Creative Water Solutions

Natural Water Treatment for Pools, Spas, and more

During the summer months, there’s nothing better for adults and kids alike than taking a dip in a nice, cool swimming pool, lake, or river. Summer is also when we head to the lake and rivers with our boats, jet skis, kayaks, etc.
Yet, as we know from recent events, water fun can swiftly become tragedy if some simple, basic safety rules aren’t observed. Make sure you and your family are water safe by following these safety policies:

BASIC WATER SAFETY
Learn to swim

The best thing anyone can do to stay safe in and around the water is to learn to swim. The American Red Cross has swimming courses for people of any age and swimming ability.
Learn CPR and insist that babysitters, grandparents, and others who care for your child know CPR. The American Red Cross and the Minnesota National Safety Council both offer CPR classes.
Never leave a child unobserved around water—any water, including pools, spas, bath tubs, etc. Adult eyes must be on children at all times when around water. The average child stays on the surface of the water for only 10 seconds and the drowning process can start after they are submerged within 20 seconds.
It takes as little as 2 inches of water and 2 minutes for a child to drown. Toilets and buckets of water can be deadly to toddlers, who are top-heavy and can fall over head first. If you have toddlers in your home, always keep the toilet seat down and never leave a bucket of water unattended.
Always swim with a buddy; never swim alone, even in your own pool.
Wear a lifejacket or PFD whenever possible, the Personal Floatation Device must be US Coastguard approved and fit properly.
Don’t swim if you’re under the influence of alcohol or other drugs.

POOL SAFETY

Make sure the depths of your pool are clearly marked. Teach children and other inexperienced or non-swimmers to stay in the shallow end.
Post CPR instructions in the pool area.
If you have a cordless (not cell) phone, keep it with you at the pool. If there is any pool emergency, call 911 IMMEDIATELY; then attempt rescue efforts.
Always keep basic lifesaving equipment by the pool and know how to use it. Pole, rope, and personal flotation devices are recommended.
Enclose the pool completely with a self-locking, self-closing fence with vertical bars. Openings in the fence should be no more than four inches wide. The house should not be included as a part of the barrier.
Pool covers should always be completely removed prior to pool use.
Consider installing an alarm that will sound if anyone or anything falls in the pool. Remember: A child can drown in less than two minutes.
Never leave furniture near the fence that would enable a child to climb over the fence.
Keep toys away from the pool when it is not in use. Toys can attract young children into the pool.
If a child is missing, check the pool first. Go to the edge of the pool and scan the entire pool, bottom, and surface, as well as the surrounding pool area. Keep your pool water sparkling clean so if someone is on the bottom, they can be seen.
Make sure your pool deck is made of or treated with slip-resistant materials.
In public swimming pools, always swim in areas supervised by a lifeguard and read and obey all rules and posted signs.

LAKE & RIVER SAFETY

Children or inexperienced swimmers should ALWAYS wear a US Coast Guard-approved personal floatation device/life jacket when around the water.
Watch out for the dangerous “too’s” – too tired, too cold, too far from safety, too much sun, too much strenuous activity.
Set water safety rules for the whole family based on swimming abilities (for example, inexperienced swimmers should stay in water less than chest deep).
Be knowledgeable of the water environment you are in and its potential hazards, such as deep and shallow areas, currents, depth charges, obstructions and where the entry and exit points are located. The more informed you are, the less likely you are to be injured or killed.
Use a feet-first entry when entering the water.

If you are a new or returning PoolNaturally® user, here are our suggestions for a more natural pool opening:

Spring Start Up/Opening

Install the PoolNaturally® system at the beginning of the pool season for best results, but better late than never! Returning PoolNaturally users report much easier pool start up the following summer. Excellent opening results are seen even if users installed PoolNaturally as late as August of the last pool season.

Start with a fresh filter

Remove filter media (sand, DE) and replace with fresh media if you are just starting the PoolNaturally system. If you have a cartridge filter, for best results replace it or please ensure the cartridge is well cleaned. Why? If you are new to PoolNaturally, your pool has years of accumulation of organic contamination and the filter will contain a large amount of it. The easiest way to get rid of much of it fast is to change out the media or replace the cartridge filter.
If you used PoolNaturally last season, be sure to backwash the sand filter after filling your pool with water. Place cleaned or new cartridge filters back in the system.
Less is more!
When starting/opening your pool, know what you are putting in it! If you used PoolNaturally last summer, don’t start by adding shock, algaecides and cyanuric acid. Expect that your pool will start up with a minimum amount of additives.
-Add chlorine to get desired free chlorine.
-Adjust pH, alkalinity, hardness , and CYA to recommended levels below:
• Free chlorine 1-2 ppm
• pH 7.2-7.6
• Alkalinity 40-120
• Hardness 200-300
• CYA *less than 20 ppm
-Once water has been balanced, add PoolNaturally® PoolRefills to PoolNaturally® contact chamber according to the dosage chart below. It is important that once there is enough water in your pool to start the pumps, get it balanced and add PoolRefills as soon as possible, to begin experiencing the conditioning effects of moss.

How Your Pool Will Change With PoolNaturally®
Depending on the age and how much your pool is used, there could be a lot of material (including scale) that is shed from the pipes, pumps, heater, and pool surfaces – this is evidence that the PoolNaturally system is working! Use a pool vacuum to get rid of the larger particles that settle out in the pool and clean or backwash filters to get rid of the smaller particles.
Maintain 1-2 ppm of chlorine – you won’t need anything higher. With PoolNaturally®, your pool is no longer precariously on the edge of ‘going bad.’ It will take less chlorine to maintain this 1-2 ppm free available chlorine, so turn down your automatic chlorinator or salt generator to the lowest settings.

In my continuing travels to dealers, shows and meetings I am frequently asked, “Does the moss work in a salt water pool? “ Or “why do I need moss since my pool doesn’t need chlorine since it is a salt pool?” So this blog is about the science and chemistry of salt-water pools.
First, definitions: I’m going to talk about pools where the sanitizer is made from salt by a generator – not about the very few pools that actually have salt water similar to that in the ocean. Second, when I talk about green pool products I’m using the word to describe a product that is sustainable, with no artificially made chemicals, that doesn’t introduce toxic chemicals to the air, water or ground.

How does a salt water pool work?

Salt is usually sodium chloride or potassium chloride. When these chemicals are in water they become positively charged sodium or potassium and negatively charged chloride ions. In a salt pool, solid or crystalline salt (like table salt) is passed through a generator that produces hypochlorous acid and delivers it to your pool.
This is the exact same chemical that results when you place chlorine in your pool. Salt generated chlorine doesn’t add cyanuric acid in addition to the chlorine, which is added when “stabilized chlorine” such as dichlor or trichlor are used.
So a salt pool is simply a different way of delivering chlorine to your pool to make hypochlorous acid. It is no greener or different than using liquid or solid chlorine. Again, the end product that works to kill bacteria in water is hypochlorous acid and whether you produce this from salt, or deliver it to the water as chlorine, it is all the same thing.

Is a salt pool greener?

The short answer is no. People who sell salt generators want customers to think it is green since it uses salt that doesn’t have a bad name vs. chlorine that had a bad reputation. The end result of each method is the same production of hypochlorous acid that causes the exact same problems with pool water regardless of how the chlorine is delivered to the water. Salt-water generation of chlorine is no greener than adding bleach or granular chlorine to the water.

Does moss work in a salt-water pool?

The short answer is yes. It works the same way whether the sanitizer is added chlorine, bromine, cooper or silver salts, or ozone. It has the same positive effects with all types of sanitizers (except biguanides).
In our customer’s experience using moss with a salt generator, the amount of salt consumed by the generator decreases by 80-90% to keep the free chlorine in the pool between 1-2 ppm. This puts much less strain on the salt generator and results in less chlorine being added to the environment. The other effects of moss, such as pH stabilization and organic contamination effects are the same.

Organic Contamination

A couple of weeks ago I attended the World Aquatic Conference in Atlanta that focused on health and safety issues in aquatic recreation. There were a few sessions on Cryptosporidium and pool contamination.
A long time ago I spend three months in rural Ivory Coast in Africa and saw the effects of parasites on health. There it is a daily, widespread and often fatal problem. Trying to eradicate the parasites is impossible, so most of the medical effort centered on treatment. Luckily, we have very few parasitic diseases so general knowledge about parasite patterns of transmission and growth are widely known.

Parasites in Pools and Lakes

Cryptosporidium, or Crypto for short, can be a serious health problem from pools and lakes. Giardia in lakes is a type of Crypto. Both parasites set up home in the intestines of mammals and cause diarrhea with the accompanying dehydration.
Contrary to most people’s belief, these parasites do not proliferate or “grow” in the water – only inside mammal’s intestines. They can live in the water for long periods of time waiting for an unsuspecting mammal, maybe you, to swallow the water. Then they set up shop and start to divide causing intestinal disease. Huge numbers of Cryptosporidium parasites can reside in every stool from an infected animal or human. As few a 10 ingested organisms can cause serious disease.

Read the rest of this entry link

 

Now that you’ve flushed your spa once, twice or as many times as it takes to get it all out, how can you prevent organic contamination from forming again?
Remember – organic contamination forms when bacteria in solution adhere to a surface, divide and cover themselves with a protective layer of slime (mucopolysaccaride). Learn more at Montana State University’s CBE site.
You could try to completely sterilize your spa and the spa water and keep it sterile; drain the spa and use fresh water every week; use a flush to remove all organic contamination once or twice a month and replace the water; OR you can prevent formation of organic contamination while killing all swimming bacteria. Let’s look at each one.

The Hard Way:
Sterilize your spa and water

There is no easy way to sterilize every surface in your spa short of sending it to an industrial sterilization facility that uses high power x- rays. Even if that was done, the water placed into the spa would have to be sterilized, and you couldn’t use the spa because the second you stepped into the spa the bacteria on your skin would quickly repopulate the spa water and the spa surface. In my research laboratory, we conduct many experiments under sterile conditions and keep the systems sterile. The amount of work and equipment in addition to training required to accomplish that is enormous.

Drain the spa and use fresh water every week

This is essentially how commercial spa operators try to keep their spas within health department guidelines. They often use a measurement called “total dissolved solids” to determine when to dump the water and start fresh. Depending on the bather load, this could be done twice a week or weekly. The water is then treated with a sanitizer like chlorine to keep the bacteria count in the water within safe limits. This approach uses a lot of water, takes a lot of time, and does nothing to address the formation of organic contamination in the spa. With the organic contamination present in the spa, any excess bacterial challenge or change in bather load will “tip the balance” of the water and require more frequent water changes.

Use a flush to remove all organic contamination once or twice a month and replace the water

As we discussed in my last blog (September 23, 2009), we now have an effective flush system that efficiently remove organic contamination from surfaces and keeps it in solution. When the spa is drained, the organic contamination goes out with the water. With fresh water and sanitizer in the spa, new organic contamination will form over time requiring reflushing and fresh water. Theoretically, the water should last longer between changes than the previous scenario, but with frequent spa use, flushing would have to be done once or twice a month. The same problems as above make this treatment plan a real problem.

The Easy Way:
Prevent the formation of biofilm and control the number of swimming bacteria

This solution is ideal. Up until the discovery that certain species of moss prevent the formation of organic contamination, this was a just a theoretical possibility. We know that sanitizers like chlorine and bromine are very effective killers of bacteria that swim. We now know that these same sanitizers are absorbed by organic contamination and fail to kill all the bacteria within the organic contamination.
Here’s how we now think this works: Combining the moss with sanitizer solves the problem. The moss prevents organic contamination from forming, allowing the sanitizers to efficiently do their work on planktonic (swimming) bacteria. The moss also inhibits bacteria from dividing, so there are fewer swimming bacteria to kill. Combined with the moss’s ability to remove heavy metals from water and stabilize pH, the spa water becomes stable, clean, clear and safe. See the video on our website for more information