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SPN OCT 2012 WorldNews


www.swimmingpoolnews.co.uk worldnews IS THIS THE WORLD’S SCARIEST SWIMMING POOL?


The locations of swimming pools around the world seem to be becoming more and more extreme. The Holiday Inn Shanghai Pudong Kangqiao’s swimming pool has a view with a difference.


Part of the indoor pool, which perches at the top of the 24-storey hotel, protrudes from the main building and is suspended mid-air. Its bottom is constructed with toughened glass.


This gives guests a delirious sense of swimming in the sky – they can see the street clearly down below while passers-by can see the swimmers way up above.


“I felt as if I was flying in the sky – I could also enjoy the beautiful scenery of Pudong from here... it’s so cool and wonderful,” one swimmer said. “We wanted to provide our guests with a unique swimming experience, and let them feel they’re vacationing even in a bustling city,” said a spokesperson from InterContinental Hotels Group, parent company of Holiday Inn.


CHINA COMES DOWN HARD ON QUALITY OF ITS PUBLIC POOLS


A crackdown on public swimming pool standards throughout parts of China has ended with a record number of closures and a campaign to improve overall standards. Another ‘special inspection’ of pools was ordered by the China Health Supervision Bureau which targeted small scale pools in residential areas throughout the country.


Understaffing of lifeguards was highlighted as a continuing problem in substandard swimming pools during the inspection. A majority of pools were found to have a shortage of lifeguards.


The inspection results also showed that the swimming pools below standard had lifeguards without certificates; no signs set up to tell people the maximum capacity of the swimming pool, or warning signs for deep-water areas; lack of sufficient lifesaving equipment including life-belts and first-aid dressings; pools operating with expired business licenses; excessive levels of chlorine in the pool and pools selling unqualified products without production date, quality certification and manufacturer information.


US POOL OWNERS SEE HUGE ENERGY COSTS SURGE


A new report in the US claims homes with a swimming pool use a whopping 49% more electricity and 19% more gas than homes without one. Energy efficiency company, Opower, examined the energy consumption over four seasons of two million homes of which 318,000 had a pool.


At first glance the 49% differential isn’t surprising because pool pumps use a lot of electricity – 2,000-2,500 kW hours per year. The US has 5.4 million homes with in-ground swimming pools which collectively consume 9-14 billion kW hours running their pools. Opower says: “That’s more electricity than is used each year in 11 individual US states and Washington. It’s as if all the retail electricity consumption in New Hampshire could grind to a halt, and then be routed to power the nation’s swimming pools.” But what’s really interesting is the pool itself only accounts for a small part of the higher energy use of pool owners. They also have larger homes on average (by 21%) but that too only accounts for a small part of their higher energy use.


What Opower found is pool owners use more electricity across- the-board:


Our data suggests that pool owners systematically use more energy for


reasons beyond their energy-intensive pool pump or their large home size. We found that pool homes use significantly more electricity and natural gas than similarly sized non- pool homes in all four seasons, rather than just during the peak-swimming summer months.”


The median annual income of swimming pool owners is double the national average. Opower notes that higher income implies a greater likelihood of owning “additional TVs, a second refrigerator, and other discretionary appliances”. In other words, higher income households consume more.


There’s a clear parallel here with the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Consumption Atlas, which found a very strong correlation between income and environmental impact:


While high income households spend more on high cost, low impact activities such as entertainment and other services, they also spend more on electricity and most other categories of goods.


Both studies are also another reminder of the key distinction between selection effects and treatment effects. Opower found it’s the characteristics of the population living in homes with pools that’s the key driver of higher energy consumption, not the fact of the pool itself.


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