Big Bertha — 12m × 4.4m Fibreglass Pool

Yes. At well over 35,000 litres — and at 12 metres long — the Big Bertha needs a building consent, and because it is larger than 8 metres a consent must be secured for both the pool and its surrounding fencing. Bayside manages that for you: preparing detailed plans, draughting, verifying the design complies with the safety regulations, and dealing with council. We work with clients from the design stages through consents and engineering to the completion of the project.

1.175 m at the shallow end, sloping down to 2.01 m at the deep end. Bayside publishes depth as shell height — measured on the shell itself, top of the shell down to the base, as dimensioned on the engineering drawing — so the figure here matches your specification sheet exactly.

Well over 35,000 litres, which is the largest water volume in the Bayside range. There is a straight answer that comes with it: more water takes more energy to heat, so a pool this size wants a properly sized heat pump and a cover working with it rather than against it.

We do not publish running costs, because they depend on your heat pump, your cover, the shelter around the pool and how you use it. What we will say plainly is that volume drives heating, and Big Bertha has the most volume we build — so this is a pool to size the heating for properly rather than guess at. Your installer sizes the heat pump to the pool and the cover you choose.

You could put in real metres. A lap here is 12 metres, so 500 metres is a bit over 42 lengths of clear, 4.4 metre wide water with a continuous toe ledge to turn on. It is not a 25 metre training lane — but it is one of the longest home swim areas you can put in a backyard, and it is the reason this model gets bought by swimmers and not just by families.

The deep end is 2.01 m of shell height, which is properly deep, and that is exactly why the shallow end is not. Big Bertha keeps a wide, open shallow end that the little ones can stand and play in, reached by three entry steps, with the depth building gradually away from it. Adults have the twin deep-end benches to sit on within arm’s reach of swimmers, and the fencing consent that comes with a pool this size is part of the safety picture.

Carefully, and with the right machinery booked before the shell leaves the factory. A 12 metre shell arrives on a trailer, delivered to the bottom of your driveway on the back of a large truck, so there must be a crane, a hiab or machinery on site to lift it off — and a mobile crane and operator then hoist and position it into the prepared hole. If a large digger cannot reach the backyard, a 1.8 tonne machine digs instead. Access is the first thing your installer looks at, not the last.

A standard installation is included in your quote — DCV installation, testing and as-built drawings. The final figure can vary with location, concrete reinstatement, council requirements or site access. Beyond that it is your property that decides: how easily machinery reaches the backyard, how far excavated fill has to be moved for truck loading, whether services or stormwater are in the way, and whether the shell has to be craned over a fence or the house. Every variation is confirmed with you before it is carried out.

Our shells are manufactured to AS 1838 / NZS AS 1838 — Swimming pools: premoulded fibre-reinforced plastics, design and fabrication — and installed to AS 1839 / NZS AS 1839, its installation companion. Those standards set out the layers a shell is built from, the structural loads it has to carry, and the curing and finish requirements before it leaves the factory. We build to them on every pool, consented or not.

By hand, in layers, and every layer earns its place. From the water outwards: the gelcoat, the coloured surface you swim against; the corrosion barrier, a resin-rich layer that keeps water out of the laminate and is what stops osmotic blistering; the structural glass laminate, chopped and woven glass carrying the load; core and rib reinforcement, which stiffens the walls and the top flange across a span this long; and an outer sealing coat against ground moisture. The swimming surface is finished with ChlorShield, our chemical-resistant surface technology.

Thicker than a small pool, and different in every part of it — deliberately. The floor, the walls, the steps and the corners each carry a different load, so each is laminated to suit: wall laminates generally run around 7–9 mm, while steps and corners run 12–15 mm where the loads concentrate. A 12 metre shell is laminated heavier than a 3.6 metre one, because it has more water pushing on it and a longer span to hold. If you want the lay-up details for the Big Bertha, ask us and we will put the layer specification in writing.

Every shell is moulded in our Whakatane factory rather than shipped in from overseas, and it is inspected and signed off at each stage — lay-up, curing, gelcoat and finish. The build is recorded against the individual shell, so if we need to look anything up about your pool in five years, we can. It is also why you are welcome to visit the factory and watch a shell this size being made.

The same as a small one, with more water in it. The smooth, non-porous fibreglass surface is easy to keep clean, the shape has no tiled corners and no grout lines, and the twin deep-end benches are moulded into the shell rather than built on. Standard water chemistry with a clean filter does the work; Q360 in-floor cleaning can be added so you are not vacuuming a 12 metre pool by hand, and a freshwater system like Naked Pools is an option if you would rather swim without chlorine.

This is the model that gets that question answered with a yes. 12 metres of length and 4.4 metres of width is a genuine court with water either side of the net, the shallow end gives the shorter players somewhere to stand, and the deep-end benches are the commentary box. Add a heat pump and the game outlives the sun.

End to end, 12 metres of open water, at whatever speed the lilo chooses. The twin curved benches at the deep end are the sensible place to start and finish. We recommend the drink before the lilo, not during.

They will. It is usually “how long is that?” followed by an invitation to the first warm weekend. This is the one pool in the range that is genuinely hard to hide, so we do the other part properly — consent for the pool and its fencing, and a site-specific install that respects the setbacks your property has to keep.