Quote Originally Posted by deanb View Post
The house is roughly the same size as my loft, and my electric bill now is around 300 a month.
Where is God's name do you live? How old is this loft? I bought a new home with Energy Star construction last February, and I live in Colorado. The MOST my electirc bill has been is $74, and my gas bill $108. And I have a saunna that is used every day...and I love to heat in the winter, and air condition in the summer to the point where you could store meat next to the refrigerator. The house is 1800 square feet finished, with an unfinsifed attic and basement. I could not imagine paying $300 for any utility. Have you ever called them to do an audit?

As far as your question though...my last house had a rather large pool, and in the summer we had the filter on a timer to only come on at night. (night electricity is about 1/2 the cost of day electricty.) As far as heating, we used a solar pad that rolled out on top of the pool. It made the water very toasty. I never had problems only filtering at night. We were the only ones using the pool, it was not like a public pool with people peeing in it. Ok, maybe we peed in it once or twice, but you get my drift.

By running the filter only at night I only noticed about a 80 cents a day increase. You can also calculate the volume of water in the pool, and the capacity of your pump, and then only run the pump/filter long enough to circulate all the water in the pool once or twice a day. This would maybe be a few hours at most for 'normal size pools'. With proper chemicals...I dont see how you would need any more than this. I never understood running a filter 24/7 in a home pool.