It’s near midnight now at my apartment complex and the tenant swimming pool is bubbling and roiling furiously and sending out huge clouds of vapor. The area has a strong smell of chlorine. What causes this? Do such swimming pools have some sort of carbonation system? The apartment maintenance won’t check it out until tomorrow.
Edit - it is not a hot tub
Stranger
Thanks, great info.
Normal pool plumbing issues that cause bubbles don’t typically “roil furiously”. Is it possible that someone dumped dry ice into it? That will definitely roil and bubble furiously and will have a visible vapor as well.
Possible, but I doubt someone would play a prank like that here. And the bubbles have been boiling for so long that it seems a much longer amount of time than dry ice could last.
Do you have the ability to post a photo?
If not, is it coming out of the “jets”? (If that doesn’t mean anything, pools are closed systems and jets are where the water enters the pool, much like you’d see in a hot tub or jacuzzi, but usually only a couple per pool)
Do you get the feeling the water is hot?
Don’t go there unless it’s very safe.
I can’t believe management isn’t on this.
The Fire Dept. might be interested.
Could be geologic activity. Is there a volcano nearby?
I would have guessed that, whatever it is, it was something that maintenance was doing deliberately. Maybe the process for adding the chlorinating chemicals produces bubbles while it’s being added?
Also, is this an outdoor pool? In what climate? In most of the US, pools would be empty this time of year.
Thankfully, I am no longer a pool owner, but when I was, this sort of thing was usually caused by air being sucked into the skimmer. That creates lots of bubbles. The “steam” is most likely just caused by the pool being warmer than the air.
Or magma upwelling.
We stayed in a hotel in Caldwell Idaho in early January where they had a full outdoor pool (there was a way to enter it from an inside foyer and swim under a glass wall). The outdoor surface of the pool bore a layer of foam peanuts. It was a few decades ago, though.
Volatile chemical content springs to mind.
Do Not Swim.
Well, if it enough chlorine to make the water roil, swimming would probably kill you.
In that part of the country, the pool might have been fed by a geothermal spring. I’ve been to a few such places.
It was not. It was a regular heated pool. The peanuts were just there for insulation and to reduce evaporation loss. Caldwell is in the meh-est part of the state.
Is it extremely cold? Could it be something like sea smoke?
We live right on the ocean, and when the air temp gets close to 0 F, the water can become covered with a low layer of fog.
A possible air leak in a pool, on a holiday?
Not unless there’s a suspicion of some hazardous chemical dumped into the pool to cause it or there’s another imminent danger to the community. At most, if they thought the pump was in danger of catching file they’d shut it off & do a lockout/tagout until a appropriate party comes to look at it.
@Velocity is it an outdoor pool or an indoor one?
Still happenin’ today?
Who empties their pool in the winter, season after season?
As a pool owner in the Northeast for over twenty years, I can attest that the water is usually only emptied out if there is some serious work that needs to be done. In my pool ownership years there were two times when I emptied it: when I had a new liner installed in the early 2000s, and when I had it filled in with dirt a few years back.
To close a pool for the winter you put a tarp over it and winterize the plumbing.
I eventually installed one of those fancy covers that stretch taught and they advertise with an illustration of an elephant standing on it. The cover was thick mesh so that rainwater would go right through but leaves would not go in.