The filters remove really small stuff. But my point was that filters are backed washed removing some of the water and urine from the pool.
At my local pool, at any one time you might have around 200 folk in an olympic size pool swimming laps.
I’d bet that about 40% of those pee in the pool once per hour. So I’d say about 80 pees per hour.
The pool is open for 10 hours a day
that’s 800 pees
At 500 ml each time
You’re looking at 400 litres of pee
At 2.5 million litres in pool that would make it 0.016% pee.
Of course for kiddy pool,
I’d say that at one time you have 100 people in 150,000 litres (if that). Same one pee per person per hour, but only 300 ml, 40 % people peeing you would get 12 litres per hour, 120 litres per day 0.08% pee
Ars Technica decided to do some math to figure out how much pee in a pool would kill you. You know, for science.
It sounds like you are talking about adults swimming laps (I rarely see kids swimming laps at pools). Are you telling me 40% of adults pee in pools and do it once per hour they are in the pool? As in 4 of every 10 posters on this board? How much would you bet?
If a pool reached 100% pee, it would still be 95% water.
I’m at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum. I get out of the ocean to urinate.
If the pee participants have been drinking American Lager style beers, it could be closer to 99% water. Could be a great conservation method for the arid parts of the US: LA pee pool filling parties.
I don’t even pee once per hour, no matter where I am.
According to this highly scientific poll, conducted by Dr. F. Gimpy, noted urine researcher, 28.6% of adult women and 33.6% of adult men pee in the pool. Numbers are higher for children of both sexes.
500,000 gallons for an ordinary public pool.
500 users per day
200 days use per year (we don’t all live in Detroit and Chicago)
1 liter urine per person
100,000 liters (25,000 gallons) of urine per year
5% urine at the end of the season assuming that evaporation = rainfall and that the pool is not drained or topped-off.
Free chlorine (good) vs chloramines (bad)
Free chlorine reacts to any organic material and pretty well kills it (it is a sanitizer, not an oxidizer).
If there is not enough FC, the chlorine you add will react with, but not destroy, organics. Hence chloramines (“Too much chlorine!” Burning eyes and mucous membranes).
They way you get rid of chloramines is to add more FC.
Modern pools automated just about everything - someone has come up with a machine to analyze water, using proprietary petri dishes. As soon as they figure out how to do that analysis using a stream of pool water, we have another industry in which the sole purpose of the human is to maintain the machine.
Sample Salt Water Chlorine Generators: it turns out that if you dump table salt in the pool to 3000 ppm, passing that water over titanium plates charged with 24vdc will break the salt down into FC and something. Once the FC has done its thing with the nasty organics, that something sucks the Cl out and it reverts to salt. At 3000 ppm, those with incredibly sensitive taste buds can detect a tinge of salt; most just notice the water is “softer”. Not surprising - all “water softeners” do is add salt to your potable water supply.
The titanium eventually erodes (as I understand it - maybe they just get so crudded up as to be ineffective and the SWG mfg’s like to sell replacements).
These started at $1000 for the unit and $7-800 for a cell. Then a maker of above-ground pools made one for $150 - and the In Ground people started adapting. Now there is a $500 unit, $200 cell being made for specifically for IG.
It is a sanitizer by virtue of being an oxidizer. Note that “oxidizer” does not mean “causes to combine with oxygen”: Oxygen is an oxidizer, but not the only one.
And it isn’t really meaningful to speak of “killing” organic material. Chemical substances aren’t alive. You can break them down, or convert them to other compounds, but you can’t kill them.
No - what they do is exchange calcium ions and sodium ions, so you end up with soluble Sodium Carbonate in your water, not Calcium Carbonate which has a habit of precipitating into your hot water pipes and staying there.
Salt is used as the source of the Sodium, and when you flush the column, you are flushing Calcium Chloride.
People with a Sodium issue have to be careful of softened water, but it isn’t “salty.”
Even one incident of urination is apparently enough to require draining 30 million gallons of water.
snort
But all of the bird and deer pee and poop is OK, because it’s natural and not man-made.
I can understand small children peeing in public pools because they haven’t been properly trained, but that’s disturbing that there’s adults who are too lazy and selfish to go take a pee in the bathroom.
Once I was at a hotel pool with my first wife. She said, “Hon, give me the key.”
“Why?”
“I need to go up to go to the bathroom.”
“Well, just go in the pool. It’s a big pool. The dilution factor is huge. Won’t make any difference.”
Five minutes later I looked up to see everybody jumping out of the pool, and somebody was yelling, “Hey, what idiot took a dump in the pool?”
‘Free chlorine’ refers to the hypochlorite (OCl–) ion.
Total chlorine is the sum of free chlorine and combined chlorine (chloramines)
Hypochlorite is most definitely an oxidizer . Oxidation is how it sanitizes.