This is one of the most divine natural pools I’ve ever experienced in my life, absolutely no mud to be seen, and it’s crystal clear, invigorates the soul come join me as we speak with norm van hoff, the builder and designer of this national pool. My mission on this earth is to connect people to the magic of nature, to thrive physically and globally. Hi. My name is haley weatherburn and welcome to thriving with nature, hello, climbing, a tree [, Music, ], hello, thrivers, and welcome to this week’s episode uh my name’s haley weatherburn. If you don’t know who i am, and i am standing in front of a beautiful, beautiful natural pool, which i’m going to show you around in in just a moment, we luckily get to sit with norm van hoff, who is the designer and builder of this amazing Natural pool and what i love about it is that it looks like a modern pool you can have in your backyard, but it is natural.
No chemicals there’s live ecosystems in here, but it’s not scary. It’S not muddy. You can go for a lovely, beautiful swim and it’s it’s just divine. So i’m going to show you a little video around and then we’ll sit down with norm and talk about how he designed this beautiful pool: . So this amazing pool behind us what um?
How did you like fall into now that you’re starting to actually design some natural pools for people? How did it come about for you to build this amazing natural pool? We’Ve been wanting to have a pool for the for the eco-lodge for a long time. We’ve got this awesome clean natural creek down the bottom of the land, but, as you know, by now it’s quite a walk. It is it is since the pool’s been in.
I haven’t been down so yeah quite a long time, but we’ve never liked. The idea of a chlorine pool never been fond of chlorine. Pools and saltwater pools are still chlorine by the way for anybody who doesn’t know that um. So we always wanted to have a national natural pool bird there’s, not a lot of information out there, there’s no textbooks um. What you do see out.
There can be a bit scary and lots of them look like fish ponds that you can swim in, which you know we didn’t want. You can see the restaurants right behind us, so it’s right in front of the restaurant right in the middle of the property. We figured that wasn’t going to be fun for people, so it took us a while to get round to, i suppose make a decision that we’d take a gamble and it’s quite a big investment too. Then having worked with water quite a lot, especially wastewater. I figured the principles were not that crazy, complicated.
It’s, not brain surgery, um and it turned out that it works. You know it was as expected that you don’t have to have a fishpond that people can swim in. It can look like a normal swimming pool and it works great yeah. It’s amazing i mean i’m i’m one of those people that if i can’t quite see the bottom and it’s got a bit muddy and even if there’s any kind of reeds or things i freak out a little bit like, i will go for a swim. But it’s just i’m not relaxed and a swimming pool.
You want to get in and relax and this pool does that exactly you don’t come out muddy, you can see what’s going on in the pool, which is also very exciting yeah. It’S you’ve done an amazing job. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Yeah we’re pretty happy with it. You know the first three months. I guess every morning i’d get my coffee i’d come down here and have a look at the pool kind of expecting something perhaps expecting something to go wrong but wondering if something was going to go wrong um, but every morning it’s crystal clear and lovely. So now, i’m six months in i don’t do that anymore and you just come in and have a swim.
I just come here frequent swims, yeah, yeah, it’s so it’s so beautiful and refreshing. There’S this sense of the first time i jumped in it. It was my body sort of i think, because it thought you know when you get on an escalator and it’s not moving. Your body still goes through the reaction of it’s not like you feel, like you’re, jumping on something moving. Well, the same thing when i jumped in this pool.
I think my body was waiting for chemicals or some kind of thing couldn’t open my eyes here. It was just this crystal clear water and just you know like you’ve, just dumped in a big fresh. You know water that you would drink yeah. So true, it’s just really nice. It’s really different.
It’s there’s no question. It’s um. It feels different to swim in the pool yeah. It really does um. You know, opening your eyes, as you said, doesn’t sting you know little fish swimming around frogs.
Frogs are great environmental indicators. When you see a frog and fall, you can be pretty sure that the water quality is pretty awesome. Yeah. Well, something amazing um. You know for those of you who are like just hear frogs and like oh, i can’t swim in a pool with frogs.
What’s amazing about this pool is generally speaking, the little tiny fish stay in the wetlands and we’ll show you a bit about the wetlands and they don’t really come out until night time when you may not be swimming, and it’s not. You know people pay a bit of money here for fish, spas down in bali down in cuda, put your feet in you get these little fish nibbles. If the water is still and you’re still, you’ll get some of that you’ll get a free free fish. Manicure! You get a free fish bar yeah yeah, that’s true, yeah, those those little guys stay out during the daytime.
As you say, if you sit still, you come and get a fish bar, but most of them, as you said, they hide in the wetland during the daytime, which is really convenient because i don’t think mostly guests want to swim with a whole bunch of fish. So it’s kind of awesome at night as you’ve probably seen already, you know the lights come on. You can see it’s like a giant aquarium after dark. It’S really fun, so yeah everything’s, like nature, is cooperating a lot with this. It’S just all worked out.
Wonderful. I want everybody to do it now. I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t have a natural pool now all right. So, let’s talk about you know: how did we get this balance? How did you get this balance in the pool?
What are the, what are the main sort of principles that you’ve applied here to make sure it has that balance? I guess you can sum it up. There’S aeration filtration circulation. Um, you know, give life the what it quite what requires to to be happy and thrive. Air oxygen um circulation, so the water is continually moving like in a normal, creek or little river filtration.
To get you know, particles out, we use gravel, nothing fancy. We don’t even have a sand filter on this pool, although i may put some on future pools. Give life what it needs and life it would seem, will take care of you. So you know we rely on plants and microbes in this to keep everything perfect and it’s been perfect since day, one um with very little maintenance. So i think, without getting sort of super technical about it, just provide the basics for life, and life will take care of you a bit yeah.
You know the waterfalls here provide a lot of aeration and filtration the wetland over there. If we have a look at the roots under the the pontoons over there to the raft, those roots are an amazing filter which you can see it’s common sensical. When you look at them so yeah i mean it’s give life what it requires and it seems to look after you and 100 agree with you. Why would you swim in chlorine if you didn’t have to which applies to all these other things too? Why would you spray your house with pesticides or cover your body and various things that are not good for you, yeah yeah, so it’s all the same stuff, yeah.
So um i mean you know, that’s something. You’Ve got over there, no sunscreen, because that would kill the ecosystems here in the pool a little bit. I mean you know for it to be practical, it’s got to be a little bit robust. You know it’s going to be able to survive a bit of disturbance, so we would have to expect over time that some of our guests will wear sunscreen, we’ll wear something else or chemicals on their body. Yeah yeah – and you know in general, nature’s pretty good at handling small amounts of disturbance or toxic stuff.
Small amounts. It’s when you overwhelm it with too much stuff that things go wrong, yeah, so like we’re doing to the planet right now, anyway, yeah yeah, yeah, that’s yep, that’s exactly right, um, so yeah, and I mean it wouldn’t be practical if, if it was so sensitive to Things like that sort of stop functioning yeah. So it’s not like that. It’s been good. It’s fine!
You just try and encourage the majority of people not to use things like sunscreens, which are bad for life yeah. Exactly should we show them the waterfall and the wetlands, and maybe you can explain what those systems are doing sure. So we have two systems that manage the clarity of the water in the pool. One is the waterfall system here, so what it comes from the swimming pool to the first pond up the top there. It comes up it flows up through a gravel bed and then out through the first of the waterfalls, it’s kind of hard to see because the plants are taking over and we’ve got it switched off at the moment.
Um in a moment, we can turn it back on, but so the water flows up through the gravels in that first pond through the root filter up there out into the first waterfall. What happens with these waterfalls? It’s not immediately obvious is that most of the water goes down behind these walls. That look, you can see a piece of bamboo there. So most of the water goes down behind that wall there and has to come up through the gravel to get out of that.
Pond some of it overflows on the top most of it goes down the behind that wall up through the gravel so down through. So it comes off here yep down into here, and then it comes up up through the gravels, exactly yeah. So that’s happening several times here over a waterfall up through the gravel over a waterfall up through the gravel over what pardon me so that it’s being filtered every time that happens and nutrients are being removed. Every time that happens by the plants nutrients being the big number one enemy in any system like this, because every waterfall also is vigorously aerating. The water, which is super important.
So there’s one two: three four: five waterfalls to get back into the swimming pool, a german water genius, called victor shawburger, were worked out. I guess early in the 20th century that water vessels shouldn’t have sharp corners, because you know water moves in circles. So if you have corners in a fish tank or in a swimming pool or a septic tank or a water tank, that’s where all the dirt and nasty bacterias and things tend to accumulate, because there’s no movement in the water in a sharp corner. So this shawburger fella figured out that we should always round the corners or cover it in english. You cove them we’ll build the um, build a nice big radius into them so that there are no dead zones and you don’t provide any habitat for um.
For the bacteria and the you know, the anaerobic bacteria and the stuff that we don’t much like in our pools: yeah, okay, amazing! So let’s talk about this. This wetlands you’ve got here. You can see the the fish bar fish are going. Oh yeah, there’s there’s a few fish down there.
Maybe you can see them um, yes, okay. The second treatment system is this one’s called a wetland. This is a bit more conventional than the other. These rafts have vetiver grass growing in them. Vetiver is an awesome plant for treating wastewater or for treating, in this case a swimming pool.
It grows extensive, big root systems, which i might be able to give you a bit of a look at all right there. You go it’s a bit heavy now, so those roots yeah, that’s fine. Those roots grown down there into the water, provide a tremendous filter for particles and nutrients and, of course, a lot of habitat for the shrimp and the fish and whatnot that live in there. This plant lives well in a low nutrient environment. So it’s doing pretty good here, whereas more conventional wetland plants like the papyrus and reeds and rushes we’ve found.
Don’t do that well here and we figure it’s because the swimming pool is very low nutrient, whereas these things are often growing in swampy areas, with rather too much nutrient. So it’s been a bit of a learning process to see which plants will thrive here, but certainly vetiver has been one of the best yeah, and so what happens here in the so obviously the the reeds are uh, not the reeds, the vertebras and the roots are Clean helping clean the water, along with the fish and the shrimp, so what they’ve got gravel down the bottom here yeah, unlike the waterfall, the water in this case, comes from the swimming pool to the wetland and then flows down through those gravels there to the pump. The circulation pump this one’s hooked up also to a skimmer box to take the leaves and whatnot off the surface. So in this case water comes in here, flows down through the gravels and to a pump and then back to that very vigorous kind of bubbling thing. We saw before in the middle of the pool uh in the case of the waterfalls, the water flows up through the gravels.
So same basic thing you know, water’s flowing through the gravel microbes and roots of plants are stripping out, especially nutrients, because nutrients are the thing that grow that cause the growth of algae, which is our enemy um. So we need to really have as little as an enemy for a swimming pool, yeah of course, yeah. Obviously yeah yeah you’re right for a swimming pool, you’re quite right. If we’re going to keep it really clean and crystal clear and low maintenance, we have to keep the nutrients really really low. All right.
How amazing, is that? Don’t you all want a natural pool now for those of you who want to find out more or speak to norm, you can go to bali, ecolodge.com i’ll, put a link below otherwise start to have a look at have a look at victor shoberger and taking those Those principles that norm mentioned, but thank you so much for watching, make sure you hit subscribe and the notification bell and i’ll see you in the video next week for more information. You can visit thrivingwithnature.com, see you next week.
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