After a borderline-grammy-worthy intro, Eric discusses the volatility of all different chlorine types, and how they should and should not be used, handled and stored. This is the first of a multi-episode series on chemical conflicts.
00:00 - Introduction
04:54 - Rule 1: Never let chlorine touch any other chemical
07:16 - Rule 2: In commercial pools, pick ONE type of chlorine
09:11 - Rule 3: Keep acid stored with separate spill containment
11:44 - Rule 4: For residential pools, only one primary chlorine type, and possibly one secondary chlorine stored separately
12:36 - Trichlor feeders need to be installed correctly
15:15 - Rule 5: Saltwater pools can use a secondary chlorine shock (but not in-line)
17:10 - Rule 6: Create physical separation between chemicals in your vehicle
19:00 - Mistakes happen...even Eric is guilty
20:33 - Chlorine "conflicts" in water
22:41 - Summary
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121. Chemical Conflicts | Chlorines
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Intro
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[00:00:00] Eric Knight: And just when you thought the Rule Your Pool podcast was becoming legitimate and credible. I mean, last episode, 120, we had Dr. Darla Goeres, the world renowned biofilm expert on here. It's pretty awesome, I couldn't believe she said yes when I emailed her out of the blue. And yes, we're going to have more PhDs. We're going to have more chemists, and we're going to have more experts in their fields on this podcast.
[00:03:52] And that song, some of my best work by the way, is to introduce a new multi-part series on chemical conflicts. Now I'm not sure how many episodes this is going to be. My thinking is three or four. Originally, I had it written down to be like seven or eight. But I feel like we can condense it because we don't have to hit all of the notes. What we really need to do is we just need to hit the highlights.
[00:04:13] So in this episode, 121, the first of our multi-part series on chemical conflicts, we're going to talk about chlorine. And in full disclosure, this is actually the third time trying to record this episode. The first time was with Terry Arko, but we had some technical difficulties couldn't really use the audio. And then the second time I tried it myself, but I realized that I went way too deep into the weeds. And so I decided, I think I'm just going to talk about what you need to know, rather than getting really scientific about it. Because let's be honest, the chemists who listen to this you probably already know this anyway.
[00:04:45] This is really for homeowners and pool pros that may not be aware of some of the hazards of every day swimming pool chemicals that we're using. And we're going to start with chlorine.
Rule 1: Never let chlorine touch any other chemical
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[00:04:54] Eric Knight: So let's talk first about how chlorine interacts with other chemicals. Because if we talk about what chlorine conflicts with in the water, we could talk for hours. Rule number one, if you want to be safe, never let any type of chlorine touch another chemical directly. You do that, you're probably going to be okay.
[00:05:15] If you mix chlorine with like literally anything else, it is likely that it's going to be hazardous, if not toxic fumes, or flammable, or explosive. I'm not trying to scare you. I'm just trying to be real. Chlorine is an oxidizer and it's pretty decent oxidizer outside of water. Like if we compare it in the water to something like ozone or hydroxyl radicals? No, it's not that powerful of an oxidizer in the water. But if you're just mixing them directly, oh yeah, yeah. It. Uh, chlorine is pretty severe. So we're going to take it safe. We're going to keep our distance on these things. And we're going to talk about safe practices. Okay.
[00:05:53] For instance, if any two types of chlorine were to come in direct contact with each other, The result is almost always a fire of some kind. The fumes, you can bet they're going to be harmful. And this is immaterial of manufacturer, it's just the compounds themselves. Something like trichlor and liquid is going to create harmful fumes and a fire. Trichlor and cal hypo is going to explode. Liquid and cal hypo is going to explode. Cal hypo and just about anything is going to explode. It's just the nature of these chemicals. So when you see things that say always add chemicals to water, never add water to the chemical. That's real. Never add water to a chemical.
[00:06:37] I've seen videos on Facebook where a homeowner makes the mistake and they mix things together, the footage is only there because they have like a ring camera or nest camera in their backyard, overlooking the pool. And they send it out into these Facebook groups as a warning. And you start seeing this yellow frothy foam in these fumes coming up like smoke. And the next thing you know, the bucket explodes. And it just goes everywhere. It's really dangerous.
[00:07:01] Just to be safe, assume that chlorine should never touch anything else. That is a cardinal rule in pool care. That's obvious when you think about physically mixing it, but the less obvious things are how to store these things.
Rule 2: In commercial pools, pick ONE type of chlorine
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[00:07:16] Eric Knight: Now I'm going to start with commercial pools and then we'll talk about backyards. I've been in a lot of pump rooms in my life. Since 2012, I've been in the commercial pool business and I've been going to a lot of problem facilities. Specifically facilities that struggle with indoor air quality. This lovely rasp in my voice is from lung scarring from swimming indoors for a decade of my life.
[00:07:36] I go to these pools because I want to help the air quality. And as a result of that, I'm in a lot of pump rooms. I'm looking at chemical storage areas and I'm looking at how these things are actually stored. And for many years, I didn't really understand chemicals at all, I was looking at the duct and the HVAC in these pools. But now when I go into a facility, I'm not only looking at the duct. I'm looking at the pump rooms. And I will tell you, I see some hazards in almost every pump room I go to. I see some really dangerous practices.
[00:08:05] Let's say a pump room has one chemical storage room. What are the rules? What can you put in there, and what can you not put in there? I think the obvious is if the pool is using acid, acid should go in that room. Yes. Because acid fumes. And there are some less fuming acids, but acid fumes as a rule, and it can corrode just about anything. So it should be in a well-ventilated, separate room.
[00:08:28] On a commercial pool, you should only have one type of chlorine in that facility. I'm going to repeat that. In a commercial pool, there should only be one type of chlorine present in that facility.
[00:08:43] I go in facilities and I often see trichlor feeders. At like hotel and motel, apartment complex kind of pools. And then there'll be a bucket of cal hypo in the same room. That is extraordinarily dangerous. If that bucket were to leak, or there was a crack in it, the fumes alone interacting in that room could make that room extremely volatile. You put acid in that room too? You could have toxic fumes. Pick one type of chlorine.
Rule 3: Keep acid stored with separate spill containment
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[00:09:11] Eric Knight: And it's a similar kind of rule of thumb with acid. I know this episode is about chlorine, but if you're using liquid acid, you can store chlorine in that same room, as long as they're separated and it's well-ventilated. So let's say for instance, you have a cal hypo feeder. Very common on commercial pools. Don't put them next to each other. Don't let them interact directly. Have separate spill containment for both. So for instance, the cal hypo is going to be in buckets and it's going to be on a pallet of some kind off the ground. On one side of the room.
[00:09:44] The acid is going to need to be on a plastic spill container on the other side of the room. Well-ventilated, separated. At least six feet is ideal, but it depends on ventilation. So the better the ventilation, the better the room.
[00:09:55] Now you can store some other non-volatile chemicals in that room. For instance, you can have a pallet of sodium bicarb, as long as it's dry and off the floor. You could have calcium chloride in there. That's fine too. You could have dry cyanuric acid in its own container. But you never want to have two different types of chlorine in the same room. Like never. Never, ever, ever, ever do that. It's very dangerous. I'm not exaggerating when I say this, look it up.
[00:10:23] If you're using liquid chlorine and acid, those can be in the same room as well, but you're going to have separate feeders. Make sure the liquids never touch each other. If they do, it creates mustard gas. Very toxic, you don't want that. If you have trichlor and acid, make sure they never touch each other. Same idea. Okay. When in doubt, spread them out.
[00:10:42] If you had to pick one chemical to go in the separate chemical storage room, it's going to be acid. Because liquid chlorine and cal hypo, they can be in the pump room, although eventually it could cause some caustic reactions if there's enough fuming. But really liquid chlorine doesn't fume that much. And cal hypo could, but typically it's going to be in sealed buckets, and it's going to be used in a feeder. So put the acid in the room. Well, ventilated. Run the feed tube through the wall.
[00:11:11] And then if you have to put liquid chlorine in the room, if it's drums, you're going to have it on secondary spill containment. If it's a big vat of chlorine, it should also have like a double walled vessel or secondary containment as well. So that's the commercial pool.
[00:11:26] And I only bring that up because you may think what, who listens to the Rule Your Pool podcast? Believe it or not, of our 181 listeners I estimate now, at least three of them are commercial operators. Thank you for listening by the way. I know this because they reached out to me. I thought that was pretty cool.
Rule 4: Only one primary chlorine type, and possibly one secondary chlorine stored separately
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[00:11:44] Eric Knight: Now let's talk about residential pools. Storage is always going to be a concern for the pool pro. We recognize this, especially if you have a warehouse that you operate out of, or you're operating out of a van or a truck. Let's just go through the basics here so that you can figure out what works in your world. I understand there are limitations and there are risks that you have to make. But here's a really easy way to simplify things. Do not have more than two types of chlorine in your building. And separate them as much as possible.
[00:12:16] And here's what I mean by that. A lot of pools have salt chlorine generators, and that's great. Salt systems, they work as long as they're installed right, and the correct level of salt is there. It creates chlorine on site. Yes, salt pools are chlorine pools. I find it amazing how many people still think... well, I don't have chlorine, I have salt. But that's immaterial.
Trichlor feeders need to be installed correctly
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[00:12:36] Eric Knight: In that pool, it makes sense to use a secondary chlorine to either shock or to supplement that salt system as needed. One of the more common things that we see is a trichlor feeder. And any pool pro should know this, it is extremely important that if you install a trichlor feeder, that you do not inject that chlorinated water before the salt cell. That is really bad. Don't do that. The opposite is also true, do not start the bypass for the trichlor feeder after the salt sell. So that super chlorinated water goes into the trichlor feeder. That could explode. Don't do that.
[00:13:10] My advice is to consult the equipment manufacturers who make these things. If you have any doubt as to which order you should plumb these things in, talk to them. I am not a mechanical expert, and I don't pretend to be. Only take advice from certified, trained professionals or manufacturer representatives on how to actually install these things in the right sequence. I'll leave it at that.
[00:13:34] The same can be said for a liquid chlorine feeder. If you were using a liquid chlorine feeder, obviously you're not going to have a salt system... or at least you shouldn't. But are you going to have a trichlor feeder? Some pools do. My recommendation for that would be no. Don't do that. It makes sense to use a few tabs a year or early on in the season to get your CYA up. But the alternative to this is just using granular cyanuric acid or liquid cyanuric acid to get your level up, and it'll stay there pretty much exactly or very close to it for several months. Okay. That's a preferred way of getting the desired cyanuric acid level in your water. So you would use not trichlor, but direct cyanuric acid if you have a liquid chlorine feeder.
[00:14:18] Or if you have a cal hypo feeder. Again, commercial pools do this a lot, but there are, believe it or not, some residential cal hypo feeders. Same idea. I would not put a trichlor feeder on a cal hypo pool. No way. It is too risky. If you are going to do something, make sure that you keep these products separate.
[00:14:37] Now you can technically put a trichlor floater in one of these pools. That's possible, but you're never interacting these chemicals directly. You're doing it in 10,000+ gallons of water. And I don't recommend trichlor floaters, but I know they're popular. A lot of our listeners have them. I'm never putting a floater in my pool. I don't want it going near the tile and etching because it creates a localized LSI violation from that 2.8 pH of that trichlor. And I got my pool here that I'm actually about to destroy because I'm going to deliberately put some trichlor pucks on the surface to show what they do. They're very acidic. Don't do that, I'm doing it on purpose.
Rule 5: Saltwater pools can use a secondary chlorine shock (but not in-line)
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[00:15:15] Eric Knight: But the point is if you're going to supplement a chlorine, you never let these chlorines touch. By and large is going to be a salt system that site-generates chlorine and you're going to supplement it with a shock of some kind. So a very common thing to do, which is perfectly acceptable, is to have a salt pool that shocks with liquid chlorine or granular cal hypo. That makes sense.
[00:15:37] You shouldn't have to shock very much, but sometimes you do in the heat of summer. If you're struggling to hold chlorine, you're trying to manage the oxidants. It's been a really hot summer in 2023. I get it. Sometimes we just have to break the water.
[00:15:51] If that's the case and you need to shock, even turning the salt cell up to a hundred might not be enough in that moment to handle the dogs or the birthday party you're handling. Whatever it is. So it makes sense on a salt pool, if you need to, to come in with a non-stabilized chlorine and shock it. And in some cases, if you have a salt pool and you don't have enough cyanuric acid, you can also shock with granular trichlor or dichlor. That's also acceptable. But you're not going to put it in line right before that salt system.
[00:16:23] Now if you're a pool pro and you're hitting 10, 12, 13 pools a day, whatever you're hitting, and you're manually adding chlorine for the week, that is considered a shock, usually. Because you've got to elevate those chlorine levels to 5, 6, 7 parts per million sometimes. And that's more than we desire, but it's also the reality of the business because you're going to be gone for seven days. How do you hold chlorine for seven days?
[00:16:45] We talk extensively about this in previous episodes and also in our blog. You got to manage the oxidant demand. I would not recommend just throwing more chlorine at the problem because chlorine is not meant to get rid of non-living organics, metals, nitrogen compounds. So, what do you do about those? Of course, we recommend things to alleviate some of that burden on chlorine. We talk about that in previous episodes.
Rule 6: Create physical separation between chemicals in your vehicle
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[00:17:10] Eric Knight: In my opinion, if I'm a service pro, I'm either going to have salt pools or I'm going to pick one type of primary chlorine for all the other pools on my route. I'm not going to be using three, four or five different types of chlorine. No way. That is extraordinarily dangerous on my truck. The truck bed is not that big. And if you're a service company that uses vans? Even more important because it's not nearly as ventilated.
[00:17:35] I'm not going to put liquid, cal hypo, trichlor, and dichlor in the same truck. But some people listening to this may say I've been doing that for years, never had a problem. Yeah, you haven't yet, maybe. Lucky. But every year we get calls. Every single year. Get another picture of a truck that caught on fire. The guy's lucky to be alive. Don't let that be you.
[00:17:58] So if I'm a service pro. I have one type of chlorine on my truck as my primary. And I might have trichlor to supplement the rest of those pools. I keep them on opposite ends of the truck. I also separate chlorine from acid. I put one in the front, one in the back. Or one on the left, one on the right, whatever it is. Separate it physically, and the reason you want to separate physically, because it's not just distance. Distance is important, but you really need to physically make sure these things never touch. So you put stuff in between. Your clean white bucket, your ancillary chemicals, your vacuum hose, your hardware, whatever it is, toolbox. Whatever you have in the back. Separate these things out so that if you get rear-ended on the road, or you slam on the brakes really fast, they don't interact. The last thing you want is a hazmat issue on the road. That is not a good thing.
[00:18:49] So never let acid mix with any type of chlorine. Never let two types of chlorine mix with each other on the truck. And guys it's always an accident. I get it. Nobody does this intentionally.
Mistakes happen...even Eric is guilty
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[00:19:00] Eric Knight: But mistakes happen. If any of you watched my Facebook Live when I was cleaning up my pool this past May, on the Orenda Facebook page, I made the mistake. It was the dumbest thing I'd done. But I wasn't thinking about it. I was focused on talking to the camera, walking through the green pool cleanup procedure. And I had just done the white bucket test. I put liquid chlorine in a bucket of green water and it cleared up. As a side note, the camera really didn't show how much it cleared up, but it cleared up quite a bit. And the next step I knew I was about to chlorinate the pool. I said, I know I have a high pH because it's a green pool... algae consume CO2, therefore my pH is probably over 10. I've measured it digitally before, it's over 10, most likely. Very high pH. If I just put liquid chlorine in now, it's going to cloud up like crazy because the pH is so high, I'm going to have an LSI violation.
[00:19:52] So I went into my house and I got an Orenda measuring cup. And I measured acid. And like an idiot, totally forgot that I had just done the white bucket test. And there was a lot of chlorine in it. Thank God it was just a couple ounces. And it wasn't straight chlorine. If it was, it'd be way worse. And I put muriatic acid in, and need a second, it turned like highlighter yellow. Like oh, immediately got into the pool. Didn't breathe. Pushed it in, you could see it on video.
[00:20:19] I regret that decision, but at the same time, I'm glad it happened so you could see what it did. Let me make that mistake for you. I don't want you to have that happen in a backyard. I don't want any of you, or your coworkers, or your employees, or whatever to have this issue.
Chlorine "conflicts" in water
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[00:20:33] Eric Knight: So let's wrap this up. The previous two times that I tried to record this episode about chlorine conflicts, we went into the weeds about what it does in the water. What does it conflict with in the water? And rule of thumb, chlorine is going to attack just about everything in that water. There are some things that cannot attack. But pretty much everything else is. So be aware that it will quote unquote conflict with a lot of things in your water.
[00:20:59] Some things that chlorine attacks and water may surprise you. For instance, polymeric clarifiers. I learned this from Terry when we were recording the first time. Unfortunately, I wish I had his audio that would work. But synthetic clarifiers. They could be oxidized by chlorine. I didn't know that. Chitosan doesn't actually, chitosan is natural, it does not get oxidized and so it actually works really well. That's a good thing because that's what ours is. Good job, Jarred. You picked a good formula. I did not know that.
[00:21:29] Chlorine will go after just about every algaecide that you can think of that's not named chlorine.
[00:21:34] But then again, there are a lot of things that are totally compatible with chlorine that interact symbiotically. They harmonize. PR-10,000 is one of those. It's a phosphate remover, works really well with a chlorine shock. Enzymes CV-600, CV-700, they work great. People ask all the time at what concentration does chlorine start to attack the enzymes? We don't really know, but I will say don't pour them on top of each other as a best practice. Don't put them in the same bucket. But we've elevated pools deliberately to 20 parts per million as an experiment, and the enzymes performed just fine. I cannot imagine you having to go to 20 parts per million, even for a green pool cleanup. So in everyday pool use, chlorine is not going to wipe out the enzymes if you separate them accordingly.
[00:22:20] Chlorine is not going to attack sodium bicarbonate. Not going attack some other things, but if there are oxidants in the pool, yes, chlorine is going to get used up on those. So we didn't want to get into that because those aren't really conflicts necessarily. That's chlorine doing its job. It's chlorine being used up. Right? That's what it's doing.
Summary
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[00:22:41] Eric Knight: So in summary. If in doubt, separate the chemicals out.
[00:22:48] Do not let any different types of chlorine come into contact with each other. Ever. If you are storing them, separate them as much as possible in well-ventilated areas. If you have to have two different types of chlorine on a truck, you're going to have these on the perimeter and then you're going to have your gear in the middle. That's the general idea.
[00:23:07] I know it's a lot of things to think about, but the easiest way to summarize it is keep them separate and keep it simple. The KISS principle, right? Keep it simple, stupid.
[00:23:16] Don't have too many chlorines in your truck. Don't have them in your building. Pick one, own it. Stick with it. That is the smart way to do it. Always keep these things separate. Rinse out your buckets. Rinse off your bottles, dip them in the pool when you're done pouring so you don't get dribble.
[00:23:34] These are the best practices. That's what we teach at Orenda. If you want to rule your pool, be safe doing it. I'm Eric Knight with Orenda. This is episode 121. We have several more episodes to come. I hope you enjoyed the song. I enjoyed making it for you. We'll see you next week. Take care, everyone.