Pool Screen Enclosures in Florida

What pool cage installation buys you

A pool cage is the difference between skimming a pool every day and skimming it on a Saturday. Oak litter, lovebugs, pine needles and the sand that arrives with every storm all stop at the mesh, and the filter stops working through them. That is the boring reason people build them and it is the correct one.

The rest of the case is the evening. A screened lanai is usable at dusk in a way an open deck in Florida simply is not, which turns a pool from a daytime object into an outdoor room. What people give up in exchange is real: the mesh takes some sunlight out of the water, so the pool runs a shade cooler, and the frame is a permanent structure sitting in the view.

Two things make this the most engineered thing in the average Florida backyard. The thing is a very large sail with very little weight, and the law requires it to survive a hurricane. Everything expensive about it follows from those two sentences.

Choosing the mesh, and the frame behind it

The mesh spec is written as two numbers, and Phifer, the largest maker of it, explains them plainly: the count is how many yarns run vertically by how many run horizontally within a square inch. Higher numbers mean a tighter weave, which means fewer insects, less light and less breeze.

Phifer's own note on its higher-clarity pool screen is the useful one for this state: it passes about ten percent more sunlight than the standard weave, which means a warmer pool and a brighter one. In Florida that is a feature for most of the year.

The frame is aluminium extrusion, and the code sets a floor on it. Section 2002.3.1 of the Florida Building Code requires a minimum thickness of 0.040 inch for extruded aluminium in a screen enclosure. Beyond that minimum, section size is an engineering output rather than a shopping choice: the beams get bigger as the span and the wind speed go up, and a cage with visibly slimmer members than its neighbour is either a smaller span or a different calculation.

What moves the number on a quote

Cages are priced by the engineering as much as by the square footage, which is how two apparently similar quotes end up far apart.

• Footprint, and the span between posts
• Height, and whether the roof is flat or gabled
• The site's design wind speed
• Exposure category, which coastal sites push up
• Whether the existing deck can carry the footers
• Mesh choice, and how many panels differ
• Doors, and how many

The one that surprises people is the deck. A cage is anchored into concrete, and an existing deck is not automatically thick enough or sound enough to take the footers. Cutting and pouring new footings through a finished deck is normal work and it is not free, and a quote that has not established which case applies is a quote that will move.

The other is the mansard. A gabled or mansard roof costs more than a flat span, and in return it sheds rain and debris rather than holding them, so the cheaper shape has a maintenance bill attached to it.

How one goes up

The build itself is fast. Almost all of the elapsed time is paperwork and the wait for the engineering.

1. The contractor measures and drafts the frame
2. An engineer runs the wind load and seals the drawings
3. The permit application goes to the building department
4. Footings are cut, drilled or poured into the deck
5. Posts, beams and purlins are assembled on site
6. Panels are splined in, then doors and hardware
7. The building department inspects the finished structure

Screen enclosures are frequently a specialty contractor rather than the pool builder, and on a new build the two schedules have to be sequenced: the cage cannot go up before the deck it bolts to, and the deck is easier to pour once the footer positions are known. Anything that will be mounted on the frame later, cage lighting in particular, is cheaper to plan now than to drill in afterwards.

The engineering, and why the permit takes weeks

This is the part no national pool page can write, and it is the reason a cage costs what it does.

Chapter 20 of the Florida Building Code governs aluminium structures, and section 2002.4 requires the members supporting a screen enclosure to be designed for wind in two orthogonal directions, against design pressures tabulated for ultimate design wind speeds from 110 to 170 mph across exposure categories B, C and D. Your site's number comes off Figure 1609.3(1) of the code, and the exposure category is a function of what surrounds the lot, which is why the same cage costs more on open water than three streets inland.

Two further requirements are worth knowing as an owner, and both read like the code talking to a homeowner rather than an engineer.

• Primary members carry a 300 lb vertical point load
• Purlins carry 200 lb, for the same reason
• Removable panels wear a decal reading 75 mph

The first two are the code assuming somebody will climb on it. The third, in section 2002.3.3, is the design intent of the whole structure printed on a sticker.

A cage is designed to shed screen rather than hold a hurricane out, so a panel blowing out in a storm is the structure working. The frame is what is supposed to survive. Section 2002.4.1 points designers at the Aluminum Association's guide to construction in high wind areas, section 2002.7 permits an alternative signed and sealed engineering route, and section 2003.9 carries a parallel set of provisions for the high-velocity hurricane zone.

When the enclosure counts as your pool barrier

Sometimes, and the doors decide it. Under section 515.29 of the Florida Statutes a residential pool barrier has to be at least four feet high on the outside, free of anything a young child could crawl under, squeeze through or climb over, and placed around the pool's perimeter. Gates have to open outward, be self-closing, and carry a self-latching device whose release sits on the pool side, out of a child's reach. Section 515.29(5) adds that nothing may sit where it could be used to climb the barrier.

A cage whose doors meet all of that can serve as the barrier. A cage with an ordinary sliding screen door on a spring cannot, and the fix is hardware rather than a rebuild.

How to tell a good cage from a cheap one

Standing under a finished enclosure, several things are visible to anybody.

• No standing water sitting in the gutter
• Panels tight, with no ripple or slack
• Fasteners the same colour, and not weeping rust
• Doors that close and latch on their own
• Beams that line through, not stepping at a joint

The fastener question is the one worth pressing. Stainless costs more and does not bleed rust down a white frame two summers later, and on a coastal lot or over a salt pool the difference shows up quickly. Ask what is going into the frame and what is going into the concrete, and get the answer in the quote rather than in conversation.

Gutter fall is the other. A cage roof drains to a gutter built into the beam, and a gutter that ponds breeds mosquitoes inside the thing you built to keep insects out.

Living with one, and what it costs later

The frame and the mesh age on completely different clocks, and that is the single most useful thing to understand before signing.

The aluminium is effectively permanent if the fasteners are right and the finish is maintained. The mesh is a consumable. Sunlight, wind and cleaning wear it, and every cage in Florida gets rescreened eventually, whole or panel by panel. Budgeting for that as a scheduled event rather than an unwelcome surprise is the difference between a cage that looks cared for at fifteen years and one that does not.

The routine work is unglamorous and unavoidable. Pollen and algae film the mesh and reduce both the light and the view. Spiders colonise the frame corners, which is a genuine, heavily searched Florida annoyance rather than a joke. The frame's paint chalks under eleven months of sun and gets repainted rather than replaced.

• Nothing to power, nothing to service
• Mesh, on a long replacement cycle
• Cleaning, pollen and spiders, all year
• Paint, once the finish chalks

Who in Florida builds them

The roster above is every builder profile tracked here that names screen enclosure work among its services, counted live. A hundred and fifty have a cage visible in the photographs reviewed for this directory, across several hundred images, which is unusually close agreement between the two and reflects how normal a cage is on a Florida pool.

The trade split is the thing to establish early. Plenty of pool builders subcontract the cage to an aluminium specialist, which is a completely standard arrangement, and the question is not whether they do it but who holds the engineering and who returns for a warranty call. Ask who seals the drawings, who pulls the permit, and who comes back if a panel fails in year two.

What a cage sits on and next to

An enclosure is bolted to a pool deck, so the two decisions are really one, and a re-deck under an existing cage is a harder job than a re-deck without one. If the lanai is really the point, pool patio contractors covers the wider outdoor space the cage encloses.

Pool lighting is the upgrade most often bolted on afterwards and most cheaply designed in now, since cage fixtures mount to the frame. On the water side, the shell underneath is a gunite, concrete or fiberglass decision, and a cage over a saltwater pool stands one more aluminium structure in salted air, which is where the fastener question stops being pedantic.

Demand and supply for this work are heaviest on the Gulf coast. Cape Coral, Naples and Sarasota carry the deepest rosters, with Lee and Collier counties densest of all.