American to Australian pool ownership statistics.

[AUSpool]

I have always thought that Australia was a pool loving nation but how do we compare to America? A recent thread prompted me to have a quick google search and I thought I would share my google research.

Roughly 13% of the Australian population live in a house with a pool. In comparison, 3.2% of the American population live in a house with a pool. To put that in perspective though, there are ~10.4 million domestic swimming pools in America and 3.3 million in Australia.

In Australia pool ownership increases with parents of older kids, 17% for parents with 6-11 year old kids to 23% for 12-15 year old kids.

In both America and Australia the percentage of pool ownership in creases with warmer climates.

Is there any more statistical data such as percentage of SWCG pools, pools with heating or pools with extra features such as water features etc.?

 

[JJ_Tex]

Interesting. I wonder if you could go more granular and compare states and provinces with the same swim season duration. My gut feeling that it would be similar % pool ownership with similar climates, but I would love to see the data.

I will say that you Aussies represent well in TFP and we are glad to have you.

 

[AUSpool]

Thanks, I think from a very basic search it was Texas that had the greatest % of national ownership but I think Texas has the second largest population by state. There was something about locality to a large town or city that influences pool ownership.

I think you’d be right with % per climate.

I read something about % of salt water pools but didn’t write it down. I found a statistic from the Aussie bureau of statistics about around only 50% of Australian pools being both filtered and treated but it did not give a definition for treated.

 

[Teald024]

As a comparison, Aussie latitudes are -15 to -38. US latitudes are +26 to +48. In general the AUS has a warmer climate than the US.

 

[mgtfp]

But the US (at least the east coast) have the Gulf Stream. South coast of Australia has the Great Southern Ocean - you can smell the penguin poo in the air when the wind comes from the south (which it does very often in Melbourne...).

But in general, the climate in Australia is much milder, I guess. One of the main advantages in Australia is, that (at least in most of the few cities where a large percentage of the population lives) the winters are hardly winters, no worries about winterizing a pool - which takes a lot of troubles out of pool maintenance. Winterizing is probably a big hurdle for many that don't want to go through all that stress for a pool season of two months.

In Australia the pool just sits there in winter with the SWG chugging along, I have never heard about SWGs shutting down completely in winter here. I haven't seen any statistics, but I reckon SWGs are pretty standard down here - at least in our local pool shop, the stack of MA bottles seems to be larger than the stack of bleach bottles, and I have never ever seen someone buy one, but many leave the store with 5 liters of MA. But I am not often enough in there to actually have reliable statistics...

 

[aussieta]

bunnings seem to sell a lot more liqiuid chlorine than acid

 

[mgtfp]

^^^ Good point