Whether your outdoor swimming pool is a modest, above-ground affair or a sprawling, marble-clad paean to luxury, it will need some kind of motorised pump to keep its water circulating; without it, water will not be pushed through your pool's filtration system effectively, and your luxurious swimming spot will rapidly become a stagnant, debris-strewn eyesore, particularly during the autumn months.

However, choosing the right pump for your outdoor pools is (sadly) not just a case of installing the cheapest, most powerful pump you can find. There are a variety of different pump types on the market today, and one of the most important distinctions to make between different pumps is whether their running speeds are adjustable. While single or two-speed pumps have been standard equipment for many years, variable-speed pumps are becoming ever more popular, and for good reason.

What are the advantages of choosing a variable-speed pump for my outdoor pool?

Variable-speed pumps are pretty much exactly what you would expect; pumps that can be fine-tuned to run at a variety of different speeds. This stands them in contrast to single-speed pumps (which are completely non-adjustable) and two-speed pumps (which are limited to fast and slow pumping cycles), and provides many advantages over their less sophisticated cousins:

Minimised energy usage

The chief advantage of variable-speed pumps is that they can be set to very low speeds while your pool is not seeing significant use. This minimises the amount of energy used by your pool pump, while still providing just enough water circulation to keep your water free of debris, algae and other unpleasant additions. When your pool is in use, the pump can easily be adjusted to provide faster pumping, then turned down again as soon as your swimming session ends.

Noise control

The average pool pump makes a surprising amount of noise, even when heavily insulated, and the noise created by powerful pumps required to keep larger pools clean can be particularly hard to ignore. By choosing a variable-speed pump, you can turn down the pump's power level when keeping noise levels to a minimum is important (i.e. at night time, or when hosting a poolside party). Any loss of filtration efficiency can be accounted for by turning up the pump power when noise levels are less of an issue, such as during weekdays.

Inexpensive to run

As you can imagine, keeping your pump's power usage to a minimum by choosing a variable-speed model can save you substantal amounts on your energy bills. However, variable-speed pumps are cheap to run for another reason; because they can be kept on low-power settings when intensive filtration isn't requires, wear on your pump's moving parts and components is significantly reduced, especially compared to single-speed pumps. This makes expensive maintenance issues much less likely to occur, and saves you cash on replacement parts.

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