The pool cost $180,000 to construct today, it would be about $250,000, said Dutra, who built the pool. It took three months to construct the pool, which includes a swimming area of 700 square feet and regeneration zones of 400 square feet. Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Geraldine Brooks installed a natural pool at her home on Martha’s Vineyard about 10 years ago. If you don’t like the color green, and you don’t like bugs, then maybe a natural pool isn’t for you.” “There are times when I see that the person is not going to be interested either because the property doesn’t fit it or the landscape design doesn’t fit it or it’s just not that type of person. “I don’t sell a natural pool to everybody,” he said. Jesse Dutra, owner of Nantucket Pools, said that of the 10 pools he’s building this year, two are NSPs.
Schnaak said that while about 16 percent of pools in Europe are natural, they make up about 0.03 percent of them in the United States. NSPs currently represent a tiny percentage of the pools constructed nationwide. These pools resemble traditional swimming pools and require less space than a BioSwimPond. Instead, a biofilm filter is used to clean the water. BioPools are purified by a biological filtration system that does not utilize plants.They resemble natural ponds and have a separate planted zone. These pools use aquatic plants and beneficial microbes to control algae and clean the water. BioSwimPonds are pools purified by a wetlands regeneration zone.There are two types of NSPs, according to Schnaak: It operates without the use of chemicals, instead relying only on biological processes. “It’s all about health, wellness, and green living.”Ī natural pool is simply an engineered swimming pool that has a biological filter adapted to it. “Whether they’ve just bought an electric car or a green roof, the people interested in a natural pool already have some sense of awareness that chemical pools are not sustainable,” said Allen Schnaak, co-owner and vice president of BioNova Natural Pools and a member of the board of the Association for Swimming Ponds and Natural Swimming Pools. For them, a natural swimming pool (NSP) is a great option. But some homeowners don’t want to immerse their bodies in all those chemicals, preferring a more natural approach.