Quality of communal pool water

[jacforte]

Hi All,

Apologies for using this forum, but cannot seem to find any clear answers online.

I am working in Northern Iraq and have just set up a company Ladies Social Group to empower our female staff more. One of their social activity requests is that they would like to learn to swim (I have 25 ladies that have never even been in a pool). I have found a city pool that will allow us to have exclusive use and bring in a teacher.

My problem is I have to ensure that the water quality is adequate - I know that they do test the pool daily and plan to ask them to show me their test results - but how do I determine what is a good result versus a bad one???? What are 'safe' figures for PH and chlorine?

I would really appreciate your help to get these ladies splashing.

Many thanks
Jac

 

[zea3]

Hi, welcome to TFP! There are some articles in Pool School you should read to help you understand the basics of pool water chemistry. The safe chlorine (FC) level depends on the CYA (cyuranic acid) level. The pool you use may or may not test for CYA, so you may not know if the FC level is safe or not without that test value. In a pool without CYA, 5.0 FC would be too high to swim. In a pool with 100 CYA, 5.0 FC would be too low to sanitize the water. If they do not know the CYA level, you can ask what they use to chlorinate the pool. If they use liquid chlorine, chlorine gas, calcium hypochlorite, or a saltwater chlorine generator then there might not be any CYA in the pool. If they use trichlor (trichloro-s-triazinetrione) or dichlore (dichlor-s-triazinetrione) then there is CYA in the water. Regardless of what they use in the water, the water should be crystal clear and not cloudy in any way.

Read through these articles and feel free to ask any questions. Good luck with your Ladies group!
pool-school/pool_water_chemistry
pool-school/chlorine_cya_chart_shock
pool-school/recommended_levels
pool-school/swimming_pool_definitions_abbreviations

 

[Isaac-1]

Zea has given you some good general starting reading material, having said that "safe" is a complicated issue, testing to see if basic factors like pH and Chlorine levels are in the accepted "safe" range is fairly easy. However even though such numbers along with visual appearance can insure some confidence in basic sanitation of the water, they are going to tell you little about the presence of possible water borne Chlorine resistant pathogens like Cryptosporidium (see this thread for a discussion on the topic cdc-guidelines-for-disinfection-t36945.html). Unfortunately there are no good field tests available for such things, and the only reasonable approach involves signage to ask swimmers to not swim if they are experiencing such stomach issues (which I think is now required by the state of California and some other locations), as well as proper cleaning procedures to followed by pool staff in case of an incident in the pool water.

Ike