Strong smell and burning eyes when air blower is on.

[Megsyperk]

Hi guys,

Attached spa/pool with spillover. We've noticed a strong chlorine smell and burning eyes when the air blower is on in the spa. My eyes are rather sensitive so it could just be that, but it seems odd. The eye thing is not from the actual water, but the air coming up around us from the blowers.

Water is crystal clear, but I always test the pool water and not the spa. You know what? I'm going to run a full battery on both bodies of water and report back.

Brb.


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[Megsyperk]

Tests are almost identical.

FC 7
CC < .5 (pool was 0)
pH 7.5+
TA 70
CH 300 (pool 275)
CYA 50


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[chem geek]

A spa's hotter water and aeration from spa jets volatilizes a lot more chlorine that gets into the air. Also, the higher temperature has the active chlorine level be higher at the same FC/CYA ratio -- it's about 3.8 times higher at 104ºF than at 80ºF. Also, a spa has higher bather load so can have more chloramines and some are volatile and irritating even at 0.02 ppm which won't be measured as CC.

Ideally in a spa that is separate one would start a soak with around 1-2 ppm FC ad 30-40 ppm CYA and would add chlorine after the soak. The most smelly, volatile, and irritating compounds would then be generated after the soak and can be outgassed with the cover off either after the soak or before the next soak. Unfortunately with your spa connected to the pool you don't have that option. Probably the best thing to do is to aerate the water in the spa (i.e. run the jets) for a short time before you are going in to use the spa. That may help remove volatile chemicals that may be irritating.

Another option is to lower the chlorine level before you get into the spa and this is most easily done using hydrogen peroxide where the same volume of 3% hydrogen peroxide is equivalent to getting rid of the same volume of 6% bleach (so you can use PoolMath with 6% bleach to figure out how much hydrogen peroxide to add to the spa). This way you can get down to 2 ppm FC. Since the spa water volume is small, this shouldn't affect your overall chemistry once you go back to exchanging water between the spa and the pool (I presume you do that after your soak).

I'm assuming that this problem is related to some volatile chemicals from the water. It may instead be something else going on with the blower. See if you experience the same problem if you just run the spa jets to aerate the water (i.e. see if you can smell or get irritation from what is outgassed). If that doesn't bother you, then there may be something growing in the blower since it has moist air so could be biofilms or mold or something like that.