What's best for me - aboveground or inground pool?

The right choice for you really depends on two things: your backyard and your budget. Inground pools are beautiful and can be custom designed to fit your landscape and the ways in which you want to use your pool.

The Pool Center offers two options for inground pools. The first option is installing a Doughboy aboveground pool - inground! The second option is a custom built inground pool. With The Pool Center's quality construction, an inground pool also provides a durable facility. The design options are limitless and The Pool Center's professionals can help you design a facility to meet your specific needs.

However, it may be that your yard or your budget is not quite the right fit for an inground pool. Doughboy aboveground pools are more affordable and can be installed more easily in a variety of backyards. Today's aboveground pools also offer more choices than ever before in the exterior, decking, suggested landscaping and other amenities that create the right fit for your home.

Those are the basic differences, but there are many inground choices to evaluate.  There are three types of inground pools:

STEEL WALL / VINYL LINER

This is the type we recommend.  While the fiberglass pools offer the lowest price with the least flexibility and the concrete pools offer the most flexbility but the highest price, the third type of pool fits perfectly between and offering you a wide range of shapes & sizes while not breaking the pocketbook. This type of pool is built with a steel wall and typically has a concrete/vermiculite base. This base is pourous enough to allow water to pass through without heaving the walls. With the shifting of ground over the seasons a fixed structure like the fiberglass or regular concrete pool will eventually form stress cracks and need to be repaired. While the vinyl liner ingrounds are able to give a little without the owner even noticing the movement. This eliminates most of the problems associated with typical concrete pools. The steel/vinyl wall will not chip or crack, and the wall does not have to be acid washed to remove algae or oils. Finally, the construction techniques are less labor intensive, making the pool equal o rin some cases less expensive than a standard concrete pool.  All of The Pool Center's inground pools are custom designed and built, and can be built in several shapes and sizes.

FIBERGLASS

One type of pool design is the fiberglass shell. In essence, this is a molded one piece tub that is installed inground. The benefit of a molded shell is the ease of installation, making it a relatively economical. Fiberglass pools are very popular in the Southwest and in climates that do not have the seasonal changes like those in the Midwest; changing seasons and high water tables make the installation of fiberglass pools much more difficult. Freezing ground will cause flexing of the fiberglass, eventually resulting in the possibility of stress fractures. Hydrostatic relief values must be installed in areas with high water tables in order to allow ground water to enter the pool, relieving pressure. Failure of the hydrostatic valves could result in the pool "floating" out of the ground, destroying the concrete around the pool.

OPINION: While fiberglass pools have been sold and installed successfully in our area, The Pool Center does not recommend them. This is obviously just our opinion, but is based on over 30 years of experience.

CONCRETE / GUNITE

Another type of inground pools available is concrete/gunite. These pools are made with poured concrete walls, and a floor that is poured or blown into a wire grid. Generally the most expensive type of inground pool, concrete/gunite pools offer the buyer a wide range of styles, and can be plastered, trimmed with tile, or completely tiled. Stronger than fiberglass shell or vinyl liner pools, concrete/gunite will give years and years of service. The drawbacks include the need to acid wash the walls approximately every two years to remove algae and oils that have been absorbed into the porous walls. As concrete ages it continues to cure, and becomes prone to vertical cracking. Also, because concrete is somewhat porous, after a time tile may begin to loosen. All in all, concrete/gunite pools are higher maintenance than fiberglass or vinyl, but if price is not a concern, they offer many benefits not available in other types of pools.