PoolTime
Know when the sun actually hits your pool: hour by hour, building shadows and all.
What it is
PoolTime forecasts when sunlight actually reaches a specific pool. Trace the pool on the map and it returns the day's real sun windows, hour by hour, with surrounding buildings, terrain, and cloud cover already factored in. It runs in production on Vercel today.
What it proves
- —Live in production at pooltime.io. Not a prototype.
- —Three-source forecast fusion: Google Solar API (DSM + ray-marched shadow modeling) · Open-Meteo (cloud cover) · SunCalc (astronomical position)
- —Multi-tenant white-label platform: per-partner API keys, rate limits, spend cap, and 6-hour forecast cache built in before traffic
- —Continental US coverage plus Puerto Rico (full Solar DSM) and US Virgin Islands (open-sky fallback)
What it does
Find a pool by address or pin, trace its outline with on-map draw tools, and set the deck elevation. PoolTime computes sun exposure across the day, ranks the best windows, and generates a clean, branded one-page Sun Report PDF: satellite view, summer-vs-winter solstice contrast.
How it's built
Every forecast fuses three independent sources:
- —Google Solar API: digital surface model (DSM) rasters drive 3D, ray-marched shadow modeling at the pool's location.
- —Open-Meteo: hourly cloud cover.
- —SunCalc: astronomical sun position.
The map is MapLibre + MapTiler with TerraDraw for outlining (rectangle, angled-rectangle, polygon). Reports render with @react-pdf/renderer; the satellite image comes from the Google Maps Static API. Next.js / TypeScript on Vercel, with Upstash KV backing the cache and metering layer.
Multi-tenant, with cost control designed in
PoolTime ships as a white-label platform: per-partner API keys, per-key rate limiting, a global spend cap on metered Solar calls, a 6-hour forecast cache. The economics were engineered before the traffic was.
Coverage
Coverage spans the continental US, Puerto Rico (full Solar DSM), and the US Virgin Islands (open-sky fallback), with a test suite holding the territory cases at 18°N.
Product surface
Beyond the map, PoolTime is three things:
- —A Sun Report PDF: a branded one-page report with a full checkout-to-download flow built end-to-end.
- —A white-label embeddable widget: a JSON forecast endpoint, a themed iframe, and a snippet builder, so partners run PoolTime on their own sites with their own key and analytics.
- —A partner dashboard: magic-link auth, per-partner views/leads/conversion analytics, and CSV export.
The north star
A 30-second answer on a phone. Open it, drop a pin, slide the time, pick a date. The mobile interface (collapsing search, safe-area-aware controls) exists to serve that one flow.