Public Pool Chloramines – Smell Just Like Urinals
With respect to public swimming pools, the United States may be able to learn much from Europe, Australia and Canada. Current legislative trends in the U.S., as evidenced by law changes in California and Florida, are bucking thoughtful policy in these other parts of the world. Recent changes to state law permit swimming in public pools with as high as 50 full parts chlorine. European standards require pools to be closed when total chlorine exceeds as little as 1.5ppm. Further, the European standard permits a 5ppm minimum chlorine level when combined with .4ppm. Jeff Grotte , a chief mechanical officer in the water treatment industry, notes that the European standard goes further in mandating that daily bather loads are counted and water exchange rates are maintained at a rate of 35 liters per swimmer , per day. Under the standard, pools must be closed when maximum daily bather loads are exceeded.
“Americans have been unwilling to regulate total swimmers per day and most states require a 5% water exchange daily, even with few swimmers,” says Grotte. The Europeans recognized human health issues with chloramines in the 1990’s and additionally recognized that the daily bather load and the 1 BILLION skin cells and one quart of uric acid per swimmer were the public safety and water treatment challenges. “We simply won’t sell our product to a public swimming pool that will not count swimmers. We insist on that along with the already required daily water testing,” Grotte continued.
Public Pools that refuse to count swimmers and have high daily swimmer loads are recommended to use glass as a filter media, glass media is able to filter particles down to the size of 2 microns with skin cells and ecoli both approximately 9 microns in size. “The oxygen keeps the chlorine from combining, expanding it and in turn making it larger and easier to filter out with the glass media.”
“The area where the US swimming pool regulations lead the world is in filter bed depth and pump flow requirements so we know the glass media will achieve the 2-5 microns to get the skin cells and bacteria out of the pool on the first pass,” Grotte added. For all global sites willing to install glass as their filter media and limit swimmers per day, they will benefit from natural oxygen, ionic copper and CO2 control systems. The CO2 system is optional if reliable acid dosing and sensory systems are already in place.
The oxygen (O2) is administered at forty grams per minute, per cell and multiple cells will perform better than the best ozone generators on the market today. The oxygen does a very good job targeting the uric acid and body oils and produces free chlorine numbers equal to total chlorine, a ppm sensor automates the process.
ECOsmarte has non-salt, non-chemical water technology installed in all 50 US states & 100 countries. ECOsmarte’s commercial pool systems with Residual Bacteria Control have roots in NASA.
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