triathletes are with pace and measuring things.       

Some advantages of the swimspa to the 2 lane pool are the size, the amount of water you need to heat/clorinate, filter, etc., the insulation built into the pool, the ease of covering it with a pool cover (less area) and well the jacuzzi jets are kind of nice.  Advantages of the 2 lane pool are well, you are swimming in water that is not moving, so no difference from what you would be doing at a pool or in a lake.   

Do they all come with a mad-scientist kid controlling the speed from a second room, or did you pay extra for that?

That's awesome.  So what temp do you keep it at and if you wanted to use it as a hottub with those jets, how long would it take to heat it up to a comfy 100 degrees (if that's possible)?

That looks great and I am envious.  My expereince with "endless pools" has not been great but sounds like you have found a product that works much better than what I have tried.

Maybe have to put one on next year's christmas list.

Enjoy.