Sodium hypochlorite solutions straight out of the barrel/tank stink. I work with them daily and yes, they smell of chlorine in concentrated form. Chloroorganics just smell stronger. If I’m walking across a catwalk above treated water and suddenly get a strong odor when there usually is a mild one or none, I know something is wrong. The stronger odor is a tell-tale sign that the dosage may be too small and I might be starting to lose breakpoint chlorination. You can also get an odor from overdosing (fuming) of course, but it’s not quite the same.
I worked one year at a school cafeteria. I wiped down surfaces with a very small amount of bleach in a full bucket of water. Not only did it smell of bleach, but the health inspector told me that the solution had to be replaced every couple of hours, even though it still smelled of bleach, because the germ-killing properties diminished after a few hours of being diluted in an open container of water.
So this:
is wrong.
I don’t disagree that peeing in a pool makes the smell stronger. Just with the idea that you can’t smell the chlorine if no one pees in the pool.
As a kid I took a ton of swimming lessons at the same indoor city pool and it always had a distinct smell - what we would all call a “chlorine smell”. Obviously, it is possible that over several years and several weeks each year, tons of people are continuously urinating in the pool but, somehow, I doubt it. I get that that’s not proof but that’s my take on it.
Right.
Thanks for this; I love that smell.
You can (barely) smell a properly chlorinated outdoor pool. In a typical grocery store bottle of clorox, you’re looking at a concentration of 5% chlorine. In a properly chlorinated pool, it’s 0.0003% or less. The chlorine vapors typically congregate on or near the surface of the pool, but dissipate quite a bit outdoors. Indoors they just sort of stick around.
As for chloramines (i.e. pee+chlorine, but in reality a combination of many possible things and chlorine), that’s just the end result of chlorine doing it’s job. They do indeed smell quite a bit stronger. While chloramines means we are effectively sanitizing, you don’t want them to stick around, and there are many mitigation methods that are probably a hijack.
In pool lingo, we use “free chlorine” to denote the amount of chlorine that is not yet turned into chloramine. You want all free-chlorine whenever possible.
ETA: I noticed that someone mentioned salt systems earlier. It’s still just chlorine as the end result, but the difference is that there are no chlorine tablets floating around in a little rubber ducky and no recently poured bottles of high concentration chlorine, which are typical of non-salt systems, so less vapor hanging around. End result is still ideally somewhere around 3 parts per million of chlorine, but it’s created as the water pass through the “salt cell”.
That was my consideration in not watching the video (clickbaity). Chlorine in pools smell with or without urine, in my experience.
It’s only clickbaity in that you’re going to start watching his other videos (including busting porch pirates…w/ Glitterbombs!, Indian scam call centers, & squirrel mazes) & then waste hours. He’s literally a rocket scientist with almost 60 million YT followers.
I was a lifeguard in HS/college, including at a Y. Obviously we had many gallons of chlorine on site with that size of a pool. It smelled even outside of chlorine storage room which was in the basement, on a different floor than the pool
I understand. I’m not trying to rag on the guy, and I’m sure he’s getting young people interested in real science.
He’s that guy? Then i will watch the video.
I’m a Pisces. I love sitting at the beach watching the sea. I like floating atop the water in a kayak. I enjoy navigating rivers in a pontoon boat. All of my vacations are beach vacations.
All that said, I do not enjoy swimming or even wading in the water, in part at least due to the urine thing. I’d love to be in a pool, just so that nobody else was ever in the water.
- I presume that you were wiping down the surfaces for a reason. I.e., they had remnants of food, body sweat, body oils, etc. on them. You weren’t wiping down pre-sanitized surfaces, in a clean room with filtered air.
- The amount of chlorine you add to a pool is about 1/3rd of an ounce per 1,000 gallons. Assuming that you had a 3 gallon bucket, you would be adding 1/1000th of an ounce to have an equivalent level of dilution. You would need a micropipette. You were almost certainly adding a wildly larger quantity and, again, you weren’t doing it in a clean room.
Me too. I just wanted to mention that water utilities are required to have a minimum amount of residual chlorine at the farthest water tap from the treatment plant. As the water travels away from the treatment plant, the amount of chorine decreases as it reacts with any contaminants (i.e. it is doing its job).
But this means that if you drink water from a tap that is closer to the treatment plant than that farthest tap, you may be drinking water that has a more noticeable chlorine odor than you would like. The solution to this is to let the water sit in a non-airtight container for a while (like a jug in the refrigerator), or to use an activated carbon filter like a Brita filter.
Besides the odor, chlorine and chlorine disinfection byproducts in drinking water do carry a slightly increased cancer risk. (Of course the risk is outweighed by the benefits gained by disinfecting the water.) But you can gain the benefits of disinfection and reduce the risk of any residual chlorine by using a filter.
As to the main point of the thread, chlorine and chlorine disinfection byproducts all have an odor of their own irrespective of the presence of urine.
I don’t understand your doubling down on this. What do you consider clickbaity? It’s just normal YouTube science channel. As has been explained, there is nothing clickbaity about it.
I’m talking about the clean bleach water in the bucket. It’s made up several times a day, and there’s a several hour gap between breakfast and lunch. You don’t put the dirty cloth back in the water in the pail, you get a clean cloth.
Because big (and a lot of) youtube channels and on the guidance of their youtube channel advisors are rife with stupid fucking titles and stupid fucking thumbnails intended to engage idiots and 12 year olds. “Peeing in the pool” seems to meet some form of those requirements. I also don’t want to redirect youtube’s algorithm to recommend me videos I don’t want to watch-- which is near impossible these days anyway. Maybe it’s not technically “clickbait” but I don’t really care.
As I said, I’m not knocking the guy, and his channel teaches real and practical science to people, but in this case I already have an idea of the ultimate conclusion of the video, and I just didn’t want to watch it.
I certainly don’t care if you watch it or not, it just seems strange to me that you would judge a video without even watching it.
I don’t feel it’s judging anything, I didn’t say it was wrong or right and I gave my reasons for not wanting to watch. Besides, the further commenters did the “judging” for me…
If anything I was being overly-cynical.
This is correct. Overwhelmingly the swimming-pool smell comes from chloramine, which comes from certain chlorine compounds interacting with various nitrogen compounds at a certain pH. Urine is a big one, but the body sheds all kinds of material that can react.
However, there’s also some smell to untreated pools, completely separate from chloramine load. It’s inaccurate to suggest otherwise. But the untreated pool smell is different, it’s a lot less noxious, hard to detect except indoors. It doesn’t have the “burn” you get from the irritating gases from the breakdown of chloramine.