Wiener residue, in general, I think.
Once people’s wieners are in the pool, you’re going to get weiner residue in th water whether or not they urinate, surely?
Yeah. I think the anal backwash has to be a bigger problem than any wiener residue. You realize that people have an average bowl movement of about once a day, and in the U.S. most are trained to use toilet paper.
Toilet paper doesn’t really remove anything. It just kind of smears it around and gets the bulk of the material. There’s still a thin layer of shit in your ass crack after even the most vigorous TPing.
A good shower, assuming you wash there, will fix it…but you have to imagine that at least half of swimming pool patrons have taken a dump and smeared the poop around with TP before going for a swim. So the pool is full of poop residue.
I never drink water. Fish fuck in it.
Keeping the chemical levels right in a swimming pool is not a simple matter:
So if it smells too much of chlorine, don’t go in there.
Yes, I acknowledged that 1 liter was a very large volume. I used it because first, I wanted to establish an upper bound, and second, because it’s a nice convenient round number. The point is, even with unrealistically large numbers, it’s still a tiny trace amount.
On a public pool the urine is not going to concentrate. Not only do filters remove stuff but they have to be back washed, and during the back wash process water goes down the drain and fresh water has to be taken on. Also because of evaporation a properly maintained pool should have a bleed to keep the total dissolved solids from becoming too high and causing scale formations.
“You’re soaking in it.”
I suppose the bottom line answer is “not enough to be really concerned about”.
I’m a bit skeptical that the filters do anything to remove dissolved chemicals – I suspect that they only remove particulates and gross stuff like hair and bandaids. Wouldn’t a reverse osmosis filter be prohibitively expensive for a public pool?
Also, while urine is initially sterile in most cases, it doesn’t stay that way. Lots of wee microscopic beasties find it tasty and nutritious.
Swimming pools are mini water treatment plants. There should be no worry.
Or cure all
I am reminded of the South Park episode involving the water park that was 90% pee. When it reached 100% pee, disaster struck.
Actually homeopaths encourage peeing in the pool. The real danger is allowing the urine level to get too low, at which point the extreme dilution makes the urine more “effective”.
I tested a pH level at the local pool once. It was almost all p and no H…
Very clever!
This is so delightfully naive. I was a swimmer and worked at a large pool for many years and I can tell you this number is probably closer to one per hour.
Stop it… you’re killing me!
We ran the filters all day, back flushed every other day (or maybe every day), checked the Ph hourly and adjusted the chlorine as needed. The water was very clean, but your estimates on how many kids and adults pee in the pool is way under stated.
Well, it’d also depend on how many people visit the pool, total.
How do you know how often they were peeing, by the way?
We had a few hundred even on slow days.
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We had a special chemical that turned blue when someone peed.
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The low man on the totem pole had to swim around and raise his hand and whistle whenever he hit a warm patch.
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I peed in the pool that often so even if nobody else did this is accurate.
Take your pick.
Ok, maybe none are true, but I spent hours around other swimmers and it was not a secret. Coaches even encouraged it so we wouldn’t waste time. The general public couldn’t have been much different. Plus you could see people drinking a large soda for hours and eventually dip in quickly then get out and lay around for several more hours without hitting the bathroom. I would be willing to bet even my estimate is on the low end. You spend 60-80 hours at a pool each week for several months each summer you tend to get a feel for what is going on.
Chlorine is an oxidizer, people. At proper concentrations, it will completely oxidize organic compounds and remove them from the water entirely.
The typical pool chlorine target level of about 5-7 ppm isn’t enough to oxidize entirely; it’s designed mainly to inhibit bacterial growth (and the like). In fact, at these levels, you mostly form chloramines, which is why a dirty pool is more likely to smell like chlorine than a clean one.
However, it is common practice in public pool maintenance to “shock” the water with a higher dose of chlorine, aiming for at least 20 ppm. This is a high enough level to completely oxidize the organic compounds, including partially oxidized chloramines. When I managed a public pool at an apartment complex, we shocked at least once a week and as often as three times a week if use was particularly high. If we didn’t, it was impossible to maintain minimum water clarity and somehow the public health department never did a random inspection on a day when you had ideal water clarity.
So asking how much pee is in a pool is maybe a little bit like asking how much wood is in the fireplace after a fire. None; by the time they have been oxidized, they have ceased to be the thing you’re asking about.
Anyway, the issue of draining the pool: we also did this once a year. Stabilized chlorine uses cyanuric acid and this builds up. In my area, the pool would go from 0 ppm to 200 ppm by the end of the summer season and the public health inspectors would tolerate 180 ppm. So we drained at the end of the season and hoped that they didn’t check too closely near the end. Of course, not all pools use stabilized chlorine, especially the largest ones.
But, in case you’re too reassured about the safety, how about this factoid: 1 cup of sweat per person per hour.