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Swimming Pool Tips & Safety (Part 1)
As most will know the pool season is upon us now so we thought we would give you some hand tips and so healthy safety information for your Swimming Pools this season.
Lets start from the top with:
Cloudy Swimming Pool Water
What we all would like for our swimming pools is nice clear, sparkling water as its much nicer to swim in and looks so good. When your swimming pool turns cloudy its beauty is lost some where under all the mist within it making it uninviting, and no one wants to swim in it.
If your swimming pool water is cloudy it may be due to one or more of the following factors:
- Clorine; your pools chlorine level is too low,
- PH; your pH is too high,
- Calcium; you have a high level of calcium hardness,
- Stabiliser; too high level,
- Alkalinity; too high level of total alkalinity,
- Algae; high growth of pool algae,
- Microscopic Particle; large quantity in pool water,
- Dissolved Solids; too high in total,
- Metals; high levels of discoloured water,
- Filter; clean or change and servicing
Your cloudy pool water should go if you check and test all the above problems.
Swimming Pool Algae:
Algae the main problem and most common complaint that swimming pool owners and users have. Algae can be spotted a mile of and is very unsightly making most people not want to enter a pool with even a small amount of algae.
The algae itself does NOT cause any kind of disease's but it can hide them within. Algae is just a plant which can produce food from sunlight and carbon, this provides bacteria with the nutrients it needs to multiply very fast (this is what can cause illness). Chlorine in your swimming pool will be used up fast tring to fight of the algaes growth thats in your pool water. When chlorine does this is tends to higher the levels of pH which in turn will decrease your pools remaining chlorines efficiency.
If you leave algae unchecked it will grow out of control turning your swimming pool water green and resulting in a smelly pool with foul tastes and odours. Black Algae is the most difficult type of algae to control, green and blue green algaes are much easier to remove. Black Algae will also stain your hole swimming pool (both walls and the floor of your pool
Its much better to try and prevent algae rather then waiting and having to cure it. The correct amount of chlorine should keep your pool free of algae and prevent out of control algae growth. If you notice algae growth it will require harsh treatment to completly remove it and keep it out. A chlorine and algaecide shock treatment is usually recommended. If your pools installed with a mineral sanitiser system and you have algae turnning up then its a sure sgin that you need a refill. If you have a sanitiser installed provided your water balance is correct algae can NOT grow in the sanitised water. All your water care treatments can befound under our Pool Cleaning & Chemicals section.
Did you know: Over 21,000 types of algae is known to mankind but swimming pool can only be found with a small fraction of them!
Swimming Pool Smells of Chlorine:
We have had swimming pool owners come to us in the past saying along the lines of "I can smeel the chlorine in my pool so I must have put enough in my pools water but the swimming pool water still is not really all clean. What am I doing wrong
This is the strange bit if you can still smell chlorine from your pools water you have NOT put enough chlorine in the swimming pool! Its not the chlorine as such that you can smell its infact chloramines which are formed if your levels of free chlorine are too low. This is because they react with swimmer waste, sweat, urine, ammonia and many other compounds containing nitrogen. When if happens they are only partially broken down which creates halomethanes.
To check this is the case you should; measue your free chlorine and the total chlorine. This will allow you to calculate unwanted and irritating combined chlorine compounds in your swimming pool water as bellow:
Combined chlorine = Total chlorine - Free chlorine
If you find that your swimming pools water has little or no free available chlorine = too much combined chlorine you will need to do a chlorine shock treatment or use our other swimming pool sanitiser products to completely disinfect and remove all the combined chlorine in your pools water.
If you do not want to use large amounts of chlorine we do have non-chlorine shock products which can also destroy combined chlorine in the swimming pool water.
