I talk to a lot of people who have anxiety about access to their house. The first thing to let you know is, just about everything is possible. Ideally, we’d turn up at a block, it’d be flat, we’d have no house in that spot and we could drive straight in with all the equipment. Because realistically, when a pool is built, we literally want to turn up with the biggest digging machine, an excavator, and as many tipper trucks, usually three, as we can to keep running that fill out of that property.
Easy access – the easy installation process
Now, most properties and that we consider have great access, are properties that you can pretty much drive a car to where you want to put the pool. That’s pretty much as good as it gets in most cities today. Outside of the city, we’re on rural properties and so forth. Well, that’s a bonus because it’s often very easy to get to the site where you want to put the swimming pool. If you do have constrained access, don’t be overly concerned about it. Just know that the more equipment and the more time it takes for us to get in and get the fill out of that site and then actually bring sand in, which is also used to as part of the installation process, that the costs associated with that are generally greater but, completely justifiable.
How to get the pool to the more difficult places
As you’d imagine, when we’re taking a one-piece shell, so a swimming pool, and lifting it to the site, most often we’re using cranes and the general crane lift is not overly complicated. Well, it’s probably not fair to the crane guys. They really good at what they do and it’s a real discipline for them to lift the pool. But generally, in most cases, lifting a pool into the site is non-problematic. Sometimes, on very rare occasions, we might use exceptionally large cranes, because we just can’t get anywhere near the block. In that case, the cranes can get fairly expensive. But, there is a way to install just about every pool.
Even on the odd occasion, we’ve used helicopters to lift pools into place. And that’s quite a sight, seeing a helicopter buzz over the roof with a swimming pool hanging off it. It’s pretty exciting.
What does affect the price of the installation?
It’s really difficult for us also, and obviously difficult for you to tell what’s under the ground. A lot of people know just through experience. If they’ve built on the site or they’ve lived in the area for a while, they’ll know whether or not we may have to contend with a rock. Look, if we can get a decent sized machine into the site and access is reasonable, rock is not a great issue. The smaller the machinery, the longer it takes to excavate, the greater the costs associated with excavation.
Experience makes us professionals in pool installations
These are just pretty standard things. In other cases, we might have and certainly around the area that we work a lot, we have high water tables and that may mean we actually employ an ancillary company to come in and insert spear points around the pool area, which is like a big pump vacuum system that literally sucks the area dry for a day or two before we excavate the pool. We dig every day. It’s literally our job and as much as we want to put the swimming pool, part of that process is coming out and excavating. Now, I don’t think there’s much we haven’t seen under the ground and there’s always a way for us to deal with it.