Microbiologist and the world's leading recreational water illness expert Dr. Roy Vore joins the podcast to share the truth about chlorine "allergy" symptoms, chloramines, and much more.
[00:00] - Intro
[01:10] - Degrees of Chlorine Exposure
[03:51] - Our Bodies Produce Chlorine
[08:16] - Drinking Water is Chlorinated
[10:27] - Combined Chlorine and other Disinfection Byproducts (DBPs)
[16:07] - Prolonged Exposure to Chloramines and Bacteria
[23:28] - Is Swimmer's Ear an RWI?
[27:03] - Disinfection Contact Times (CT) and Cleaning Agents
[28:13] - Organic and Inorganic Chloramines
[30:09] - Chemistry by Committee
[39:43] - Our Industry Lacks Academic Research
[42:20] - CMAHC
[44:21] - Back to Bather Comfort and Irritation
[47:55] - Signs of Trouble
[50:00] - Closing
185. Allergic to Chlorine? A Microbiology Lesson (w/ Roy Vore, Ph.D.)
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Eric Knight: Welcome back, everybody to the Rule Your Pool podcast. I'm your host, Eric Knight, and this is episode 185. And we have another special guest for you today. An expert, since you know I like bringing experts onto this show to ask very specific questions. And in this case, this is an expert who knows microbiology more than just about anybody in the pool industry. Somebody who's kind of written the literature in this industry to talk about recreational water illnesses and other things, and I have one fundamental question, which is why we have him on today. The question is, is it possible to be allergic to chlorine?
I know a lot of my customers have asked, well, you know, my customer wants a chlorine-free pool, so we're thinking salt. But obviously we know that salt systems are chlorine. And homeowners think they're allergic to chlorine. I know that my doctor, when I was swimming in college, told me that I was allergic to chlorine.
Obviously, that is not the case. But don't just take it from me, let's listen to our guest here, Dr. Roy Vore. Thank you so much for being on the show.
Dr. Roy Vore: Good morning How are you today Eric?
Eric Knight: I'm doing quite well. Sounds like you're on your multiple cups of coffee, and I've got a baby crying in the background, so we're on different scales of the spectrum of awakeness and alertness right now, but let's get to it.
[00:01:10] Degrees of Chlorine Exposure
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Dr. Roy Vore: The first question that you asked there is are people allergic to chlorine? You know what have we got, like hundreds of millions of people in the United States, there's probably a few hundred maybe a few thousand people in the entire country that are allergic to chlorine. They are incredibly rare and they're usually the janitors that are handling concentrated bleach every day, and they're splashing it on themselves every day. But it's like but you know we don't have 10,000 ppm of bleach in a swimming And so that kind of reaction does not occur to swimmers. So it's not chlorine that we're getting rashes from. It's chlorine disinfection byproducts.
Eric Knight: Well, you say you can get allergic, so let's use the case of a janitor, or in this case, how about a pool pro who's handling chlorine of various types? You've got dry chlorines, you've got liquid chlorines, and I'm sure it can get spilled or you're, you're certainly handling it with bare hands. That's a very high concentration of chlorine. Is it really about the type of chlorine? Could, could you get irritated by a chlorine product as opposed to just, you know, hypochlorous acid specifically?
Dr. Roy Vore: The reaction is to hypochlorous acid in these janitor cases in there. But it's like there are no documented cases. This is where it gets kind of you know um wavy in the scientific literature. There are no documented cases of a pool professional developing an allergy to concentrated chlorine.
Eric Knight: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Roy Vore: You know but it's like if if we really want to get into it, we can talk about where the rashes are coming from, and that's a whole different story than what you're asking. It's like what is really causing the rashes? That's what we're talking about.
Eric Knight: All right, so let's focus on the swimmers. Or, uh, in this case, the swimmers, the lifeguards, anybody who's spending a lot of time. Swim school instructors, anyone who's spending time in the water. Homeowners may be saying, Hey, the skin is itching, or, my eyes are burning, or, I've got discomfort. My child doesn't like the water because it, you know, dries their skin out, which might be a different issue, but you get my point. Patron discomfort or swimmer discomfort.
[00:03:51] Our bodies produce chlorine
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Eric Knight: I was a swimmer, as you know, and um, my breathing issues were really it. I didn't really have too much of the itchy skin. My eyes definitely got irritated, but it was really lungs. It was breathing it in, for me. I had other teammates who were constantly itchy. But that is not chlorine. What I've researched, and I'm glad to have you on the show, our bodies can produce our own chlorine. And that's one of the mechanisms that white blood cells use to kill germs. I was hoping you could talk us through that.
Dr. Roy Vore: Yeah the um, let's start there. On on how the body actually manages to produce its own hypochlorous acid. Our bodies consist of a billion cells or some ridiculous number like that. And you've got skin cells, you've got muscle cells, you've got blood cells, you've got eyeball cells, you've got liver cells. You know, and and each cell is really, we should think of it as a factory. And it's producing a special product. And what it's living on is the food we put in our bodies. They're using the energy of the food to produce some little product. And the category that you're referring to are the white blood cells. Particularly just one type of white blood cell called
And when we get a bacteria or a virus, or something like that in the body, the neutrophil grabs it, engulfs it, a little membrane around it and takes it inside the cell. And then what it does is it does oxidative burst is the terminology for it. And it's just very similar to what we have in an AOP system in a swimming pool. I mean it creates all these free radicals: superoxide, hydrogen peroxide, and just a little bit of hypochlorous acid.
This is in one type of cell in the bloodstream under unusual conditions. And so the amount it generates is pretty concentrated locally. It's real real real real small quantities compared to our bodies in there. And then it dumps all this stuff right into this encapsulated bacteria. It just explodes it, just like in an AOP system, or very similar also to a chlorine generator system in there. Because it's using the electricity from the cell. Because our bodies, our cells are really little electrical generators. And so it's generating chlorine, dumping it onto this bacteria and zapping it.
And then the debris kind of floats around and the macrophages come in and they you know absorb the debris and they clear it out and it goes out you know with our urine usually. And so yes, our limited number of cells will create chlorine in the body under very tightly controlled conditions. And that's why don't have the allergic reactions inside the body, because it's so tightly controlled. More tightly controlled than than we can really technically describe at this point.
Eric Knight: I am so glad to have a PhD microbiologist explain that. Because the way I say it is clearly not that detailed. I say, what do you eat a lot of in your food? And what is 80% of your body made of? And you know, 80% of your body is what Roy?
Dr. Roy Vore: It is probably water
Eric Knight: Yeah, well probably, oh, don't throw me off now. I hope it's water.
Dr. Roy Vore: Wait a minute wait a minute Wait a minute. Well what happens if you're in Phoenix, you know in the middle of July, and it's 117 degrees and you just ran five miles? Well then you're not 80
Eric Knight: It's a, it's 78%. Yeah. Okay.
Dr. Roy Vore: Oh
Eric Knight: get my point, like
Dr. Roy Vore: right
Eric Knight: mostly water.
Dr. Roy Vore: splitting hairs on the definition
Eric Knight: so we are made mostly of water and we have a lot of salt in our foods. And the way I say it is, think about it. We are biochemically engineered to produce chlorine when we need it. And obviously it's not a lot of chlorine, but it, you know, we're talking single cell things, transacting and killing single cell, so that's microscopic.
[00:08:16] Drinking water is chlorinated
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Eric Knight: However, because of that, at least in my logic, if we are able to produce our own HOCL, the chlorine in the pool is not what's going to be irritating us. Because I tested my tap water, my sink water at my house. 1.25 parts per million free chlorine. Now the problem is, I also have 0.25 combined chlorine, which I don't like. But I still drink that water every day. My dog drinks it. I think most city water, I mean certainly since we've been alive longer than that, since the turn of the century really has been chlorinated. Humans are fine. If, if we were really allergic to chlorine, we couldn't drink city treated water, right?
' Cause it's all chlorinated for the most part.
Dr. Roy Vore: Yeah exactly And so the the chlorine that we drink reacts with with all the organic matter in our mouth like saliva for instance. And so by the time the chlorine gets you know halfway down our esophagus, down to our stomach, it's already reacted and it's inactivated. Uh and we managed to tolerate it. So it's like there's a tolerance factor for nearly everything. Many things are poisonous. If you drink enough salt water, you die. But if you drink a little bit, so it's the dose that makes the difference. It's not the compound necessarily. It's the dose related to the compound.
And what we're talking about in the body is like I mean it is in without incredibly sophisticated equipment it is impossible to measure the amount of hypochlorous acid in the human body.
Eric Knight: Okay, so to the chlorine allergy thing, is that fair to say that that concept that people think, oh, I'm allergic to chlorine. We can debunk that off the gate? And now we can talk about what's actually causing those symptoms? Is that a fair statement?
Dr. Roy Vore: Yeah I I would say the medical evidence it probably says somewhere around 99.999 of those rashes are combined chlorine or combined bromine, and not chlorine itself.
Eric Knight: Okay. Awesome. So I.
Dr. Roy Vore: studies that have confirmed this.
[00:10:27] Combined Chlorine and other Disinfection Byproducts (DBPs)
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Eric Knight: Okay, cool. So let's look at what these combined things are. So if there's bromine in the pool, it's usually bromides that are leftover from sodium bromide. At least in my experience in the residential market. So they could still be in your water. My understanding is you have this category of four byproducts called trihalomethanes. And if you only have chlorine in your water, you can only have one of those four because that would be, uh, trichloromethane, I believe, which is also known as chloroform. Did I say that name right? I hope I did.
Dr. Roy Vore: Yep you did.
Eric Knight: Okay. And so then you have like Tribromomethane and then Bromochloromethane, and then Chlorobromomethane, which is just different configurations of these hydrocarbons that have methanes on them. Uh, I'm sorry, hydrocarbons that have, um, a halogen disinfectant on it, which would be either chlorine or bromine. Those are harmful. Uh, what do you know, what can you tell the audience about trichloromethane or, or any of these trihalomethanes? We know that we, we don't like them but what's your experience with those?
Dr. Roy Vore: Let's back up and and start off with one thing. We do have combined chlorine in some of our waters. Some of our drinking waters. And that is monochloramine that's got ammonia with one chlorine molecule on it. And the reason we use that in drinking water is drinking water supplies are supposed to be sanitary all the way from the water treatment plant to the very last house in the distribution network. There's biofilm in any water system. And if we only use just hypochlorous acid, that 15 20 miles between the water plant and the the last house will wipe out the hypochlorous acid. The monochloramine is very stable. And so we use monochloramine to keep the water sanitary all the way through the distribution system. But it's a very small amount, 0.2, 0.3, it gets up to about 0.4 then that's when you start smelling it in there.
Alright so we can tolerate that very easily. But what we're not talking about monochloramine in swimming pools, we're talking about one of close to a thousand different molecules. It's not just four categories, it's about a thousand different species of halogenated organics. And some of them are very irritating to the skin and they are very soluble in water. But some of them like chloroform and bromoform are very volatile. And when you were a swimmer what you were experiencing was the volatile compounds that were in the air above the pool. And what your other teammates were experiencing, they were reacting to the soluble ones that were in the water. So what you were seeing was the difference in sensitivity between different humans. Some people react to a few of these 1000 compounds, some people react to a lot of them. Look at any population. We don't all look alike, we don't all have the same haircuts. Uh you might have a little bit more hair on top of your head than I do.
Eric Knight: Well, maybe today we do. Yeah.
Dr. Roy Vore: Yeah yeah I mean it was like yes I wear a baseball cap these days because I can sunburn the top of my head in about three minutes! But yeah, so we have we react to differences of these species. and some of these are very irritating. We can't identify all thousand species in the pool with our test kits. We can detect some of them as combined chlorine or combined bromine. But we don't know what they are.
Eric Knight: Right.
Dr. Roy Vore: If you really want to know what's in the pool, what you really need to do is you need to get about a oh say a $50,000 gas chromatograph mass spec put it in the back of your service truck.
Eric Knight: Right. Who wouldn't do that? Yeah.
Dr. Roy Vore: Pool. Every every pool guy can do this And you know
Eric Knight: Yeah.
Dr. Roy Vore: 50,000 and by the way if it rains on this you just lost $50,000. You know?
Eric Knight: Price of doing business. Keep going. Yeah.
Dr. Roy Vore: Yeah price of doing business. So you could analyze this, but we don't really need to do that. Like
Eric Knight: Thankfully we don't.
Dr. Roy Vore: test
Eric Knight: Yeah.
Dr. Roy Vore: Our surrogate test is you measure for combined chlorines with your DPD kit.
Eric Knight: Yep.
Dr. Roy Vore: If they're above above 0.2 PPM you are going to have some people that are going to get a little itchy, or get their eyes a little red, or something in there. But other people aren't going to get itchy at 0.2. Some people are going to survive at 0.2. So there are and hundreds and hundreds of these compounds in every pool. Our idea is just to keep them at a very low concentration and they don't react with the vast majority of people.
But there is one group that we know develops long-term reactions. And actually causes them a lot of health problems. As often as you were in a pool, there's one group that was in a pool more than you
Eric Knight: I'm guessing it would be,
Dr. Roy Vore: Aquatic physical therapists.
Eric Knight: I was going to say lifeguards or swim school instructors.
[00:16:07] Prolonged Exposure to Chloramines and Bacteria
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Dr. Roy Vore: The people that are in a pool even more than that are the aquatic physical therapists, because they'll do that for like decades and decades and decades. And so that's repeated exposure. A lot of them are operating at health centers or hospitals, and let's be honest, not every hospital has a qualified pool operator. They're probably better than hotels but that's not saying much
Eric Knight: We're not pointing fingers here. No,
Dr. Roy Vore: Yeah we're not pointing any fingers. But it's like dealing with an indoor pool, so now you've got ventilation problems. Now you're dealing with water that hasn't probably been replaced frequently enough, so now you've got old water. So all the stuff we talk about water replacement, ventilation, Hospitals aren't that much better than some hotels.
And so now you're in that for two or three decades every day And it's not that you were a little younger than a lot of these physical therapists because they're in their thirties and forties, and you were in your youth swimming so you had a oilier skin which was more protective. But as you get older, your skin dries out and you become more sensitive, what happens is some of these aquatic physical therapists become incredibly reactive to these combined chlorines. The point that they can develop itch within minutes if not seconds of getting into the water. And you know the technical term we call that is an acute reaction. In
Eric Knight: Right. We hear that in swim schools a lot.
Dr. Roy Vore: Yeah
Eric Knight: We hear that a lot in swim schools, that one of the calls that I get from swim school owners is we've got instructors who are complaining of itchiness. And a couple things on that, and then I've got a question for you. The first thing is, most of them are wearing shirts of some kind, like water shirts. They're certainly not wearing two piece swimsuits, uh, for ladies. And they're not just wearing swim trunks for guys, usually. Some might, but not every day, because they're in the water so much. So they're basically wearing surf shirts. My thought is that shirt is not getting washed very often because it's being worn in the pool all day.
And so maybe the water getting in and out and in and out of the pool, there could be other contaminants getting on it from the air, I'm guessing? I don't know. But um, one thing that I will say is, it's kind of gross, but it's related. You'll appreciate this as a microbiologist. And by the way, Roy Vore, you have specialized in the last several decades on recreational water. Specifically recreational water health and recreational water illnesses or RWI's. So this is a perfect topic to talk to you about.
Let's say there is a germ or there's somebody's got, um, we'll use shingles or ringworm or something like that. Some sort of virus. Could that be transmitted through clothing? A swimsuit, for instance, that's in the water all the time, but then hung up to dry, then put back on and put back in the water? Is that something you've seen before?
Dr. Roy Vore: Yes. But now we're getting into a potentially a different category of rashes when you said that. Because there's two sources of rashes in pools. One of them is these chemical irritation. This acute contact dermatitis. And that's the disinfection byproducts the combined chlorines in there. But what you may be also talking about is infections.
What happens there is you get the germ inside the hair follicle, and specifically it's probably pseudomonas originosa. a bacteria. And the latest uh review out of the CDC says about 50% of all recreational water illnesses are pseudomonas originosa. One type of bacteria.
You know this is a very common bacteria. I can get it out of puddles of water after it rains. If it were summer right now, instead of you know freezing cold here in March, I could get it out of most people's tennis shoes. It grows on plants for instance you know so it's everywhere. And this bacteria is in most pools, if not every pool. Matter of fact I could probably bet you a keg of beer that I could probably find it in every pool that you point to. But it's going to be in very small numbers.
That depends on the keg. Yeah.
Dr. Roy Vore: Yeah yeah Alright. But in this case what happens is you stay in the water, you're exercising, and your pores dilate. And you start sweating just a little bit. And the bacteria is coming along and it's coming out of the biofilm and it's looking around, and the chlorine level drops to less than 1 ppm what the literature says, and there's a lot of pseudomonas in here. This is not just a few pseudomonas, I mean this place is swarming in pseudomonas. And the pseudomonas is swimming around like a salmon.
And it's hungry because it's been trapped in this biofilm, and there's not much food in the biofilm. So it's swimming around like a salmon and it's looking for food. It runs into this thing called a human body, it actually has a chemical sensing just like a you know a salmon, And it swims right into the hair follicle, and it gets in there and it goes Ooh I found lunch. And you know and then it proceeds to have old something like a 10 million babies inside your skin.
But that takes time. So a pseudomonas rash takes about four days to really develop. But it can develop quicker if there's more bacteria in the water or if you trap the bacteria against the skin for an extended period of time. Women get more rashes in pools than men That's because of the nature of their bathing suit.
Eric Knight: Right.
Dr. Roy Vore: Swimsuit. It traps the bacteria against the skin for a longer period of time. Pseudomonas doesn't like to dry out. And so what you could have been experiencing is the pseudomonas staying in your wet swim gear, and continually exposing you. There's a very easy way to tell whether it's a chemical rash or a bacterial induced rash.
Eric Knight: Well, I'm, I'm all ears because I've probably had both. So let's hear it.
Dr. Roy Vore: Okay, alright. Did the rash occur within 24 hours?
Eric Knight: Mean, I don't know. We're swimming every day. So how do you know when it started?
Dr. Roy Vore: Yeah But when you got out of the pool did it start to get a little itchy within a few hours or a few minutes, do you know?
Eric Knight: Let's say yes.
Dr. Roy Vore: Okay That's a chemical. Because that's a very fast reaction
Eric Knight: Okay.
Dr. Roy Vore: But it takes bacteria a while to replicate. You know they've got to make that 10 million babies.
Eric Knight: Right.
[00:23:28] Is Swimmers Ear an RWI?
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Dr. Roy Vore: So your ear aches were probably pseudomonas, because they didn't happen within 24 hours. It was a day or two later. But you were swimming every day. So it was very difficult for you to distinguish these.
Eric Knight: Yeah. I would have swimmer's ear, i mean diagnosed swimmer's ear, every few months. And it's, I was told it's actually the shape of this ear. because I would always breathe to the right. I never had it in the left ear. It was always the right ear. And that's why I have hearing loss in my right ear. It had infection after infection, after infection. And by my junior year I had to wear an earplug. But I only wore one. I only wore one in my right ear and that solved the problem. But I mean, I had dozens of these things, which brings up the question is swimmer's ear a recreational water illness?
Dr. Roy Vore: Yes.
Eric Knight: Okay. And if so, I was told in a class that there have been no reported incidents of recreational water illnesses when the standards are met or when 1 ppm of chlorine is met. But my pool was a big university venue that I'm sure had plenty of chlorine in it, um, although the first two years were bromine, but that's besides the point. The question then is how do you define, or how does the CDC or the, the experts, how do they define a reportable recreational water illness?
Dr. Roy Vore: You just used the magic word, reportable. Not all illnesses are reportable to the CDC. Skin irritation and rashes are not classified as reportable. So there's a general policy in public health is that we don't focus on everything, we focus on those that cause the most severe impact on public health.
Eric Knight: So Swimmer's Ear is not really contagious.
Dr. Roy Vore: Swimmer's Ear is not contagious. It's not going to spread from person to person. And the number one cause is probably pseudomonas originosa. But swimmer's ear can also be caused by just the native bacteria of your skin, And if water stays in your ear for an extended period of time, it may allow your native bacteria to go ahead and replicate in there.
Eric Knight: You want to know something crazy, Roy? Of all my years of swimming, I was always told, well, you put, um, rubbing alcohol in your ear. Right? That like, to me, nobody explained what that does or how it's supposed to be done, but it was supposed to keep you from having swimmer's ear. It was not until three or four years after I stopped swimming that somebody who was not a swimmer showed me exactly how you're supposed to use it.
And to them it was just like, well, this is how I use it. I was always putting the drops in and keeping it in for, you know, 30 seconds to 60 seconds thinking it was killing things. And it would dry out the ear, get the water out. No. He would put just one drop in there and then sling his head over and all the water would shoot out because it broke the surface tension. And that's how he got water out of his ear. I'm thinking, oh my gosh, like how many times did I get swimmer's ear because I just couldn't get the water out? And it would be sloshing around for days and days and days in my head and it was obnoxious. It would make me off balance and all these things, until I was back in the water. And then I had my balance back.
Amazing. Right? But it was the rubbing alcohol to get the water out just to snap that surface tension, to allow it to exit the ear. Is rubbing alcohol something that could kill this pseudomonas that causes Swimmer's Ear?
[00:27:03] Disinfection Contact Times (CT) and Cleaning Agents
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Dr. Roy Vore: Yeah absolutely, rubbing alcohol will kill pseudomonas. But it's a matter of concentration and time. Generally it's going to take four to five or maybe even 10 minutes keeping it in there. And so it's not an instantaneous kill. It's a matter of getting enough in there and keeping it in there long enough. A classic example: uh I was giving a webinar a few years ago for float tank people. And I was explaining how to disinfect a surface. It's like and I said one of the things that you can easily use the disinfect surfaces around swimming pools is household disinfectants. Like your spray bottles of Lysol or or one of those. Read the label on it. It says wet the surface and keep it wet for 10 minutes. Okay What do most people do? They wet the surface
Eric Knight: wipe it off.
Dr. Roy Vore: towel and wipe it off within 30 seconds. Uh it didn't work, all you did was clean the surface. You know you still got germs on the surface. It's contact time that matters in here. And so you may not have been getting enough contact time or enough concentration in there.
[00:28:13] Organic and Inorganic Chloramines
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Eric Knight: Okay, so you said that there's hundreds to thousands of chlorinated organic compounds, or brominated, I should, halogenated is the term you used. Halogenated, uh, organic compounds. And so we know organic as we've taught on this podcast, means carbon. There's carbon bonds in there. Do I have that right?
Dr. Roy Vore: Yep
Eric Knight: Okay, cool. What about ammonia? Ammonia is NH3. There is no carbon in it, so monochloramine, there's no carbon there. So that would be an inorganic combined chlorine or an inorganic chloramine. But I know the industry, I'm, I'm bringing this around to a big question here, because the industry uses the term chloramines generally to refer to all of these byproducts, but technically it just means the inorganic ones, mono, dichloramine and trichloramine.
My question then is, are all of the byproducts, when you say, combined chlorines having to involve organics? Because we know that monochloramine doesn't. But are there others that don't? I don't know.
Dr. Roy Vore: This gets back into the terminology we've used in the pool industry is not exactly the same terminology we use in science. The common thing we talk about is you know really nasty nasty algae big mustard algae. Look at the scientific literature, there's no such thing as a mustard algae. That's a common term that that we've described in the pool industry to talk about some algae that lays flat on the bottom of the pool and it's difficult to control.
Alright the same thing with chloramines. We use the term chloramine to refer to all chlorinated disinfection byproducts. It's just jargon. We have two kinds you have the inorganic, which is usually the ammonia based in there, and then the organic You know, peptides, proteins, organic oils, chlorinated suntan lotion
[00:30:09] Chemistry by Committee
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Eric Knight: How about urea?
Dr. Roy Vore: Urea you know But alright this gets into how do you control all that? So we're traditionally taught that use breakpoint. Okay
Eric Knight: For the audience, yeah, for just a second. For the audience, he's referring to breakpoint chlorination. So if you have combined chlorine, which is measured as the difference between your total chlorine and your free chlorine. That gap, to destroy that, you need a super chlorination, basically of a high enough level of chlorine to pass this threshold known as the breakpoint.
Okay. Continue Roy, sorry.
Dr. Roy Vore: Alright Alright So you brought up ammonia to begin with. So the amount of chlorine that you need to breakpoint ammonia is 5.5 to one. You figure out how much ammonia you got in the pool and you add 5.5. But wait a minute, that's not what the book says use 10.
Eric Knight: 10 to one. Yeah,
Dr. Roy Vore: much combined chlorine and used 10. Right. So where'd the 10 come from? Well it's taken 30 years to find it but we finally found a story that where it came from. So this is the secondhand story. Yeah You know
Eric Knight: This is going to be good, because I always thought it was just easy math. Hey, let's just simplify it. Do more than we need.
Dr. Roy Vore: it
Eric Knight: Yeah.
Dr. Roy Vore: it was a bunch of old guys sitting around uh at the old NSPI headquarters back uh in the eighties or something like that. And they were sitting around talking and it was like, this is the way a lot of our industry operates. And they were sitting around well they've been breakpointing using five, and it wasn't working. Well that means they needed more chlorine. So they need a number bigger than five. What number's bigger than five?
Eric Knight: Oh.
Dr. Roy Vore: 10! Okay. Alright so how much science is behind it? I have no idea because the ratio that we need to breakpoint some of these things depends upon the compound
Eric Knight: Oh my gosh.
Dr. Roy Vore: Not only does it depend upon the compound, it depends upon the each one has a different reaction rate. Kinetics. And so some will react very rapidly, some will react very slowly, And so 10 was developed by a routine that those of us in the science geeky side refer to as the swag method, SWAG.
Eric Knight: Scientific wild ass guess?
Dr. Roy Vore: Scientific wild ass guess.
Eric Knight: All right.
Dr. Roy Vore: Exactly
Eric Knight: I knew what a WAG was in estimating, so I figured it had to be something like that.
Dr. Roy Vore: Scientific wild ass guess. So um knowing how and when this was developed, I'm willing to bet that it was a smoke-filled room with more than one bottle of whiskey or bourbon or scotch sitting around Uh and so it's
Eric Knight: Oh man.
Dr. Roy Vore: the magic number It's like I have no clue. The magic number is you need to add enough chlorine to do the job.
Eric Knight: Yeah,
Dr. Roy Vore: And if it's an indoor pool you got to ventilate it while you're doing it because all that stuff is going to come out into the air, and if you turn the ventilation off at night it'll redissolve back into the water! So then you just wasted it.
Eric Knight: Yeah.
Dr. Roy Vore: It's like you know um I use a a a more appropriate scientific terminology rather than Swag. I just say Nuke the darn pool.
Eric Knight: Yeah. You know, I don't want you to get in trouble, Roy. You have a sterling reputation and this is clearly going to potentially compromise that by you being on this show and, and talking about these chemistry by committee moments. But I'm sure there are a lot more in this industry. Don't comment on them, but some of them, if you're willing to come back on the show, I would love to know where 1500 parts per million TDS over the tap water came from.
I would love to know why some people say the LSI is not minus 0.3, positive 0.3, but in fact it's minus 0.3, positive 0.5. I've seen no literature on that. I've seen no literature on pH controlling bather comfort. The excuse has always been the pH of your tears and blood, but hopefully we're not bleeding in pools.
And by the way, the bather comfort thing is one that's personal to me because I swam in Europe and they had a 6.5 pH and it was delightful. But they also were hardly using any chlorine because they had no CYA and they were using a half part per million by the DIN standard. The, the European standard is the DIN standard. It was great. I had no irritation whatsoever. Uh, but that's a, a separate matter.
But like, I think there's a lot of what I call chemistry by committee. And I'm not trying to incriminate anybody in it, but there's a lot of things that just make me scratch my head. Like I've been researching for almost a decade now. I'm sure nothing to the level that you've done. I just haven't found any reasons for these things. I don't see any data, I see no studies behind them. I just see it as industry dogma and, and how dare you question it. And, and yet I'm, I'm here thinking like I care so much about the health and safety of swimmers. I am one. I got really sick swimming indoors. That's what got me into the industry. I care deeply about the health and safety of swimmers. And I don't see any correlation between some of these things.
So it's really good to hear that there is at least some of this, that I'm not crazy. That some of it is just like a decision we need to solve the problem. So we might as well round up. I'm okay with that. Like, you know, respect. If, if it gets the job done, it's not going to hurt anybody. If that's the reason, great. Let's just say that's the reason that it's 10 x. Yeah, it's more than you need, but we don't know exactly how much you need because we don't know exactly what the compounds are, so to be safe, 10x it, it gets the job done. Fair, respect. I'm, I'm all on board with that.
Where I draw the line is when you can't question that. And I don't understand, like why can't we question it? Science is all about curiosity. Is it not? I don't know.
Dr. Roy Vore: Absolutely. And and this is where non-scientists really don't understand why scientists change our minds. We change our minds when there's more evidence that comes forward that we didn't know about, you know 20 years ago.
Eric Knight: Sure.
Dr. Roy Vore: You know I've spent the last months studying in detail the origin of our pool regulations. I started somewhere about 1917 and have every American Public Health Association standard and every US EPA standard from 1917 through today. Some of it uh frankly I had no clue about. And it's not in the literature. And and I'm on the same campaign you're on right now Eric, is is like let's pull the curtain back on some of this stuff, and are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? And fix it.
Eric Knight: Well, to that end, part of the reason I think we're getting along just fine is because when we first started talking about this, you and I share the same end goal. And that is the health and safety of swimmers, period. And I'm all about that. Which is one of the main reasons I'm here. So given that that's the case, the best ways to do that can be debated as long as we get to that goal. Um, so if it's 10 x because we don't know what the compounds are and we got to get past it, okay! Great. That's fine. But we should at least say we don't know what we don't know, but we know that this works. So until we find some better data.
You know, I kinda liken it to how the LSI has been modified over all these years. Part of the reason why it's not exactly what Dr. Langelier knew in 1936 is because he did it in 1936. We have much more advanced technology now. We have calculators that are able to do things, and some of the thermodynamic constants of some of these compounds has changed. I learned that from a chemist, that's a big word. I don't even understand it. But they've changed because the technology for testing has improved. So as we're going, we're following the intent of what is supposed to be done. I really hope there are some advances.
I mean, just think about it. Look at the advances in automation in our industry. Further than automation, look at the advances in disinfection systems. I mean, UV systems 20 years ago, yeah, they got the job done, but nowadays you have them at such specific wavelengths. You've got the abilities to target certain things. Ozone systems are so much more efficient. Um, hyper dissolved Oxygen is now out. You've got AOP, you've got all sorts of technology and some emerging technology that's really not even on the market yet, but they're trying to be.
There's so much optimism to have about the health and safety of swimmers. There's so many things that, uh, pool owners or operators can put on their water. But I think we need to be honest about what the threats really are and what your options are to get rid of them.
Do you always have to throw more chlorine at the problem? And as you know, my background with Orenda was some of the best water I ever swam in, this is how I got introduced to Orenda, was pools that had enzyme in it. Because I had never seen across a 50 meter pool except in Olympic trials. And like right after they filled up my college pool, which was a 50 meter pool.
But after that, it's always going to be cloudy. You can't quite see all the way across. And you can when you get the oils out. There are different ways about it. I don't think it's just one way. It has to be done only this way. There's, there's several different things. There's better filtration, there's better secondary systems. There's combinations of supplements that you can do. But as long as the end goal gets there, I'm in favor of at least hearing it out. So I want your thoughts on, is there more than one way to skin a cat, in your opinion? On a lot of these things?
[00:39:43] Our industry lacks academic research
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Dr. Roy Vore: Oh absolutely on there. The biggest problem that we've got in in our industry is we don't have hardcore in depth academic research on water quality. And that's simple because, simple to explain. There's no money for universities to investigate pools. I mean we had some money in the fifties and sixties and seventies, but swimming pools are not a hot topic that a university professor can write a grant on.
And their job is to write grants, uh get money for the college and the university, and then publish papers. And if they're not being rewarded for writing grants, they're not going to focus on swimming pools.
Eric Knight: Yeah.
Dr. Roy Vore: And so there's very and data that's really being developed is being developed by the corporate stakeholders. You know I spent 30 years bouncing between various major manufacturers and I can tell you all the major manufacturers have got big fat giant piles of data that they're sitting on, but it's proprietary for them and it's their advantage in the marketplace, because they know this trick or that trick. And and so they don't want to share it.
And and so as independents we're really stuck looking for scraps of information. How do you get rid of combined chlorine? Well you know, you you ;can super oxidize it. Super chlorinate it. You can use ozone, you can use UV, you can use water replacement, you can use enzymes, you can use potassium monopersulfate. Alright, those are options right there.
Eric Knight: Yeah.
Dr. Roy Vore: Alright which one's going to work best for you? We don't know because we don't know which one of those thousand disinfection byproducts you've got in your water.
Eric Knight: Right.
Dr. Roy Vore: And so the idea is I'm on the same page you are, is here are options. We think this one might work best for your situation, but until you try it we're not going to be able to confirm that.
Eric Knight: Well, you know, we, alternatively, you and I could invest in those $50,000 test systems and just require everybody to have one of those so they know what the compounds are. And, and then give them more. I'm being facetious. That's an absurd amount of, of laboratory equipment to do it. But I get your point. I think it lands pretty well. And I hope the listeners here understand we only know what is available.
[00:42:20] CMAHC
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Eric Knight: And to that end, the one organization that seems to be leading that is the Model Aquatic Health Code or the Council for the Model Aquatic Health Code. And I know you've had some involvement with that of trying to do some of that research. And you've done, I've seen your name on a lot of papers that I've read. And I've read a lot of papers in the last 10 years. Particularly, I know you've been involved a lot with, of course, recreational water illnesses, but cyanuric acid, how chlorine works, all sorts of things like that. So thank you for your service to the industry in that regard, Roy.
Um, the Model Aquatic Health Code is trying to raise money to conduct very similar studies to what you just described. I know we're trying to get the Airborne Chloramine study with Dr. Chip Blatchley has been I suppose underfunded, but that's been going on for over a decade trying to get that figured out of the exact behavior of this. And I'm sure there are many more things. What's your take on that and should that be something that the listeners pay attention to that we could potentially, uh, lean on the Model Aquatic Health Code Committee?
Is it CMAHC? Think it's cmac that does the research, right?
Dr. Roy Vore: CMAHC is the one that's doing research
Eric Knight: Got it,
Dr. Roy Vore: uh CMAC produces the draft. And then it goes to the CDC, who then publishes the MAHC.
Eric Knight: Got it.
Dr. Roy Vore: the CMAHC is a separate organization from the CDC.
Eric Knight: Okay.
Dr. Roy Vore: And so it's it basically one group is is doing writing and trying to fund the research and then they hand it off to a separate entity called the CDC, is the publisher. It's a collaborative effort between the two, but there is a arms length relationship as it's referred to in business.
Eric Knight: Okay. Well that's good to know. But they are, if I'm understanding correctly, you said there's not a lot of body of research for, uh, grant writing for universities to study. But I know that that study is going on through the CMAHC.
[00:44:21] Back to bather discomfort and irritation
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Dr. Roy Vore: Right, so realistically um I think the last number that I saw and it's a very tentative number. Is it's the one that you will agree with readily. Somewhere about 14% of the average swimmer develops rashes in any one exposure to the pool. That could
Eric Knight: I don't know.
Dr. Roy Vore: that could include ear infections or uh just ear aches, or it could be rashes uh on there. So it it's very common. And I've said for almost 20 years that I think that reactions to the disinfection byproducts, to chloramines and the bromamines probably outweighs the infections 10 to 1, 20 to 1, maybe 100 to 1. And so understanding how to maintain a non irritating pool, we have the technology to do it. We don't have sophisticated understandings of when to apply which technology into which environment. So we're just guessing at this point.
Eric Knight: Well, yeah.
Dr. Roy Vore: we're we're leaving operators to hang out in the sun to dry out and hoping that you know they they figure it out on their own. We're not doing a great job on education
Eric Knight: I was an operator at 15 years old because I was a lifeguard. And the the managers of my neighborhood pool went back to college. And so I had to get my operator's license and I did not know anything. They gave me a tutorial in the pump room. But they also said, make sure you don't turn this, you always turn everything off first because it could kill you. And I never forgot that. I'm like, wait, this could kill me?
You know, I'm 15 years old. Like, I'm in this room. It's loud. There's lots of filters. In hindsight, knowing what I know now, it's, it's actually not that complicated. But at that time, my God, it was scary as hell. Like, I've got vats of chemicals, I've got big filters, I've got big pipes, I've got something that could kill me. And nobody really trained me. They didn't even teach me how to use a test kit. So I didn't really know what I was doing. I'm sure that water was unsafe and it was not because I wasn't trying, it's because I didn't understand any of that. And so, I, I agree with you there. Um. I, I'm trying to kind of loop this back. We could talk for two hours, but neither of us have that kind of time right now. Maybe we can do this again.
What I'm getting at is there is a goal that I think we can aim for. And whether that's understanding every disease entirely, yeah, that'd be nice. But if there was a good method to recognize when there was a problem be and be able to prevent it before it becomes an illness for somebody. Like maybe it's not testing every single germ or whatever. But say, Hey, if your chemistry gets into these conditions, an alarm should sound one of those exists today and that's a low ORP below 650. That's like a good barometer on a commercial pool. Hey, there's interferences in this water. You, you should act accordingly.
I don't know exactly where we're going to go with this. I don't know. Um. If you, I don't know if you have any ideas on what other telltale canary in the mine so to speak. What other things should an operator listening to this, even a residential pro. Hey, if you see this, this is a really bad sign. You need to do something different. Are there any other of those things that someone could test for on a regular basis?
[00:47:55] Signs of Trouble
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Dr. Roy Vore: There's two that come to mind instantly. If that pool does not have a minimum of 1.0 PPM of free chlorine, that pool's closed instantly. I don't care whether it's a swim meet, I don't care whether it's an HOA pool. I don't care if it's a backyard pool. Pool's closed until you get a stable reading at least one. And I think any operator that tries to run between 1 and 2 PPM is probably risking getting somebody sick. So I never maintain a pool at less than 2 ppm. You know but 1 ppm is instant. If you don't have 1.0 by DPD. And I say if you are still using an OTO test kit where it turns yellow when you add it
Eric Knight: Isn't that like, don't, do they even sell those anymore?
Dr. Roy Vore: Oh yeah They still fell them. OTO test kits You can pick em up at any big box store. And you know it's not a recognized acceptable test kit by the authorities that actually analyze test kits. And so do not use an OTO test kit. Period.
I mean there is no excuse for it. So if there's less than one PPM that pool's closed. And the one that'll blow your mind Eric is I tell my residential pool customers to walk to the deep end of the pool look down at the deck. If they can't see that the screws on the main drain cover I expect a text on the spot. And I tell them when that pool's operating well, I want you to be able to see whether it's a Phillips head screw uh on that cover. And that's the way I maintain my pools.
Now I don't have swim teams that you've got. At a commercial pool you still should be able to see the screws.
Eric Knight: Right.
Dr. Roy Vore: And so those are the two red flags that I will say.
[00:50:00] Closing
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Eric Knight: Understood. Okay. I think that's fair. I think that anybody can, can do that. I'm sorry, the sun is coming through the window now, so it's a little hard for me to see. But Roy, thank you so much for being on here. It sounds like we'll have you on again with, uh, some other questions. I've been making some notes. You got my brain going in a lot of different directions, and as the listeners know, I am not a chemist. I'm not a biologist. I just read a lot. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I research a lot.
And somebody asked me, actually a lot of people ask me, was I a chemist? Did I go to school for chemistry? No. But I went to grad school and I learned how to research. And it was not for this subject at all, but I did learn how to find information. And now with the era of ai, it makes it so much faster because it can tell you exactly where the research is here, read these five links.
I have read a lot of your stuff. And I have read a lot of publications that have influenced this industry. I look forward to seeing how we can streamline this and get the water healthier for people in a more affordable way as well. Not everybody can afford a $50,000 laboratory setup to know every little component that's in a pool. In fact, I don't think anybody would do that. But even secondary systems can be expensive depending on the pool.
So what's best? Well, it's, it's a mixture of viability. Sorry. The sun is like blinding me now. Uh, it's a mixture of viability and affordability, but the priority of having safe water is still number one.
And where I come into this, and this is where in some circles, I'm very unpopular. And to customers who treat water, it's a very popular thing. Think about water balance at the same time. They're not mutually exclusive. You have to make sure the water's balanced so it doesn't change on you while you're focused on disinfection. And if we do those things, then well, to use my own term, you can Rule Your Pool.
Dr. Roy Vore: Right
Eric Knight: Had to bring it in Roy.
Dr. Roy Vore: And and and the operator needs understand which tools are available for which opportunity. We're not doing a very good job of explaining, oh you could have done this and it would've cost you less money and you would've achieved the same goal. And so practicality needs to be something that we're emphasizing when we're training our operators.
Eric Knight: Absolutely. Well, you and I have talked about potentially offering an advanced chemistry class. I know I teach the eight hour Essential Water Chemistry class for Watershape University. Advanced would be more of what we talked about today, understanding the biology going on. Understanding germs, understanding exactly how chlorine kills, um, deeper processes. So I think that would be targeted more towards commercial operators and I mean residential pros as well, but certainly commercial operators that are contending with health departments. Do you want to speak to what's on your mind for what that class might entail?
Dr. Roy Vore: I think that it even goes even to a lot of the residential, Yes it's commercial but it's a pool Is a pool is a pool when it gets right down to it. The real difference is how many bathers are you putting into the water? I mean I've had residential you know the one the the neighborhood pool in somebody's backyard where every day you go there and you look at the water and there's like 14 kids at two o'clock on an afternoon in a 12,000 gallon above ground pool. That is technically a commercial pool
Eric Knight: Right.
Dr. Roy Vore: know
Eric Knight: Well, for that hour.
Dr. Roy Vore: about the yeah For that hour
Eric Knight: Yeah,
Dr. Roy Vore: but those kids are in there between two and when they get called to go home at 5:30. You know they're coming out like a raisin. You know Uh and so uh yeah I
Eric Knight: I know the feeling.
Dr. Roy Vore: The same principles can apply. So these same little gimmicks about how do you shock this pool versus that pool? What is your source water? What is this? And it's these little tricks that are not in the book. So after you've got some basic experience I think that you know we can teach these tricks. Both of us live in the South, and we have this thing down here in Georgia called rain.
Eric Knight: Yeah.
Dr. Roy Vore: know where uh you can get an inch and a half of rain in an afternoon. It's going to wipe out your chlorine. Okay can you predict when that's coming in if you're watching the weather? And so it's thinking about what to do to prevent that next outbreak. And what that does is by understanding your tools, it reduces your number of service calls. That reducing your number of service calls means you're more effective on a service route. The pool is maintained better.
And so how do we take these little nuances, and make them applicable to just your average operator that knows basic stuff? I think that's what we need to be talking about is let's get the basic training, and then after you've got a little bit of that underneath your belt then we'll tell you how to a little safer, a little cheaper, keep your customers happy, and if your customers are happy and safe, the health department is off your back.
Eric Knight: Yeah.
Dr. Roy Vore: Because that's what they care about
Eric Knight: Yeah.
Dr. Roy Vore: And if the health department's off your back, your boss is happy, you're making more money. Everybody's happy.
Eric Knight: Yep. And the water's safe.
Dr. Roy Vore: it as a business as well as public health
Eric Knight: Right on. Well, Dr. Vore, thank you so much for joining the Rule Your Pool podcast. This has been episode 185. Any final thoughts for the audience?
Dr. Roy Vore: Keep reading everything you can on reliable sources. Not everything you see on the internet is actually accurate
Eric Knight: What?
Dr. Roy Vore: So compare your sources very carefully. And and it really was not a Yeti in the pool it was really just the Saint Bernard.
Eric Knight: Yeah. Right on. Well, Dr. Roy Vore, thank you so much. Episode 185. Yeah, not sure what my next episode is going to be because I've got several people lined up. It's just a question of who's going to be on here next. But thank you for listening. Remember to tell your friends about it. The show is back.
I've seen a lot of people at the trade shows asking if I'm ever going to start the show again. And the answer is, well, I already did. You just, you know, probably didn't know that because I wasn't doing it for eight months. But it is back and, uh, we're glad to be back. So, Dr. Vore, thank you again for your expertise.
Know you are in all likelihood, not allergic to chlorine and neither is your client. They are allergic or maybe not even allergic. They're irritated by the disinfection byproducts of chlorine doing its job, which means we need to address the organics and the nitrogen compounds in the water. That said, uh, this has been, uh, a good time.
Thank you for being on the show.
Dr. Roy Vore: Thank you for having me
Eric Knight: All right. Take care everybody.