By Patrick Burke, Operations Manager, Landmark Aquatic
Denver Parks & Recreation needed to replace the aging pool at Swansea Recreation Center. The goal was to provide a year-round aquatic facility the north Denver community could be proud of, built within a tight municipal budget. HDR Architecture designed the project and FCI Constructors served as general contractor. Landmark Aquatic came on board as the aquatic subcontractor, bringing that vision to life in nearly 100,000 gallons of water spread across a leisure pool, lap pool, and current channel. The new aquatic venue is built for swimmers, families and everyone in between.
What makes Swansea noteworthy isn’t just the finished amenities, though there are plenty of those. What makes it impressive is that efficiency was built into every layer of the project, from the earliest design decisions through the mechanical systems that will run this facility for decades. For an industry under constant pressure to do more with fewer dollars, fewer gallons, and fewer therms, Swansea is a prime example of how to accomplish this task.
One Body of Water, One System
The single biggest efficiency decision on this project happened before construction began. Swansea’s leisure pool, three-lane lap pool, and current channel are functionally separate spaces for programming purposes, but they share one body of water and one set of mechanical systems: one filtration system, one heating system, and one chemical treatment system.
This is a newer trend in aquatic design. In the past, it was more conventional to build three independent bodies of water, based on use, each with its own dedicated equipment. However, creating three separate pools would have meant doubling, or nearly tripling, the pipe runs, pumps, filters, and heaters required to run the facility. Instead, Swansea operates as a shared body of water with independently zoned spaces, which cut both construction costs as well as operational and equipment maintenance costs.
Given that Denver had been wrestling with the budgetary realities of this project for some time, that single design decision helped make the project a reality. It’s a simple idea, but one more municipalities should raise early in design, because the savings compound at every later stage of the project.
Cutting Water Waste at the Source
Colorado is no stranger to drought, and water efficiency was treated as a top priority on this project. To that end, the recirculation system at Swansea includes a Clearflow flocculant system. Electronic flocculation emits low-frequency signals through the pool’s recirculation system, causing small particles to clump together for easier filtration, which reduces the volume of backwash water the facility produces.
Backwash is one of the biggest sources of water waste in any aquatic facility; sand filters need to be flushed regularly, and that flushed water typically goes straight down the drain. Pairing the Clearflow system with the facility’s sand filtration significantly reduces how much water gets discharged during that process, which matters both for the city’s utility bills and for a region where every gallon carries added weight.
The water treatment also includes ultraviolet (UV) disinfection alongside conventional sand filtration, giving the facility multiple layers of water quality protection that reduce dependence on chemical treatment alone. This provides the added benefit of saving from reduced chemical usage.
Energy Efficiency, From the Pump Room to the Slide
Swansea’s pumps, including the one driving the current channel, run on variable frequency drives (VFDs). That’s a meaningful energy efficiency measure on its own, since VFDs let the pumps run at the speed a given moment actually requires rather than at full output around the clock. It also happens to double as a guest experience feature: operators can vary the current channel’s flow to suit different users, whether that’s a strong current for a recreational swimmer or a gentler flow for an older adult using the channel for low-impact exercise, which is a more common use case than people might expect, since the buoyancy makes walking easier on the joints.
That same VFD-driven approach extends to the facility’s signature two-story waterslide, which loops outside the building and back in, and to the general recirculation pumps as well. Running every major pump on a VFD, rather than a fixed-speed motor, means the facility isn’t spending energy it doesn’t need, whether it’s a slow Tuesday morning lap session or a packed Saturday afternoon.
Heating is handled by a Lochinvar AQUAS modulating boiler package, sized for the roughly 97,460 gallons the facility needs to keep warm. A modulating boiler adjusts its BTU output to match real-time demand instead of running at a fixed rate, so it isn’t burning natural gas at full capacity once the water is already at temperature. For a facility this size, that distinction adds up to real savings over a heating season and eliminates the “always-on furnace” model that has historically made pool heating one of the more expensive line items in aquatic facility operations.
Systems Built to Be Managed, Not Just Installed
Efficiency at Swansea isn’t only about utility bills. It’s also about the people who have to run the building every day. The facility’s water levels, filtration, and treatment are managed by controller systems with an automated fill system, which reduces the manual monitoring burden on facility staff and helps keep the entire system operating within its intended parameters.
The pump room itself was designed with operators in mind. Mechanical spaces in aquatic facilities are too often cramped, cluttered, and sometimes unsafe to work in. Swansea’s pump room was built spacious and clean, with equipment laid out for easy access and maintenance. That’s not a cosmetic detail. When operators can move through a pump room safely and reach equipment easily, maintenance actually gets done on schedule — and that follow-through is what protects the efficiency built into the equipment in the first place.
Delivered On Time, Through a Colorado Winter
While the project was completed without any significant challenges, a portion of the build happened through winter, with crews working through freezing temperatures and storms below 32 degrees. From groundbreaking in October 2024 to completion, the project stayed on track and opened to the public in May of 2026.
A Model Worth Replicating
This new aquatic facility gives Denver’s Swansea neighborhood a full slate of amenities, including a zero-entry leisure pool, a lazy river-style current channel, a competition lap pool, and family-friendly features like the “Luna” water feature, the “Fox” kiddie slide, interactive bubblers, and a waterpark style slide with a built-in timing system that displays the day’s fastest run by users. Those amenities are all features that thrill visitors.
But for parks and recreation facility managers, the more important story is what’s happening behind the scenes: a shared body of water and shared mechanical systems that lowered construction cost, a flocculant system that meaningfully cuts water waste in a drought-prone region, VFD-driven pumps that match energy use to actual demand, and a modulating boiler that heats nearly 100,000 gallons without wasting fuel. Individually, none of these decisions are revolutionary. Together, they add up to a facility that is efficient by design. Today, Swansea is among the new generation of aquatic facilities that are setting a new standard for efficient municipal pool construction.