“We’ve gotten to the point over the last few years where we can offer anything they can get in gunite,” says Jack Byrne, vice president of marketing for Cardinal Systems, a manufacturer of steel-walled package pools in Schuylkill Haven, Pa. “One of our mottoes here is, ‘If you can draw it, we can saw it.” Byrne and his counterparts at Cardinal call it “Imagineering,” a phrase borrowed the late Walt Disney.

“Say you’ve got a customer who roughs out an idea for a pool on a napkin in a diner,” he says. “From there we’ll there we’ll take it and turn it into a CAD drawing, then cut the pieces to those specifications and produce that exact shape.”

“Ten years ago it was just standard shapes, but today we’re encouraging our builders to go custom. They can add value to their product offerings. It’s a good way to increase margins.”

Manufacturers say that custom-cut radiused steel walls don’t take a lot of extra time to manufacture, and don’t add a lot of work at the job site, thus keeping intact two of a package pool’s strongest selling points: lower cost and speed of installation.

Cost and Construction
“The main thing for the consumer is the overall cost,” Byrne says. “It’s going to be lower, without a doubt.” How much lower depends on the builder, region of the country and the cost of steel, which has been rising sharply, but Byrne says a steel-walled pool can still be 25 or even 50 percent less expensive than a similar gunite pool.

The lower price tag is an obvious benefit and enticement to consumers, but what about the builders? Doesn’t that cut into their profits?

“If you look at how much profit they generate per day vs. how much a gunite builder profits, vinyl can be very efficient and profitable.”

Customers also appreciate the reduced construction time package pools provide.

“It’s much quicker because you don’t have to set up forms and rebar, wait for the gunite to cure, etc,” Byrne says. “You basically bolt together your panels, put the stairs and benches in then drop in the liner. You can do the whole thing in three days. You have to add time for the deck work, but it’s still a big time-savings.”

In addition, because packaged pools install more quickly and require less labor, job-costing is facilitated for the simple reason that it’s easier to predict the cost of materials as opposed to the cost of labor.

The cost advantage is greatest if customers choose from a set of standard shapes and sizes instead of dreaming up on their own. Cardinal, for example, offers 16 standard pools, ranging from double Romans and Grecians to less-formal shapes like “Mountain Pond” and “Mountain Lake,” which, as their names suggest, have a free-form appearance. These 16 shapes can be ordered in any of four sizes, meaning customers actually have 64 pools to choose from.

Another wall supplier, Sacramento, Calif.-based Insulated Pool Kits, offers 140 standard designs that it has cut from big blocks of expanded polystyrene at three factories in different parts of the country.

When the customer chooses a shape, Aussie calls one of the manufacturers, which takes the blocks of EPS and cuts them into panels.

Those 140 designs can also be mixed and matched to create even more choices, says Jeffrie Rowland, vice president, who along with her husband, Richard, builds Aussie package pools and distributes them throughout the United States.

“The panels are delivered within the blocks,” she explains. “So the builder just pulls the panels out of the foam blocks and puts them together. The foam blocks act as more or less of a crate and protect them from damage during transport.”

Aussie’s EPS walls are numbered to help assembly, and according to Rowland, can be put together in the excavated site in just a few hours.

“I even did one myself, which was pretty neat,” she says. “The other thing is the pools are designed not only for vinyl liners but also for fiberglass, which can be sprayed on, or epoxy coatings. We have a local company spray the fiberglass for us.”

The strongest selling point for EPS though, is that it’s an excellent insulator, which helps keep the pool water warm and extends the swim season, Rowland says.