If you're struggling to hold a chlorine reading after 7 days, this episode is for you. Most pools use 1 to 1.5 ppm of chlorine each day, but Eric and Jarred discuss what could be causing you to lose chlorine faster.
00:00 - An extra-long intro, complete with Jarred's new microphone and some housekeeping topics.
06:39 - There's a difference between using chlorine and losing chlorine.
09:01 - With CYA in the water, pH does not control chlorine strength, but at a high enough pH, OCl- breaks away from CYA and can be lost to sunlight.
11:42 - Chlorine demand is both the sanitizer demand and oxidant demand. Let's start with the sanitizer demand.
13:29 - Oxidant demand, starting with metals
15:35 - Nitrogen compounds
23:47 - Non-living organics
28:38 - Are you being proactive?
30:44 - Jarred's closing
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76. Can't hold chlorine in your pool for a week?
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[00:00:00] Jarred Morgan: Welcome everybody. Thank you for listening to the Rule Your Pool podcast. This is your maybe host Jarred with the maybe co-host or host. We haven't determined this part yet. Eric and, uh, Eric, are you there?
[00:00:14] Eric Knight: Well, I am, but I'm not sure I want to admit it.
[00:00:18] Jarred Morgan: Oh, good. I heard you did this without me on the last episode. So I felt like I just really needed to assert myself into this one. So this is episode 76 though.
[00:00:28] Eric Knight: Yeah, it is. I couldn't handle you pushing me out, but here you are just picking up where you left off.
[00:00:34] Jarred Morgan: Oh man. Our audience may be up to 28, 29 now?
[00:00:39] Eric Knight: Yeah, probably. Can I make a comment here? You sound a lot better. What has changed?
[00:00:45] Jarred Morgan: Everyone, I've upgraded to a real microphone.
[00:00:49] Eric Knight: Oh my gosh.
[00:00:50] Jarred Morgan: I just needed y'all to hear me clearer. What can I say?
[00:00:53] Eric Knight: No longer on the AirPods. We are moving up in the podcast world. This is for sure. I mean, we, we kind of fell out of that top 17. Of all the pool podcasts that they just keep making more podcasts. There's so many podcasts in the pool industry. Pretty soon. Like we have to step up our game or we're going to be out of the top 20.
[00:01:09] Jarred Morgan: This microphone right here could push us to 30.
[00:01:12] Eric Knight: Mm. I think this microphone might get us into the top 10. I don't know. It depends on the quality of the episode.
[00:01:16] Jarred Morgan: Oh, I'm talking about 30 listeners. Not top 10.
[00:01:19] Eric Knight: Oh 30 listeners! Haha, Yeah, yeah, yeah that's it. Well, let's do a little bit of housekeeping before getting into this episode. We got some questions on the last one and I'm fairly confident Jarred didn't even listen to the last episode, because he's basically the worst co-host of all time. Uh, we, I was talking about my mistakes. Did you listen to the episode, Jarred?
[00:01:37] Jarred Morgan: I absolutely listened to the episode. And I know you purposely left me off of that episode so that I would not bring up everything else that has happened.
[00:01:44] Eric Knight: I'm impressed. You actually listened to the episode. I, yeah, definitely left you off because you'd be ribbing me the whole time. And, and for, for, cause. For cause. But, um, some of the questions that came up were about the startup platform being discontinued. That's only the platform that shuts off water to the barrel. We are still selling the barrel. The Orenda startup barrel is still available, widely available, still popular, still works great.
[00:02:10] Just the shutoff platform is what has been discontinued. Wanted to be clear about that. Now a few other items before getting into this topic, because this is a long intro and that's fine. Um, it is officially two months out of swim across America, and we are going to be doing that in Dallas. Miguel and I are going to be swimming for sure.
[00:02:29] And if we raise enough money, The big man himself, Jarred Morgan is going to get in that lake and swim with us. But we need to raise enough money for that to happen. We will film it. We will totally put it on Facebook live if we get to that point. We don't make a penny on this. It all goes to cancer research.
[00:02:44] And Jarred, I don't know if you knew, but you remember that news story about three weeks ago where they did the first clinical trial of this immunotherapy cancer treatment. And it was a hundred percent remission? Did you hear about that in the news?
[00:02:56] Jarred Morgan: I vaguely remember seeing something like that on my news thread.
[00:03:00] Eric Knight: Guess who the first funders of that clinical trial were?
[00:03:04] Jarred Morgan: I felt like I was set up for this question. So I'm going to go ahead and say swim across america.
[00:03:08] Eric Knight: That's exactly right. Swim across America was the first group that put money towards that because it was a big risk. It was an experimental treatment, and they were the first ones to put dollars into it. And that is a really, really cool thing. So we are swimming in honor of Kelly.
[00:03:23] And we are swimming to raise money for that kind of research. It goes a hundred percent tax deductible to swim across America. So if you would like to donate, we would love it. If every one of our 30 listeners donate.
[00:03:36] Okay, let's be real. It's more than 30. It's probably 32. Uh, if every one of our listeners for real out there put in 50 or a hundred bucks, we would crush our goal. Easily. We're not asking for anything. We will never know that you actually donated or not. So there's no pressure. It's completely anonymous. It's only between you and swim across America. But if we hit that threshold, Jarred is going to swim too. And I think that's just going to be objectively hilarious to see a non-swimer do this.
[00:04:00] Jarred Morgan: Something will be very out of place there and it's going to be me. I will absolutely have my summer body. But it's not going to be a swimmer body. I know that for a fact.
[00:04:08] Eric Knight: Well, I've got this wetsuit here that will fit you and it's quite buoyant. So I think we're going to be good to go. And so that website is swimacrossamerica.org/goto/orenda. Again, that's swimacrossamerica.org/goto/orenda. The links will be below in this episode.
[00:04:34] Finally the last piece of housekeeping, because we got a lot of housekeeping on this. We are going to be teaching with Watershapes University at the international show in Las Vegas, November 12th and 13th before the expo. I think the expo is a few days later, the 15, 16, 17th, or something like that.
[00:04:50] But it's our first time teaching with Watershapes University, and we are doing an essential plaster workshop. We are teaming up with John Temple from Tempool, and Bill Drakeley from Watershapes. And they are subject matter experts in concrete and plaster. And we have been invited for some reason to teach the water chemistry portion of it. Once the plaster is applied, now what?
[00:05:12] It's a real honor for us to be able to do this. There are limited seats. I believe it is limited to 60 seats. Now there is a cost, but it goes to Watershapes into the show. We don't make a penny from it. We never charge for our education. That's part of our brand. But we are going to be teaching there. So if you would like to have a masterclass in startup, plaster application, all that sort of stuff, strongly recommend you sign up.
[00:05:33] The class is from WU, Watershapes University, C3611. You can look that up on the show website.
[00:05:43] Jarred Morgan: And just to clarify, this is for the trade in our industry, not the homeowners. If you are homeowner listening, this was a message to our trade.
[00:05:50] Eric Knight: Good point. Yeah. Homeowners. Sorry. If this is for pool builders, pool applicators or plaster applicators, startup technicians, things like that. So yes. Thank you for clarifying that, Jarred.
[00:05:59] Today, we're going to answer that question that we've been getting a lot in the last couple of months, Jarred. Why can I not hold chlorine for a week? Where's it going? We have this mystery case of disappearing chlorine that for some reason, this year it's happening a lot more. Have you noticed that too?
[00:06:15] Jarred Morgan: I absolutely have noticed that and I can't wait to figure out this answer because I need to figure it out. I mean, I'm using too much chlorine in my pool. I don't. I'm kidding.
[00:06:25] Eric Knight: It would be a lot to ask you to read the show notes, but we know that that's not on brand for you, Jarred. So without further ado..
[00:06:32] Jarred Morgan: Well let's well, let's, let's get into this episode, um, as your host. Why can't we hold chlorine? Let's go.
Intro music
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[00:06:39] Eric Knight: Did you just cut me off of the end of that intro, Jarred?
[00:07:03] Jarred Morgan: I thought we had an understanding that I was hosting this episode. You cut me off actually.
[00:07:07] Eric Knight: No, no, that's that is not an understanding, but you just hijacked it, but okay.
Using vs. Losing Chlorine
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[00:07:11] Eric Knight: Basically, if you are unable to hold chlorine, you are either using chlorine or you are losing chlorine. Now we talked about this in a previous episode, just a few weeks ago, Jarred, if you remember. We were talking about water temperature, CYA, and pH. And I believe that was episode 70. So if you want to go back and listen to episode 70, you can. But we talk about losing versus using chlorine in regard to sunlight and water temperature.
Losing Chlorine
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[00:07:38] Eric Knight: So let's expand upon that. Chlorine could be lost to sunlight if it's not protected by cyanuric acid, okay. Now you need some, but you don't want a lot because our fourth pillar of proactive pool care is minimal cyanuric acid, so that you are not overstabilized. You're not slowing down your chlorine so much that you can't kill things, right?
[00:07:58] That's the problem with overstabilization. And it affects the LSI, makes your water more aggressive, all that nonsense. Now the truth is if you have say 30 to 50 CYA, which is what Orenda recommends, you're not really losing much chlorine to the sun, if any. I mean, very, very little until your pH gets high enough that the hypochlorite ion dissociates from CYA.
[00:08:25] Okay. So if it's HOCl, meaning the hypochlorous acid, the strong form of chlorine, that's bound to CYA and pH doesn't affect the strength of chlorine in that circumstance. Because the ratio of CYA to free chlorine is what controls the strength. We've discussed this ad nauseum in other episodes. If the pH gets high enough, Jarred, that HOCl would convert to OCl-, which is hypochlorite ion. It's over a hundred times slower and weaker. That can actually break away from CYA. And then it gets fried by the sun.
[00:09:01] So pH doesn't really affect chlorine strength until a certain threshold that it actually breaks apart from CYA. And then sunlight comes in and takes it out. So this brings us to our containing pH conversation. How do we make sure that our pH doesn't soar over 8.2 to 8.3 ish.
[00:09:21] Jarred Morgan: Are you asking me?
[00:09:23] Eric Knight: Yeah, sure. I'll ask you. I wasn't really, it was rhetorical, but you're doing great. So go ahead, host.
[00:09:27] Jarred Morgan: Thanks. Well with our new app update, we're going to try to control the new pH ceiling. So if we know our pH can only go up to 8.0, because that's directly tied to our carbonate alkalinity. And it's going to tell you on the app, by the way, if you haven't downloaded it or updated it, please do. And also thank you for everybody for the bug fixes. But we can control the loss of the chloride ions by controlling our pH ceiling.
[00:09:53] Eric Knight: That's right. Limit how high the pH can go. And if your worst case scenario is under 8.2, this is a non-issue. You don't have to worry about it. The only way you can get over that pH ceiling is if you don't dilute your acid or you overdose it, and you force the pH higher by etching a cement surface. Plaster, pebble, whatever it is.
[00:10:13] Now, if you have a vinyl liner pool, and I know a lot of our listeners... at least six of them... have vinyl liners, fiberglass as well. You're not etching calcium. You're not actually pulling calcium hydroxide out of a fiberglass pool, for instance. It just isn't there. So you got to think about the pH ceiling as a law of physics to your advantage.
[00:10:34] Now you still shouldn't overdose acid, of course, but you have more grace on a vinyl liner pool or fiberglass pool than you do in a plaster or, you know, just concrete pool in general. So just keep that in mind, you want to focus on your pH ceiling. And that, Jarred, is why we put it in the app. That's why we went through all this headache of showing the carbonate alkalinity and the pH ceiling so that you can see what is my worst case scenario with these numbers.
[00:10:59] That's what that pH ceiling means. How high is my pH going to go after a week or so? And if that number is purple? Uh, red flag. Because if it's a purple number, you could get scale, but more importantly, hypochlorite ion can dissociate from cyanuric acid and you can lose it to the sun. That's the point here.
[00:11:20] Jarred Morgan: You lose your protection, simple words.
[00:11:22] Eric Knight: That's right. So that's chlorine being lost. Now, another way you could lose it is if you had like a leak or splash out or long backwash cycles. But generally speaking, unless you have a leak, that's not really a lot of chlorine that you're losing, right Jarred?
[00:11:36] Jarred Morgan: Yeah. Depends on the type of leak, but yeah, you're diluting it out and it's going to take a little bit of time and it's not going to happen overnight.
Using Chlorine
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[00:11:42] Eric Knight: Right. So now let's focus on what we believe is really going on. The vast majority of where chlorine is going is chlorine is getting used up. Now, the warmer, your temperature, the faster, this happens as we discussed in episode.
[00:11:57] So there's really two types of chlorine demand. There is the living stuff which is the sanitizer demand. That is killing things like bacteria, germs, algae, other living cells. And then there's the oxidant demand. This is the non-living stuff. Metals, nitrogen compounds, and non-living organics.
Sanitization
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[00:12:16] Eric Knight: Now I know you're not looking at the show notes, Jarred, but I'm going to quiz you here. Let's talk first about the sanitizer demand. What are some of the factors or what are some of the examples that might increase the sanitizer demand in a pool.
[00:12:29] Jarred Morgan: Hmm. Bacteria, algae, things like that.
[00:12:34] Eric Knight: Right! At higher temperatures, all of these things will reproduce faster. And then it kind of ties into the next category. When we get into oxidants of nitrogen compounds, because when nitrogen compounds get oxidized down, they end up as nitrates, which is a nutrient for things like algae.
[00:12:48] And there's no way to get rid of it other than draining and diluting or reverse osmosis. There isn't a chemical to get rid of nitrates. There are nitrifying bacteria, but chlorine would kill those bacteria so it kind of defeats the purpose in a pool. So sanitizer demand is pretty straightforward, Jarred.
[00:13:04] I mean, it's really just things that reproduce that chlorine has to kill. Sanitizer demands, usually a very small percentage of chlorine's job if we're doing our job right.
[00:13:13] Jarred Morgan: Cause it does a great job of sanitizing when it's in the water.
[00:13:16] Eric Knight: Absolutely. One part per million of free chlorine is the best algaecide on the market. Hands down. It is an excellent sanitizer. It kills germs in a flash. It is so good at it.
Oxidation
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[00:13:29] Eric Knight: Now it's not good at oxidizing. And yet the vast majority of what contaminates a pool are oxidants. So let's go through those.
Metals
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[00:13:37] Eric Knight: Metals. Where do metals come from, Jarred?
[00:13:40] Jarred Morgan: They can come from other chemicals. They can come from the tap water, especially if you have well water. Beware, please make sure you use a pre-filter for well water if you don't. And mine specifically come from my rocks around my pool and on my waterfall. I have Moss rock on the waterfall and then I have Oklahoma flagstone around the pool.
[00:14:00] And anything that I don't want to say anything, but pretty much, I would guess anything that's a reddish color or brownish color rock. When it's eroding with water, falling into your pool, you're going to have some iron in it. Because I know I do.
[00:14:11] Eric Knight: Well. I live in Carolinas and Carolina clay is red. Mm-hmm. Very iron rich soil, for sure.
[00:14:18] Okay. So it comes from nature. It comes from ground water. Well water specifically, because it that water matriculates through the water table, you know, and then it gets pulled out. So wells are notorious for this. If you live in the great lakes area, you already know this because your toilets and sinks and tubs are orange.
[00:14:35] There's a lot of iron around the great lakes area. Okay. So that's one way. Tap water. How about corrosion of heaters? How many times have we seen spas that turn bluish green?
[00:14:45] Jarred Morgan: Yeah, if everybody hasn't noticed yet these are going to be color keys here, because depending on the color of the stain or the water or whatever you're seeing is going to be determined by the metal you're oxidizing. So heaters specifically have heat exchangers that are generally copper. Mm-hmm. And that's going to turn into a nice bluish green color in your water or on your nice surface.
[00:15:07] Eric Knight: And there's another source of copper, right? Algaecide.
[00:15:11] Jarred Morgan: Copper is a very popular algaecide because it is antimicrobial, which good it has applications. Um, but obviously we don't feel that it's necessary if things are maintained properly. So it is definitely a cause of staining and oxidation.
[00:15:27] Eric Knight: Right. And it is a long term byproduct. Copper stays in your water for a long time. Metals are very easy for chlorine to oxidize.
Nitrogen Compounds
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[00:15:35] Eric Knight: Now let's get into a little bit of the more complex. Nitrogen compounds.
[00:15:39] And we're going to start thinking about what could possibly put nitrogen in your pool. But before we do that, how do we know? You can't just test for nitrogen easily on a standard test kit. They do make test kits for it, but most people don't have those. The easiest way to tell if you have nitrogen in your water is to test for combined chlorine.
[00:16:00] So we would test for total chlorine and then for free chlorine and subtract the difference. You want those numbers to be the same. You want the difference to be zero. But if there is a difference, the bigger that difference is, the more nitrogen you have had in your water. The reason it's called combined chlorine is because chlorine literally combines with nitrogen compounds in order to oxidize them.
[00:16:21] It doesn't do that with organics, but it does with nitrogen compounds. If you are testing combined chlorine, there's only one question to be had. Where is the nitrogen coming from?
[00:16:33] We talked about this in previous episodes. I think it was Joe, not you. Um, it was yeah, episodes 32 and 33... combined chlorine 101 and combined chlorine 201. Joe and I talked about this. I remember it. And the whole point is if you have combined chlorine and you can identify where the nitrogen's coming from, you can address it. So, where do you think nitrogen comes from? Jarred? What are some of the options?
[00:16:59] Jarred Morgan: Clearly fertilizer.
[00:17:01] Eric Knight: Okay. Yeah. Fertilizer for sure.
[00:17:02] Jarred Morgan: The lawn guys just are blowing that stuff in your pool all day. Every time they're there every week. Yeah.
[00:17:08] Eric Knight: And that'd be like phosphates too.
[00:17:09] Jarred Morgan: Absolutely.
[00:17:09] Eric Knight: If you look at the ingredients in fertilizer, phosphate, nitrogen, nitrate, all that stuff is in there. Okay. That's one example.
[00:17:16] Jarred Morgan: I'm kidding, actually. I'm not kidding, but it, people, it is exaggerated a little bit.
[00:17:20] Fertilizer is one, but you're getting a few specs and a few drops of fertilizer in your water, even though it is problematic. There's other sources where it's mainly coming from. But I will say if you do live in an area where you have farm land around your community or your house. Or you live on a golf course where they continuously just spray fertilizer, you know, around the course, that will absolutely contribute to a lot of these problems.
[00:17:43] Not kidding. Because we get a lot of those calls. But if you're in a neighborhood in a normal community, that's not going to be a huge source. Mainly it's going to be coming from other chemicals that are being added. And plant life decaying and things like that. Tap water. Those are the sources.
[00:18:01] Eric Knight: Well, tap water will have it because a lot of municipal drinking water plants, chloraminate their water. Not chlorinate, chloraminate. Meaning they put ammonia in there deliberately to create mono chloramine. They are putting in chloramines. So you can test combine chlorine of your tap water. And it's pretty common that you'll actually have some. I live in Charlotte and we have some, we have 0.2 parts per million.
[00:18:23] Jarred Morgan: There's a reason because it lasts longer in the pipe.
[00:18:26] Eric Knight: Correct. It slows it down. You have sanitizer longer in the pipes. I mean, there's always a reason, but there's always a consequence to good intentions as well.
[00:18:33] Kind of like they put phosphates in tap water too, and that's a good thing. It protects us. It protects the infrastructure. All that's great. It's just annoying when it gets into the pool. It's no different with this. So we just have to be aware that we could have chloramines coming from the drinking water.
[00:18:49] But the main source is either people peeing in the pool, which on residential pools is generally not a big deal. Um, maybe dogs. But commercial pools it's a real thing because swim teams will all pee in there. And that's actually quite a bit. But it's really about ammonia based products.
[00:19:04] Jarred Morgan: Ammonia based products, for sure. But just on a quick note, I did read something yesterday in the news that said the average commercial swimming pool um, and I don't know which size, but let's just say commercial has roughly 20 gallons of pee in it at any given time.
[00:19:17] Eric Knight: It's kind of interesting, you know, how they tested that?
[00:19:20] Jarred Morgan: No.
[00:19:21] Eric Knight: There's an artificial sweetener that passes through your whole, you know, kidney system. And they can test for that. It's not aspertame, but it's like aspertame. And they can test for that. And then they can extrapolate the average amount of urine that it would take to pee that out. And. Pretty fascinating. Also disgusting. Yes. As a competitive swimmer, I can confirm people do pee in the pool. It's gross, but it's reality.
[00:19:43] Jarred Morgan: That's why I'm not a swimmer.
[00:19:44] Eric Knight: Well, you're about to be. We're going to raise enough money at swim across America, buddy. You're going to be swimming in that lake and we are going to be filming it live for all of the fans.
[00:19:52] Jarred Morgan: Can I pee in the lake though?
[00:19:53] Eric Knight: Well, you're going to be wearing my wet suit, so I prefer not.
[00:19:56] Jarred Morgan: So ammonia based products, let's get back on track here. Come on, don't derail us like that.
[00:20:00] Eric Knight: Sorry. Ammonia based products. Primarily in a commercial pool setting, that's going to be deck cleaners, but in a residential setting, it's going to be algaecides.
[00:20:11] Yep. I'm going to give you a little shortcut here. Every algaecide leaves something behind that will eventually conflict with chlorine. Every algaecide I can think of, anyway. So ammonia based algaecide. That is not just ammonium chloride or ammonium sulfate or anything like that, it's actually quaternary ammonia as well.
[00:20:28] So if you see the word quat, you have quaternary ammonia.
[00:20:32] Jarred Morgan: It's going to usually have the word or some variation of ammonia in the SDS sheet. You'll see it.
[00:20:37] Eric Knight: Yeah. Or on the ingredients. Now these products work. I mean, they do kill algae. Like we're not saying they don't. We're just saying that after that happens, you have to deal with it. And that actually will consume chlorine. Okay. On a molar ratio, meaning a weight ratio. It's a 5:1 chlorine to ammonia ratio to convert it to monochloramine. Then another 5:1 ratio to get it to dichloramine. And then another 5:1 ratio to get it to trichloramine, which off gases. That's the pool smell.
[00:21:04] So that's a 15:1 ratio of chlorine to ammonia just to get ammonia out of your water.
[00:21:09] Jarred Morgan: Is this why the recommendation on super chlorination is prescribed commonly? Because they have combined chlorine that is too high. So therefore they super chlorinate their water to help burn off this ammonia reaction. Chloramines.
[00:21:25] Eric Knight: Right, because they have to reach breakpoint chlorination to get ahead of this nitrogen demand. And so the shorthand way of doing it is 10 times your combined chlorine level. So if I have 0.5, I need five parts per million free chlorine. Now that should achieve breakpoint.
[00:21:42] Now it's not exactly 10. Uh, it's a little less than that, but 10 is a good rule of thumb. It's easy to remember. But the question is, is that the most efficient way to handle this? Maybe you can supplement chlorine a little bit better so that you don't have this problem accumulate over time to begin with.
[00:21:58] Jarred Morgan: I was going to say this process sounds very inefficient. And with the cost of chlorine these days, sounds very expensive, too.
[00:22:06] Eric Knight: It is. It absolutely is. In fact, I think that's a future episode for us. But for now, nitrogen compounds take a lot of chlorine to get out. Address them before they get into the pool. Find them and destroy them. If you know they're coming in the tap water, you can put a pre-filter on like an activated carbon filter. Maybe you should invest in an oxidizing system like an ozone system or AOP, that can destroy this before it becomes a problem. If you are actively destroying it, you're going to account for what's in the tap water. No problem.
[00:22:37] But if you let it accumulate, it will consume more and more and more chlorine as you go through the season. So just be aware of it.
[00:22:43] Jarred Morgan: Well, I know I was amazed just on that note. I have a ozone system and a UV system I played with on my pool. And we do a lot of replumbing over here because it's our test pool, right. And when we cut out the pipe after the ozone system, the inside of my PVC pipe is red, brown oxidized, iron everywhere.
[00:23:03] Eric Knight: Oh yeah.
[00:23:04] Jarred Morgan: And I was amazed. Um, But that also gave me a little bit of comfort, because that's also iron that is oxidized on my PVC pipe after the ozone system and not in my pool.
[00:23:17] Eric Knight: No stains in the pool. That's good.
[00:23:18] Jarred Morgan: It just goes to show that you may not see it. You may not know it, but I promise you it is there and your chlorine or whatever it may be is going to oxidize it, whether you think about it or not. And that has a demand. And that's the whole premise of what we're talking about here. And pre-filters are a very important process here. Especially those of you that are on well systems, well water. Pre-filter that water going in because it's so hard to treat it once you add it to the pool.
[00:23:44] Eric Knight: For sure. It takes a lot of chemicals to neutralize that.
Non-living organics
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[00:23:47] Eric Knight: All right, let's move on to the mac-daddy of them. I mean, this is the oxidant demand in a sentence. Non-living organics.
[00:23:53] If you were to look at a pie chart of your oxidant demand, it's got to be over 90%. We're talking about decaying plant life, which by the way, also puts in nitrates and phosphates and other things. But it's mainly organic. Carbon based stuff.
[00:24:08] Natural bather waste. That would be like mucus, tears, saliva, body oils. But the real thing is the synthetic bather products. The deodorants, the lotions, the tanning oils, cosmetics, and of course sunscreen. This is your chlorine demand. Almost every time that we talk to somebody about, I can't hold chlorine for a week, we ask about two things.
[00:24:33] What is your CYA level? To make sure you have enough, but not too much necessarily. And are you supplementing your chlorine against the oxidant demand? Primarily what we're asking about, are you supplementing against non-living organics? There isn't really a supplement other than an ozone or AOP system to handle the nitrogen compounds.
[00:24:52] You could chelate, you could use SC 1000 or sequestering agent or pre-filter to get metals addressed, which we recommend by the way. But the real lion's share of where your chlorine is getting used is going to be non-living organics.
[00:25:07] Jarred Morgan: I know my personal experience this past weekend, I had a bunch of family over. We had, uh, nine kids and eight adults in my pool. And they were in there from three o'clock till 10:00 PM.
[00:25:21] Wow. And I'm going to tell you right now, that water was, it was cloudy after they were done. Because the system was off, it wasn't circulating. And the kids, if y'all have kids, you know, they're running around the entire yard, running through grass clippings, they're jumping off the rocks, getting dirty. And they're basically rinsing off in my pool every time they jump in and out.
[00:25:39] And that has a massive oxidant and sanitizer demand, as you can imagine. And it shows by the cloudiness and the haziness in the water. But after I said, you know what? That water looks a little cloudy. I'm going to turn my pool filter on overnight. And what do you know? The following morning, the pool was crystal clear.
[00:25:59] So if you know, you're going to have a pool party, which I'm sure everybody... well, I don't know if everybody listening to the episode, there's 30 of us, but, if you do have a pool party, you dread this. You plan accordingly. And part of that planning accordingly is understanding you might need some chlorine to help, you know, manage the demand.
[00:26:16] And you also, in my case, I use the enzymes, clearly. Because I know the kids are going to be in sunscreen, lotions, things like that. They're going to add an increased demand than normal. So just plan accordingly.
[00:26:29] Eric Knight: You need something there 24/7 to break down these organics and chlorine is not good at getting rid of sunscreen. If it were, you would never have a scum line. These oils and organics float. And then they stick to the tile and it's nasty. But enzymes will break it down, et cetera, but it's a process. We just say they process it. Yeah, exactly.
[00:26:47] Okay. So finally, this is the question. We don't have an answer to it. We're not pointing fingers at all, but there's quite a bit of speculation that the chlorine is just not the same quality that it once was. And that's possible because during the chlorine shortage, a lot of this was imported from overseas.
[00:27:03] We don't know the quality of the chlorine that came in and we're again, not pointing fingers. We've never tested it. Um, a lot of people are thinking that it could be different. And maybe it is, I don't know. But let's think about one thing, especially with liquid chlorine. Liquid chlorine degrades over time. There is a shelf life. Okay.
[00:27:22] Think about what we've been facing in this country. Trucker shortages. Shipping issues. Supply chain delays. All of that can be applied to this problem. If chlorine is two weeks later than normal on delivery, it's that much weaker. And then there's storage issues, and there's labor shortages in warehouses and all this stuff. So you got to think all of these problems kind of stack on top of one another, that your chlorine could just be a few weeks older than it was when you were used to getting it. Right Jarred?
[00:27:56] Jarred Morgan: It can be. And you know, there's obviously you said supply chains and sometimes raw material components are not available or they're on short supply. So you're looking for alternatives and that could be the case. But when you're talking liquid, that's easy, because we know it has a half life. And we know it can degrade.
[00:28:12] Eric Knight: Well, that's kind of an interesting segway, and that's part of the guarantee of the NSF certification. Our formulas don't change. The formulas that we had years ago are at the exact same mix ratios that they are now. PR 10,000 is the exact same PR 10,000 that it was five years ago.
[00:28:27] Jarred Morgan: 3, 4, 5 years ago. Yes.
[00:28:29] Eric Knight: And it's going to continue to be. So we're not changing our formula on you or anything like that. Our purity is remaining exactly the same way it always has been.
Are you being proactive?
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[00:28:38] Eric Knight: To end this let's talk about three proactive questions here.
[00:28:43] First, are you addressing metals? Are you filtering them out? You chelating them? Sequestering them? Filtering them before they get into the pool? If you are then that's proactive. If not chlorine has to do it, and you're going to use up chlorine on metals.
[00:29:00] Number two, are you testing for combined chlorine? Are you testing your tap water for combined chlorine? Do you know if you have nitrogen in your water? And if you do, where's it coming from? And then have you taken steps to address that directly?
[00:29:12] Are you using ammonia based algaecides? Are you using ammonia based deck cleaners that could be washing into the pool? These kind of things matter. And if you take nitrogen out of the equation, right there you're going to get some chlorine savings if you've been facing them before.
[00:29:27] And then number three, if you remember from episode 55, we talked about the root word of decide, meaning you eliminate all other options. You take them out of the equation and you . Confirm on one decision. Have you decided to remove non-living organics from the equation? Have you decided to supplement your chlorine to handle the lions share of the oxidant demand?
[00:29:49] We use enzymes, but you could use a secondary system as well. If you are doing these things, you are being proactive. And you should be able to hold chlorine throughout the week. And the final thing I would say is we want minimal CYA, but you could increase your CYA to intentionally slow down your chlorine to make it last a little bit longer. But you do run the risk of things like algae outbreaks because you've slowed down your sanitizer.
[00:30:16] So optimize your chlorine efficiency the best way you can.
[00:30:18] Jarred Morgan: And it's a cumulative thing. So once you put it in be prepared to manage it. Remember everything has a byproduct build up. The CYA is one of those things. So if you think you're going to add more to give more protection, plan accordingly. Not that we recommend it at all.
[00:30:34] Eric Knight: That's exactly right. Well, I think this one went a little long, but it was good because it's an important topic. So this has been episode 76 of the Rule Your Pool podcast. And the host, Jarred is now going to close us out.
[00:30:44] Jarred Morgan: Yes. Thanks everybody for listening. And remember, please check out swim across America, because I really am going to enjoy swimming this, uh, fall, I think it's fall or late summer. I don't know.
[00:30:55] Eric Knight: September 24th.
[00:30:56] Jarred Morgan: Yeah. Whatever time period. You consider that. Here it's still going to be hot. So I'm going to say summer. Check it out. We would appreciate it. Like I said, it goes to a good cause and it goes towards, you know, we're sponsoring Kelly Kraft.
[00:31:07] She was my basically right hand for the past 10 years or so. She was a big part of our business. And unfortunately cancer's one of those scary things that can take somebody you know very quickly. I'm sure it's happened to anybody listening here.
[00:31:21] So check it out. We appreciate it. Thanks for listening. And till next time I'm with Eric. This is Jarred.
[00:31:28] Eric Knight: Take care, everyone.