Salt, subtropical sun and dust off the vega: what Salobreña asks of a cover
Salobreña's climate is semi-arid Mediterranean with a clearly subtropical temperature regime. The town council puts the figures like this: an annual mean above 17 °C, winters around 12 °C, some 24 °C in the warmest months and rainfall of around 500 millimetres a year. That is the climate that made the Guadalfeo valley the last place in continental Europe where sugar cane was grown for industrial use, until the Nuestra Señora del Rosario sugar mill at La Caleta closed in 2006 with the final harvest. Today the vega grows custard apple, mango and avocado, and the pools get what the orchards get: a great deal of sun and very little rain.
The first thing to settle is the salt. At La Caleta-La Guardia, along the beach front and on the slopes of Costa Aguilera and El Pargo the sea is a few hundred metres away, and the breeze leaves a salt haze over everything in the garden. Salt like that makes short work of ordinary fixings. So our whole structure, the shaft, the supports and every fitting are AISI 316L stainless steel, the molybdenum-bearing grade used in marine environments, with no exceptions and no stripped-down version depending on the area. The upkeep we ask of the owner is as simple as rinsing the whole thing down with fresh water now and then.
The second is the sun. With more than 320 days of sun a year and a good share of the hillside terraces facing south, the radiation falls straight onto the cover with nothing to shade the slat from the sky. A badly chosen slat fades and turns brittle in a few summers: the PVC slat we fit has a co-extruded profile and treatment against ultraviolet light, and before recommending a finish and a colour we look at the way your pool actually faces.
And the third is what the air brings. In a municipality with 500 millimetres of rain a year, evaporation is a real expense: an uncovered pool loses water every day of the summer and, with it, the chemicals dissolved in that water. On top of that come the fine dust off the vega and the leaf litter from the subtropical crops, which end up on the bottom every time the wind blows. With the cover closed, evaporation falls by between 70 % and 80 %, chemical consumption drops by around 35 % and the dirt stays up on the slats instead of sinking. You can see the full calculation in how much water a pool loses (in Spanish).
It is worth knowing how it works, because there is a lot of confusion with other systems. Our slats float on the water: they do not rest on the bottom and they never run on rails or side guides. What rests on the coping stone is the legs, the supports with their shaft and, where one is specified, the housing. Every cover is motorised — there is no hand-cranked version — and as standard it is worked beside the pool with a key switch, hold-to-run: the slats move only while the switch is held and with the pool in sight, which is the only safe way to operate it. They carry no alarm and no obstacle sensors: working the cover with something on top of it, or pulling the slats by hand, sets off no warning of any kind — what it does is damage the mechanism. And we do not make walk-on covers, telescopic covers, pool enclosures, domes, winter tarpaulins or bubble blankets: automatic slatted covers only, and since 2005. The sections, the weights and the behaviour of each profile are on our page on slat types, and the roll-up systems on cover models.
