About Swim & Solar

Why this site exists

Because the buying guides in this category contradict each other and none of them shows its working.

Ask how much a solar cover will warm your pool and the pages that rank on the first screen will tell you 4 degrees, or 10 to 15, or “up to 15”, or 5 to 8 per twelve hours. That is a three- to four-fold spread. Every one of those pages sounds confident, most of them claim to have handled the products, and not one of them reconciles itself with any of the others or tells you which question it is answering.

It turns out they are measuring three different things — daytime solar gain, overnight retention, and where the pool settles after a week — and reporting all three under one label. Working that out is the piece of analysis this whole site was built around.

Who writes it

Scooter M. — an enthusiast. Genuinely interested in this, in the specific sense that I find it satisfying that a swimming pool is a solvable arithmetic problem wearing a leisure costume.

I have not tested a single solar cover, and I am not going to tell you otherwise. What I do instead is read the manufacturer documentation, pull the published energy figures from the Department of Energy's own pool guidance, and work the arithmetic out on the page where you can check it. If the numbers here are wrong, the working is right there for you to catch me on.

What I actually do

1. Read the manufacturer documentation, and say plainly when there is none. In this category that happens constantly, and it is a finding rather than a gap in the research.
2. Pull published physics from primary sources — the Department of Energy on pool evaporation, the EIA on fuel prices and energy content, the USGS on water density, NASA on solar irradiance.
3. Do the arithmetic, and print it on the page beside the answer so you can re-run it on a phone.
4. Say what I could not work out, which on a site with no test lab is a long list and belongs in public.

The whole method is written out on the methodology page, including every constant with the source it came from and the date it was read.

The numbers I am proud of

Every buying guide in this category says it tested twenty covers over a summer. I have not tested any, and I say so. What I did instead was compile the published specifications, apply the Department of Energy’s own evaporation physics, and show every calculation. That is checkable in a way “twenty covers were put through a summer here” is not, which is the entire proposition.

What this site covers, and what it does not

Covers: solar covers, solar rings and liquid covers; pool heaters of every type; the cost and time arithmetic behind all of it; pool temperature and heat loss.

Does not cover: water chemistry, filtration, pumps, cleaning, construction or repair. There are people who know those subjects properly and I am not one of them.

Is not: an installer, a retailer, a service business or a local company. There is no premises, no phone number and no service area, because there is no service. It is a website.

How it is paid for

Affiliate commission, mostly from Amazon. If you buy something through a link here, this site earns a commission and you pay exactly the same price. It never changes the ranking, and the full arrangement is written out on the disclosure page — including the fact that we take no sponsored placements and accept no free products.

There is a practical consequence worth stating: when the cheaper option is the better option, this site says so. Our top solar cover pick is a 12-mil cover rather than the more expensive 16-mil one, because that is what the evidence supports.

Corrections

The point of publishing the arithmetic is that it can be checked, so please check it. If a formula is wrong, a constant has moved or a cited page has gone dead, info@swimandsolar.com reaches me.

Errors get fixed and date-stamped where you can see them, not edited quietly. That commitment is written down on the editorial policy page.