“A swimming pool designed first and foremost for family use that will complement and not detract from the garden,” was the brief Gareth Gibbs of Wicken gave to Cambridgeshire pool builders Aqualeaf.

“We have four children under 12 years of age who all love the water,” explains Gareth. “We felt the family fun that a swimming pool would create whilst they are growing up would be priceless and create some great memories.

“When we met the team from Aqualeaf we were really impressed and immediately felt we could trust them with our project. We wanted a medium sized, outdoor, heated pool that had some shallow areas along the sides for the young ones to play but had a clear length-wise section for us to do lengths if we wanted to have races against each other. We were braced for a very costly project but we had our needs more than met and for less money than we had anticipated.”

“We completed the 9.5m x 4.5m x 1.4m deep liner pool in just seven weeks,” says MD of Aqualeaf, Paul Carman. Any hiccups along the way? “There was a soak away built at the back of the house by the previous owners when they extended it, that we were unaware of. Unfortunately, because the pool was built in the middle of January, we had some small issues with water from the house making the plaster and pool sides damp during construction which slowed the project down a bit, however, we soon got on top of the problem.”

Aqualeaf are loyal customers of Certikin and at the start of each project they turn to the UK’s number one supplier and manufacturer of wet leisure equipment with a shopping list of products. They are particularly fond of using Calorex for their H&V needs – indeed this project features a Calorex Pro-Pac 16 Heat Pump.

The pool also features Certikin’s ground-breaking OC-1 Filtration Media. The British manufactured OC-1 media is tearing up the textbook on traditional methods of entrapment filtration. OC-1 works through settlement and cleverly harnesses advances in pump technology and variable speed pumps/controllers to make massive energy savings. Using OC-1 media also reduces the head loss in the filtration system as it has more than 20 times the capacity to retain debris. This means that the designed flow rate is maintained even when the filter becomes dirty. Maintenance costs are also reduced as less backwashing is required, wasting less heated and treated water. All this whilst maintaining filtration performance standards.

Delighted with the end product, Gareth adds: “Realistically, we’ll use the pool from April through to September and probably daily during the holidays and when the weather is hot. If the kids had their way, they’d be breaking the ice to get in during winter! We are so happy with the way the pool has turned out. We are all just so excited for the air temperature to rise a bit so we can take the baby and younger ones in for a bit of a longer splash! I would absolutely recommend one!”

01223 930291

www.aqualeaf.co.uk