It's a short episode this week as we dive into a new topic: different kinds of chlorine. The next few episodes will focus on liquid chlorine, calcium hypochlorite, trichlor, and salt generated chlorine in that order. As a point of order, we should also tell you this: NEVER mix or store different kinds of chlorine together.
[00:00:00] Welcome to Episode 16 of The Rule Your Pool podcast. My name is Eric Knight with Orenda. And unlike most of the other episodes, I'm actually doing this episode alone. It's sad. Yes, but the good news is it's going to be a short episode because all I really want to do today is explain where we're going with this show for the next four episodes. I want to cover these topics because we had Orenda get a lot of questions about water chemistry, obviously, and that makes sense. But a lot of it is, you know, how do I manage my pool? I have a salt system or how do I manage my pool that has liquid chlorine because I keep getting such and such problem. And what we realized is a lot of the same problems happened based on factors that have to do with your primary sanitizer. And we're only going to be talking about chlorine here. And there's four types that are primary chlorine. I'm not talking about shocks. I'm not talking about other things. I'm talking about what do you primarily use as a chlorine product to keep your pool sanitized throughout the week? You know, if you're doing weekly visits or if you're a homeowner, what's your primary? Chlorine? Sure, you may have a secondary one, but let's focus on the primary, because that's the one that really impacts chemistry and should direct how you actually manage your pool. We are not talking about bromine in this. And the reason for that is bromine should never, ever be used in an outdoor pool. That's because sunlight will break down bromine. You can't stabilize it with cyanuric acid or anything else. Sunlight will break it down and it can actually create a pretty harmful thing called Bromates, which is recognized by the CDC as something you don't want in your pool. And we will leave it to you to do the research on Bromates yourself. We're not going to get into it. We're going to focus on chlorine. So this is Episode 16 of The Rule Your Pool podcast. Let's get into it. [00:01:50][110.2]
[00:01:55] INTRODUCTION MUSIC AND NARRATION [00:01:55][0.2]
[00:02:16] So this is, again, just an introduction episode, but the four chlorines are liquid chlorine. Which is sodium hypochlorite, cal hypo, which is calcium hypochlorite and then trichlor and finally a salt chlorine generator, and you might be thinking, aren't there other types of chlorine? Yes, there are. There just rarely used as primary chlorine. [00:02:41][24.3]
[00:02:41] And then something, for example, like Cal Hypo, you can actually get it in tab form or briquettes, which is very common in commercial pools, but not very common in residential pools. And then you can also get it in granular, which is not very common in commercial pools, but very common as a shock in residential pools. So we're going to go through the nuances of each of them. But what we really want to talk about in these next four episodes is how that chlorine really drives the chemistry of that pool and how you should treat them different. For example, you need to have different alkalinity and calcium levels for a salt pool compared to a trichlor pool. Trichlor has an acidic pH. It's going to keep the suppressed because it's just 2.8 as opposed to a salt pool, which is going to raise your age because it creates sodium hydroxide. Liquid chlorine also has a high pH, even though it doesn't raise your age too high, it temporarily does. And so we have to look at all these factors. And, you know, we don't have time in this episode to get into all of it. But we've been researching this for a long time. And and, you know, your pool is only going to fit into one of the four categories of the next episodes. And that's OK. But say you have a Trichlor pool where you've had one for a long time and the primary chlorine is trichlor at those three inch tabs that hopefully are not being put into your skimmer, but they're probably in a feeder or floater. Trichlor is getting really expensive now, you know, we're in 2021 now and with the shortage of Trichlor, thanks to covid and then the production backups, you're going to have to think differently, you're going to have to think about non-stabilized options like the other three, whether it be liquid chlorine, cal hypo, or salt system, every single type of chlorine has its own consequences, too. So there are benefits and drawbacks of each one. And the whole point of this is I just want to get your sanity right before we go into it, because there are some things that all these chlorines share in common. And so I just want to list those out now and then the next episode will get right into it with liquid chlorine. [00:04:46][124.6]
[00:04:47] The first thing that they have in common is chlorines do not play nice together. You should never, ever, ever store chlorine of different kinds next to each other so they can ever come in contact. To be safe, try to keep them as far apart as you can. Don't even put them in the same room, if that's a possibility. But you want them in a well ventilated area or stored outside liquid chlorine and cal hypo can explode. Liquid chlorine and trichlor can explode Cal Hypo with you see what I'm saying? Like, they don't play nice together. So if you are going to have a primary chlorine, make sure you stick to it. And if you are going to supplement with something else, like let's say you have a liquid chlorine pool, but you want to shock it with cal hypo. That's fine. As long as you're not storing that cal hypo in a place that it can directly touch liquid chlorine. You know, you may add that cal hypo to the pool, but that's in a much more diluted, well ventilated area. It's going to be OK. Just make sure that the safety is something that you keep in mind. Do not mess with these things. They are very volatile and not trying to scare you. I'm just trying to be realistic. There are cases where homeowners don't know enough about the severity of these chemicals and they mix them together and boom, they get a little fireball and they singe their eyebrows off. And that's considered lucky. You can be very it can be lethal. So you've got to be thinking about just rule of thumb, never mix two different types of chlorine together. Try not to store them anywhere close. All right. That's the first thing that they all kind of share in common. [00:06:21][94.4]
[00:06:22] The second thing they all share in common is they all introduce chlorine into the pool that dissociates into hydrochloric acid and hypochlorite iron. And once that dissociation has happened, all the chemistry of chlorination is identical. That might be different. All these other byproducts, when chlorine goes in changes other aspects of chemistry. But once chlorine is in the water and it has dissociated into hydrochloric acid and hypochlorite ion the chemistry of chlorination, how it oxidizes, how it kills germs, all of that's the same. So it's just a matter of how do you get it into the water, you know, liquid chlorine. You add sodium hypochlorite, you add that in. There's some byproducts. We'll explain that in that episode. If you do it with Trichlor, you're adding in for every puck of Trichlor. It's like 50 to 55 percent of that puck is going to actually be cyanuric acid and the rest of it's chlorine. OK, so now you add that type of chlorine in. It's going to dissociate, too, but then chlorination is pretty much the same thing. Once it once it breaks apart from cyanuric acid, chlorine generator. Yes, salt pools are chlorine pools. They just generate the chlorine through electrolysis by, you know, charging through sodium chloride and creating chlorine. So we're going to explain all of that. We don't want to get too much into the weeds. Just know that the chemistry of chlorination, once it's actually in solution, is identical through all of them. [00:07:49][87.5]
[00:07:50] And the final point here is. You have to treat different pools differently because if you don't. You're going to have an unpredictable pool and an unpredictable pool is one that you can't really control. We had Orenda, we teach Proactiv pool care, simplified pool care. We want to obey physics and we want to treat water in such a way that we make sure that the water is happy on our terms. So if you have a salt pool, that pool has different chemistry parameters than a liquid chlorine pool. And I know that sounds kind of weird, but don't worry, we're going to explain all of it. I remember going into a customer's office on a whiteboard and just making a grid on the whiteboard of where you should try to keep your range chemistry. And I know that sounds really taboo if you've been following Orenda, because we always say Elci first range chemistry. Second, we still do. But the general ranges of where you want those numbers does depend on your Elci, but it really depends on the chlorine. So you don't need as much alkalinity in a salt pool. You need a lot more in a trichlor pool than salt pool. Then you need different levels of calcium. It's all about trying to balance the Elci and keeping it balanced throughout the season, depending on the chlorine that you have. So I'm going to leave you there on that. Hopefully you find the next four episodes valuable. That will be, I guess, 17, 18, 19 and 20. And then we're going to move on into another topic that we haven't decided yet. So anyway, I'm Eric with Orenda. This is the Rule Your Pool podcast. Thank you for your time. And we hope that you get value out of the next few episodes. Have a great New Year. Thank you. [00:09:33][102.3]
[00:09:34] OUTRO NARRATION AND MUSIC [00:09:34][0.0]
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