Is chlorine bad? Is it necessary in your pool? What other options for pool sanitising are out there? Watch Kate explaining salt water pools, mineral pools, natural pools and other types of pool sanitation and their features.
Chlorine helps your pool
One of the big questions we get asked by people at Compass Pools Melbourne is, “I don’t want a chlorine pool. What are my alternatives? I don’t like chlorine. What is the difference between salt and chlorine?”
One of the things we always say is that chlorine is not the bad guy. I’m drinking Melbourne water here. It’s got chlorine in, and it’s delicious. Now, the reason is because it’s the chlorine is at the right level for the job that it has to do. The job in Melbourne is to kill any bugs or anything that are in there. It should be at the right level so that you don’t detect it for water.
The right level of chlorine
When it comes to a swimming pool, one of the fundamental things is having the right level of chlorine in the right location, so that it does the job that it’s meant to do. One of the reasons people hate chlorine and that concept of chlorine, is they can relate it to being in a public pool or in another pool where they’ve got these really strong smells, their eyes hurt, and their skin itches. A lot of people blame chlorine as the main fault here.
However, the chlorine has done its job. The job of chlorine is to kill those bugs and the bits and pieces that are in the water. That’s called a chloramine, which is a dead piece of, let’s call it gunk, and that’s what smells and that makes your eyes red and it makes your skin itch. Now until that material gets taken out of your pool and in through your filter, so that it gets collected in the filter, then it’s going to stay around and it’s going to continue to do those things.
Salt chlorinator explained
So you understand how a salt chlorinator works. What actually happens is a low level of salt gets put into your pool. Now it doesn’t matter if it’s magnesium salts or pink salt, or this salt, whatever type of salt it is. That salt will then go through a normal salt chlorinator and get charged into what’s called liquid chlorine, and then that comes up through the pool. So it’s an automated system. Now, it’s been very popular forever because it doesn’t rely on you having to go and manually put chlorine in the pool. And in the old days when that used to happen, you used to have the ups and the downs of the chlorine. So the machine makes it a lot more consistent.
Circulation is the key
One of the fundamental things when we here at Compass Pools Melbourne talk about is circulation. Whether it’s a self-cleaning pool or a logic pool with really smart water circulation, it’s about getting your pool water chemistry right, but also getting it into the right location.
The other thing that happens with this circulation and the return is if you actually just have, say, two eyeball returns at the end of your pool, so this is where the water is actually coming out from your pump and your filter back into your water, then you actually have to run it a lot higher and a lot harder because you’ve only got two lines of return into your pool. And chemicals are very lazy. They don’t go down, they just sit and they rise and go up. And water also follows the path of least resistance. So if you have two eyeball returns at the end of one end of your pool and you have a skinner box at the other end of the pool, the water’s going to go straight down towards that and this is where your chlorine, your beautifully balanced, clean water is actually going. So you’ve got to run it a bit higher and a bit harder so that enough chemicals are actually trying to get dispersed into the deeper side parts of the pool.
No traditional eyeball returns
One of the things we do at Compass Pools Melbourne is we don’t have these eyeball returns in our pools. We either have an infloor cleaning system so that the return comes up through the floor or we have our logic system, which forces the water down in three different motions all the way around the pool. Now by doing that, that means we can get the right level of chlorine, so that it doesn’t affect your eyes and all the other issues that go with chlorine, in the right location of your pool.
So often, so many people say, “My children have eczema and asthma, and all the time the chlorine affects this.” So what we tend to find as well, and that can be the case. However, in more common situation it is from public pools. When you actually have the right level of chlorine, in a well circulated pool, then all the issues that tend to go with those sorts of conditions tend not to happen in the experience with the customers that we speak to.
Kate’s children love their self-cleaning saltwater pool
I have a self-cleaning pool as well, and my children have asthma and eczema. And in our swimming pool they do not experience this same sort of reaction that they do in some other situations like a public pool. And a public pool is just because there’s so much volume that they just cannot actually get those dead bits of chlorine out of their filtration system. So for my kids, it’s not about a special machine, or a certain type of salt, or a certain type of non chlorine type pool, it’s about having the right level of water balance for swimming in a pool. Just like Melbourne water, having the right level of chemical balance so that it’s good to drink.
So whatever type of sanitizer you choose, and really there’s only the, there’s salt, chlorination, there’s metal option, there’s UV ozone, no matter which one you choose, it doesn’t really matter if you don’t have really good circulation because that sanitizer has to get to the right place at the right time.
We’re happy to arrange for you any type of system, be it a salt chlorinator with plain salt, or with magnesium salt, or whatever salt that you want in your pool. But we will be very passionate about making sure that whatever system that you choose, it’s going to go to the right place in your pool.
