Getting Started
🏊 Smart Swimming Pool: Home automation for smarter control of your swimming pool
Example Environment
In a typical setup, a thermal solar system heats water and supports the home heating system. The heated water is stored in a buffer tank, which has a third circulation loop for the pool. A pump attached to this loop circulates pool water through a heat exchanger:
Basic Requirements
- Swimming pool with sand filter system
- Heating circuit with a pump-switchable heat exchanger
- Solar heat storage tank with an additional heating circuit for the pool
Preparations
If a heating circuit with a heat exchanger is in place, you can start implementing the smart pool control.
The heart of the system is the Pool Controller. It handles:
- Circulation scheduling for sand filter cleaning
- Switching on the heating circuit to warm the pool water
- Reporting status and temperature data for integration with Smart Home servers
The Pool Controller uses Home Assistant MQTT discovery for seamless smart home integration. With the configuration presented here, the pool controller can be quickly set up and controlled from any Home Assistant-compatible app.
History
🏊 Smart Swimming Pool originated from an earlier project that was not yet modular and had all control logic implemented as openHAB rules.
The first version ran in Summer 2018 and revealed several weaknesses:
- Controlling pumps via 433 MHz socket switches was unreliable — no feedback meant the actual state was unknown
- Switching logic lived in openHAB rules, causing problems when WiFi was unreliable
- MQTT messages used a proprietary format
Based on these lessons, the revised 🏊 Smart Swimming Pool was built: modular, resilient, and standards-based.