Swimming pools - pros and cons pls

[Swimington]

We’ve seen a house we like and it has a swimming pool. It was installed about 12years ago and has an air source heat pump (?). Looking for pros and cons of having a pool - is it great or costly to run? A hassle to maintain etc?
We have kids under 10yrs of age.
It takes up a reasonable amount of garden not leaving masses of lawn.

The main con is having to constantly watch the DC around it and always be in the garden with them. Mine may be younger than yours though. Also, having to be on top of chemicals which is a daily task.

Other than that, in my opinion, there are only pros!

Oh wait, you may have to host all the neighbourhood kids every summer if you're sociable and can't say no (I'm not!).

Can put off future buyers who don’t want one - they are not cheap to remove

They are genuinely dangerous for young children. Locally to us a toddler died falling in a home pool.

Pros - good keep fit routine, kids learn to swim well, nice for pool parties.

We considered a house with a pool and made an offer, but sellers decided not to proceed with sale.

The safety aspect would be a deal breaker for me.

I'd never buy a house with a pool. Too expensive to run and maintain, and too much of a hazard with kids. So unless you plan to live there forever or it's an area like southern France where everyone has pools I'd avoid.

I've seen pool covers that you can pretty much walk on, so I'd be installing something like that for the safety aspect. No idea how much they cost to run, but I'd be happy my kids playing in it than be out on the street up to mischief!

We lived overseas and always had pools when the kids were young. As long as you are prepared to heat them then they are endless fun. I spent a lot of time in the pool too.

Ours were always fenced off so no more dangerous than living next to a busy road.

We viewed a house a few years ago that had a pool, and we loved the idea but it sold faster than we could have properly looked in to the extra costs etc involved. The garden wasn't huge, the house itself was a standard link detached so it took up a good chunk of the garden.
It's actually back on sale now, and they've made a few changes to the garden, including taking the fence around the pool down.
In hindsight, we wouldn't have gotten a lot of use out of of the pool I don't think.

Check the annual costs to heat it. A friend has had to shut hers down, too expensive to run.

Absolute no for me after one of my patients used to visit me then her grandson who was 2 and in the same hospital after nearly drowning during a party where there were lots of adults around but he fell in anyway. I don’t know what the outcome was in the end as I left, it was really sad .

Having a pool is fantastic if you use it daily in the summer . Unfortunately it can be quite costly and requires constant monitoring and upkeep even in the off seasons. We have always had a pool ( in south of France). In retirement though now we moved to be free of the burden.

We have a pool with a walkable safety cover.
We have a heat source pump after years of heating it with a gas boiler.
We love it and our 3 children (now young adults)and extended family have had a great experience with it and wonderful childhood memories with their friends.
It's so much more cost effective with the safety cover and it keeps the heat in much more efficiently.
Happy to answer any questions.

How much do you think you'll actually use it?

For me, the cons (cost and safety) would outweigh the pros but that's because I don't particularly like swimming so it wouldn't get enough use to justify it.

Although actually in terms of safety, as long as you're always supervising, I wonder if children who grow up with a pool end up with better water safety because they have more swimming practice. They probably do. I have a friend with an indoor pool that they use all the time, and her three pretty young children are fantastic swimmers with a lot of confidence in the water. Obviously she supervises all the time, and is an absolute stickler for keeping the door locked at all times she isn't in there (it's accessed through the house), so for her the pros outweigh the cons by far. Having to worry about making sure the pool was always locked so my 3 year old couldn't get in would stress me out though!

They are fairly costly to heat plus you need to clean, sort chemicals etc. if you want to swim daily then it could be amazing otherwise it's an expensive chore.

We have a pool with a walkable safety cover.
We have a heat source pump after years of heating it with a gas boiler.

Same. I've been here 15 years, bought both from new and have had to replace both. The pool was here (but near derelict) but I'd never get one.

The main reason being that the equipment breaks constantly (no matter how much you insulate it over winter, it's sitting in a shed in freezing temperatures). When everyone turns their pools on in May, there's an unholy demand for engineers to fix whatever's not working and you can end up paying eye watering fees.

Just a few examples - the first air source heat pump had a leak (not uncommon according to the engineer) so kept needing a top up. The electric pool cover ropes break most years so it's very difficult to open the pool until the engineer comes.

We have a robot cleaner but it never looks that clean as stuff constantly blows in from any trees in the area and the cleaner misses bits. It's a pain to open up and close down at the end of the season and fiddle around with the chemicals. We have some fancy machine that's meant to convert salt into chlorine but doesn't seem to work that well.

Yes, you're popular when your kids are at primary school or the odd weekend party but I have to nag my teenagers to use it. Off the top of my head, my heat pump costs about £400-500 per month in electricity (my pool is 11x5m and quite deep) so we're often paying £150 per swim.

The pool also only gets really pleasant when you have a hot spell of weather plus the safety aspect of other people's kids swimming. I'm always relieved when it's time to shut it down for winter....

I’d have an indoor pool with a flow through it so you could swim properly, not just three strokes there and three strokes back.
An outdoor pool in the UK would be a huge no, unless it was super heated and had a heated changing room next to it.