How to keep kids pool clean?

Factual Questions
1

This could go either way, here or in IMHO. So I’ll leave it up to the mods to boot it if it’s wrong.

We’re trying to get a small pool set up for our 2 year old daughter to play in this summer. We picked up this one and set it all up. In about 2 days it was all slimy and just generally gross. So I did a little research, and the opinion at most online sites I found was to empty the pool every night, and let it dry out. While it’s not a huge pool, there is enough water in it, that aside from the pain in the ass factor, I’m not sure the ground will dry after dumping that much water on it. Taking a look at chemicals, they all seem to be for larger pools that have filters and such like in them.

So the question is, does anyone know of a way to keep kids pools of this size clean and non-scummy for at least 4 or 5 days? I don’t mind emptying it out every 3 or 4 days, but every night seems a bit much.

Thanks in advance!

2

I have the same problem with my daughter’s pool, so I’ll be interested to see the responses.

I did drain the pool after a few days of rain, and I feared the ground wouldn’t be able to absorb all the water quickly enough. Well, I drained it at sunset. At first, the water pooled up all throughout the grass in about a 10-ft circle (pool size is 5 ft diameter x 8-10 inches deep). However, by the next morning, the grass was no worse for the wear. I guess the ground did soak it up after all.

I’d like to prevent the slime build-up, too. It occured to me to perhaps clean the bottom of the pool with a weak bleach solution and a sponge, then hose off thoroughly when done. But if there’s an additive that can help prevent the scum in the first place (a teeny amount of bleach, maybe?), then I’d love to know about it.

3

We have a normal pool and a kiddie pool, we transfer pool water into the kiddie pool, skim it and it lasts a week or two. But before we had the normal pool we did the following.

Installed one of these( not the exact pump) filter pumps*. and treated the little pool with the proper chemicals. We started doing things like that when we had water restrictions and couldn’t replace the water every one/two days.
*Of course depending on the amount of water in the pool, you can find even smaller filter pumps, different setups for ease of use etc.

4

Slime is the least of your problems. If you are worried about algae, you are way past healthy. It’s what you can’t see that can make your kids sick, such as all the bacteria that will be present. Kids jump in - water sloshes around all their orifices, water is contaminated. I’d say a few hours of this = contaminated.

There is no practical way to keep the water longer than a day. Heck, after a few hours, I doubt any test anywhere would show the water as ‘safe’.

That’s the reality of it. The best way to use temp pools and fun slides that require water is to let the water run the whole time or at least every hour until you circulate most out of it. Otherwise, you have a petri dish on your hands.

You could do what everyone has done for decades before we got germ-aware: let everyone enjoy it, deal with ear infections, nausea/sickness/other infections and pretend like they didn’t come from your petri dish experiment.

The MOST you could do is put some stabilized chlorine tabs in a dispenser and let it float around, but since all the water is not stabilized against UV loss, I doubt it’d do anything, and the limited am’t of water and ability to balance pH will render it pretty useless.

Changing the water is the only practival option, and after 24 hours it is WAY past filth.

5

Bleach? Or is the amount required unsafe for pools?

I know there is an amount of bleach that is safe to add to questionable water to make it potable in an emergency. I was thinking that perhaps that same proportion of bleach in a wading pool (not talking about diving, swimming, or even getting the hair wet) would be safe.

6

Chlorine bleach (calcium hypochlorite and sodium hpyochlrorite) are water disinfectants, but they can only be used in water that is stabilized with cyuranic acid (I might be killing some spellings here). These are the chemicals that keep pools clean in conjunction with essential chemicals that support them (more chemical support the chlorine, but do not directly disinfect, such as stabilizer/cyuranci acid, acid powders, baking soda, etc)

Cyuranic acid usually needs a filtation system to break down before it can protect the chlorine and is not manageable in small am’ts. It keeps chlorine/bleach from being lost instantly to the atmosphere and UV rays. It must be re-added, usually from stabilized chlorine tabs, when it it lost to splash and washover, but not add the kiddie pool pace.

Big pools with filters are easier to take care of than small pools. No filtration, hard-to-dose the chems in small am’ts and large masses of organic matter (including people) vs water make it darn near impossible to manage a tiny pool, especially with the am’t of water lost.

That’s why dumping and adding new water is the only practical answer. You really have no practical way of keeping clean a small pool that has no filter, a bad people-to-water ratio and lots of water loss.

Dump the water, and keep fresh water coming in. Really. Put in 3 or 4 kids and imagine where all the water washes through and around them, then tell me a few days outside and that water is even close to safe! I wouldn’t give it a few hours.

7

The amount for emergency drinking water is between 4 and 40 drops per gallon of water, depending on the strength of your bleach. The CDC recommends straining and settling cloudy water first and adding bleach to the clear water to make it mostly safe to drink. Bleached is the third choice for emergency drinking water, after bottled and boiled. You can also use iodine to make water potable. cite with table.

But, as **Philster **says, this is not a long-term treatment. The CDC is not expecting that you can throw a few tablespoons of bleach into a hundred gallons of water and then leave it outside under the sun and still drink it three days later. If I have a bunch of kids in the kiddy pool who don’t regularly share germ circles, then I do add a bit of bleach to attempt to reduce immediate cross-contamination by the germy kids, but it doesn’t really give you extra time to let it sit around - the bleach breaks down in the sunlight, after all.

8

Grasping at straws now – is there anything else that can be added? Liquid dish soap (even enough to make bubbles)? A bottle of lemon juice? Vinergar? Rubbing alcohol? Anything?

9

They are all going to dry the skin or irritate the skin and eyes, and while I can’t venture a firm positiion as to the disinfectant properties, it is likely negligible.

I’d help you if I could!

10

This is into WAG territory, but maybe worth a shot: essential oils. I use them in baths all the time for pleasure and for medicinal use. Most of them are, to some extent or another, fairly antimicrobial, antibacterial, etc. Lavender is gentle enough to not irritate most people’s skin. Citronella has the added bonus of being slightly bug repellent. Most essential oils, however, can burn the skin if placed directly on it and just dumping the e.o in straight will give you puddles of burning liquid on top of your water. They would have to be mixed with a little milk to encourage emulsification with the pool water - which is itself pretty yucky looking. I have no idea if you could, as a practical matter, get a large enough supply of real essential oil (as opposed to fragrance oil). I use about 15-20 drops of essential oil in 1 Tablespoon milk in my bathtub full of water, but that’s for treating myself in it, not for preserving the water. I really couldn’t begin to guess the amount needed for a whole kiddy pool. And, again, they break down in sunlight, so I don’t know how long it would be useful for. Not very long, is my guess.

And, of course, I’m not sure what would happen to your grass when you eventually dump out the water. Probably nothing, but I’d try it in a hidden corner of my yard first.

11

Well, there are some actual recommendations for kiddie pools here. And yes, I realize it’s a pool chemical manufacturer’s website, but it’s a good illustration I think of the procedures that you have to go through in order to practice chemical sanitation on even a small kiddie wading pool: you gotta test, add chemical, and test, and test again. There’s no easy way to do it. Here’s an .edu website with basically the same information: It’s a LOT of work. If you’re gonna keep it going, you’re going to have to be out there testing it three times a day.

Or you can just dump it every day or two, like everybody else. We had kiddie wading pools of various sizes in our backyard from 1987 to until just a couple of years ago, one of which was a big hard-sided 30" deep pool that Daddy liked to float around in, and dumping them every couple of days, even the big pool, didn’t harm the grass in the long term, as we always moved the pool’s location from week to week. And we never noticed that the water had trouble sinking in. It went somewhere, since our back yard isn’t concrete.

The main problem was in hoisting/folding up the side of those injection-molded Wal-Mart pools in order to dump, but there’s a knack to it, you discover. You get it part of the way, you let water flow out, and then it’s lighter, and you lift it up more, and more water flows out, until finally it’s empty and light enough for you to flip it over.

I notice that the pool you’ve picked out really doesn’t hold that much water; the inside dimensions are considerably smaller than the outside dimensions. So it shouldn’t be that much of a PITA to empty and refill. It’s designed to be a toddler frolicking place, not a place to “swim”, i.e. submerge. They’re supposed to play on the slide and just generally fool around, not swim, so it doesn’t hold that much water.

Also, with such a small volume of water, if you’re going the pool chemical route, and you do the math wrong, or mis-measure, and accidentally get too much pool chemical in there, there’s less volume to buffer your mistakes, and an increased chance of nasty burning eyes, or worse, due to too much pool chemical.

Really, just empty it every day, especially since it’s a two-year-old who’s going to be using it, and who is statistically more likely to pee into it without realizing you’re not supposed to do that.

12

Ok, thanks all. That is sort of what I figured…but I thought it was worth a try to ask here first before I started the empty/fill routine on a nightly basis. We’ve had some wet days lately, so that’s probably why the water isn’t draining very well into the ground and drying very fast. Appriciate the assistance.

13

Get yourself a drill powered pump, it’ll let you choose where all that pool water goes (and they’re cheap)!
Look for the ones that use standard garden hose fittings.

CMC fnord!

14

And, if possible, put the waste water where it will do some good, such as a vegie garden.

17

Reported for profile spam. (althuryaa)
Though why you think we’re in Riyadh, I’ll never know.