Choosing the right slat for the Orihuela Costa climate
Orihuela Costa has a semi-arid Mediterranean climate: around 300 days of sunshine a year, an average annual temperature of about 18°C, and rainfall that rarely tops 300mm. January averages around 12°C and August close to 27°C. In practice that means a swimming season stretching well beyond July and August, and a pool that loses water steadily to evaporation for most of the year.
Evaporation is what persuades most owners here. In a dry, breezy summer an uncovered pool can lose the best part of a centimetre of depth a day, and every centimetre you top back up is water you pay for and chemicals you have to rebalance. A closed slatted cover sits on the surface and stops most of it, so the level, the chlorine and the pH are all far steadier between your visits.
Then there's what falls in. The pines of the Dehesa de Campoamor drop needles, the wind off the interior carries dust, and the calima, the Saharan dust haze, leaves a fine red film on everything. If the house is shut up for a month or two, all of that goes into the water, sinks, and waits for you. Closed, the cover keeps it on top of the slats, where a hose and a brush deal with it in minutes.
Safety is the other half of it. Every cover we build is motorised — there's no manual version — and closes at the turn of a key or the touch of a button, so nobody is dragging a cover across the water by hand. Ours are built to the French NF P90-308 standard, the benchmark for slatted covers in Europe, which matters if there are grandchildren visiting or holiday guests arriving while you're back in the UK.
So which slat? <a href="/en/lamas.html#pvc">PVC</a> is the workhorse: opaque, tough, the most common choice, and very good at cutting evaporation and keeping dirt out. <a href="/en/lamas.html#solar">Solar polycarbonate</a> makes more of those 300 days of sun — it lets the sun's heat through and warms the water by several degrees, which is what stretches the season into spring and autumn. <a href="/en/lamas.html#transparente">Transparent polycarbonate</a> is the discreet option, chosen when owners would rather not see the cover at all. Compare all three on our <a href="/en/lamas.html">slat types</a> page.
