It is common for pool owners to search for the best pool water system once they learn that there really are many different ways to approach caring for and maintaining their water. You might expect that it is a simple matter of following some technical protocol but as it turns out there is a lot of gray area around exactly which technical protocol will result in the optimum outcome. I don’t mean to sound elusive to the uninitiated, but this is the reality of managing pool and spa water. I am your pool guy and I build you a pool or renovate yours back to health so you ask my opinion as to what the best way to care for the water is. I tell you to use chlorine and balance your total alkalinity and pH, along with a few other chemical details that you largely ignore. You are already picturing copper ions dancing in your mind.
How could there not be a better solution than chlorine. The answer is so obvious to you that it never even occurred to you that chlorine might actually be the best option you have. There must be an alternative because you have read about ozone injection systems, germicidal UV lights, advanced oxidation process, copper ionizers, antimicrobial silver, active enzyme treatments, biofilm removers, hydrodynamic cavitation, salt water systems, Polyhexamethylenebiguanide – one of these HAS to be better than chlorine, right? Wrong. First, one of those things on the list does not belong, and that is salt water because salt water is just a regular chlorine pool so that is not an alternative to chlorine, just an alternative to where you get your chlorine from. Hopefully this is not new news to you, and if it is then I insist that you take a moment to read my article.
Getting back to the rest of the list, I will ask you a very simple question. Can you name for me any commercial swimming pool that you can go to near your house that does not use chlorine, but instead uses any one of the peripheral devices or chemical processes as an alternative to chlorine? You might have a pool near you that is open to the public that utilizes one or more of these systems in addition to chlorine, but can you name a single one that uses only the methods listed above with no chlorine at all? For 99.9% of you reading this the answer will be no. Do you think that every commercial pool in America uses chlorine because “big chlorine” bureaucrats want to keep you down somehow? No, chlorine is in your drinking water, the water you cook and eat with, the water you bathe in and the water you bathe your children in. Trying to avoid chlorine by using an unsafe alternative in your pool while continuing to drink it in your water and cook and clean with it daily…this just makes no sense. Here are the four reasons we use chlorine in pools, as well as in all water supply systems:
Chlorine is a sanitizer
Chlorine is an oxidizer
Chlorine is an algicide
Chlorine can hold a residual value in the water
This is the ultimate list of criteria which must be satisfied in order for your water to be safe. Each and every item, device and chemical process above fails to meet at least one of these four critical elements. You can pick any one from that list and it will be missing one of these four things. Ozone for example is an oxidizer, and works great with a few limitations. It can not build or hold a residual value in the water which means it does not function or provide benefit until the water has been pulled in through the filtration system and had the opportunity to pass through the ozone injection point…or UV light, or any other system other than chlorine.
