With restrictions on diving boards getting tighter and tighter, and constantly inflating home insurance policies the pool slide has sort of taken the place of the spring board in the backyard. At Precision we installed many different slides over the years but our most recent installation on an in-ground pool in West Newbury Massachusetts might be the best slide we have put in yet.
The Turbo Twister Slide from S.R. Smith was chosen for this particular project due to its sandstone like color. It went nicely with the paver patio stones we were using. S.R. Smith has been in the pool accessories game for a long time and sells more diving boards and pool slides than most all other companies combined, so you know it is a name you can trust. When we initially took this pool slide out of the box we were impressed by the slides hefty construction which is made of high impact roto-molded plastic and only contains 4 pieces. As you can see in the pictures it features a very wide base at both the stair end and the slide tail piece. When this slide is set up it is not moving, it is sturdy as you walk up and slide down with little to no movement.
Installing a Pool Slide
Installing a slide like this onto a pool with a paver stone pool patio requires a little bit of creativity as you really do not want to lag the slide bolts into a small paver stone. Slides like these are designed to be bolted into a concrete slab in order to be properly secured. In order to accomplish this we first need to remove the blocks from the areas where the slide base will sit. Once this happens we can plumb in the 1″ slide plumbing line and stub it out of the ground for our water connection.
After the water line is stubbed up we mix and pour concrete into the area where we pulled up the patio blocks. Once the concrete is cured we then go about trying to blend the concrete in with the paver stones. We do this by scoring the concrete with our concrete saw in the same pattern as blocks. Once the concrete is scored we can then install the slide on top of this concrete slab.
As you can see in these pictures we still need to take one more step to get the concrete base to match the patio blocks. We will be using a concrete stain that help the whit concrete look as close to the color of the techo-bloc paver stones as possible. Obviously you wouldn’t want to have this great big beautiful patio with a random patch of white concrete in the middle of it so we will be staining this section within a couple days of the install. Once we have pictures of that we will post them back on this blog.
One final note about slide installation which may seem obvious but it is still an important point. Whenever we install a slide especially one this size we want to make sure it is positioned properly. Any slide can be order with either a left or right break allowing you to put it on which ever side of the pool you want. However this needs to be determined before you order the slide as you would not want to flip a left side break over to the other side of the pool due to safety concerns. We also want to slide to break away from the shallow end slope and into the deep end. Even though you are not diving we do not want to send kids flying down an 8 foot slide right into the sloping pool floor. So it is important to figure out which side of the pool you want to install the pool slide on and then order the correct left or right break.
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