My husband ordered the Poolmaster 22260 5-Way Test Kit from Amazon. Will this work for our situation? We were only planning on having the pool up for a a few more weeks until next year.
That is not the test kit you need. It only tests for chlorine, Total Alkalinity (TA), and pH. The chlorine test is an OTO test which is the least accurate (the FAS-DPD test is much better). The test kits we recommend are either the
TFTestkits TF-100 or the
Taylor K-2006 which are compared in
Test Kits Compared where the TF-100 is the better value. Not only do these test kits have the far superior FAS-DPD chlorine test, but also test for Calcium Hardness (CH) and Cyanuric Acid (CYA).
I'm trying to understand what Chem Geek said about my results being 375 times more active chlorine than normal. I figured that I was only 10 times higher than normal since 4ppm is safe according the the manual and I was somewhere around 40ppm at the most. I know that not having the CYA in there effects the active amounts, so does that mean that the total chlorine was 10 times higher than normal but the active chlorine was 375 times above normal? So, if I had added the CYA it would have protected me somehow? Ironically I didn't add the CYA because I didn't want to add any unnecessary chemicals and I read it was only for keeping the chlorine from degrading in the sunlight. I was keeping the pool covered at all times and only going in for an hour a day usually after the sun was off the pool, so I didn't think I needed it.
Does anyone know why I wouldn't have any skin reaction if the levels were so high? I typically get a skin rash and itchiness from going to public pools. Since I didn't experience this or notice a very heavy chlorine smell I didn't suspect the pool for several days. I understand that it's the chloramines that cause skin problems and the chlorine smell. And I understand that chloramines are the main health concern here. So, would't my lack of a skin reaction be a good sign?
Has anyone ever been exposed to similar levels that you know of? Is there any data on what this would do to a person online anywhere?
The FC level alone does not tell you the active chlorine level. As you surmised, Cyanuric Acid (CYA) would have protected you because CYA
significantly moderates chlorine's strength. When CYA is present, most of the chlorine is bound to it unless the FC is much higher than the CYA level. The FC/CYA levels we recommend for SWG pools has an FC that is roughly a minimum of 5% of the CYA level is equivalent in active chlorine to a pool with only 0.04 ppm FC with no CYA. I assumed you had 15 ppm FC with no CYA so 15/0.04 = 375.
CYA isn't just needed in outdoor pools exposed to sunlight. It does not just protect chlorine from breakdown from sunlight. It hugely moderates chlorine's strength. So having even a modest FC level with no CYA is a lot stronger in active chlorine than a high FC with CYA in the water. The chlorine bound to CYA is far less active in its effects with less than 1/150th the oxidation power and even less disinfection capability. So not putting in any CYA into the pool was not good especially when the FC level got higher.
It's not your fault that you didn't know about CYA being needed and how it would protect against chlorine over-exposure. This is a chemical fact that the pool industry denies and in fact you will read in many sources how they say that CYA is not needed in indoor pools or pools not exposed to sunlight and in fact many state commercial/public pool regulations prohibit use of CYA in indoor pools (and New York State prohibits it in all commercial/public pools). The actual chemical understanding has been known since at least 1974 but the chemical manufacturers of stabilized chlorine products kept repeating the mantra, "CYA doesn't matter; only FC matters" over and over again until nearly everyone believed it including themselves since repeating a lie for over 40 years is over a generation of people where origins of truth aren't even remembered.
Your skin (the outer dead skin layer) would have been oxidized by chlorine much faster, but it may be that your skin is not as sensitive to high chlorine levels as it is to chloramine levels and the latter tend to be higher in commercial/public high bather-load pools. On the other hand, your tap water may be chloraminated (i.e. have monochloramine for residual disinfection) so if you were sensitive to chloramine you'd likely have a reaction in the shower or bath (if you tell me you city I can look up your water quality report to find out if your tap water is chlorinated or chloraminated). As for chlorine smell, it should have outgassed significantly faster so you should have noticed a fresh chlorine bleach-like smell, but commercial/public pools often have a "bad pool smell" from chloramines so perhaps you didn't think there was a problem because you didn't smell the "bad" smell. So I don't know why your skin didn't react in your pool, but there are other people who have swam in high FC with no CYA and not noticed significant effects on their skin.
Basically if you were to dilute chlorine bleach 1:6000 (about 1/8th of a teaspoon of 8.25% bleach in a gallon of water) then you can see how that affects your skin -- it may not irritate it. People use such diluted bleach cleaning solutions, and even stronger ones, but usually wear rubber gloves.
Other than whatever your doctor tells you about your exposure, I wouldn't worry about it. From your symptoms you may have had the short-term effects of chloroform exposure but that is just short-term. As others wrote, it's like being exposed to an anesthetic, but in your case not nearly enough for you to become unconscious. From chlorine, it doesn't sound like you had even short-term effects. If you had significant nose or throat irritation, then there may have been some effects in your lungs though even that would more likely be short-term since the levels for chlorine itself were not that high. Basically, it's the chlorine by-products when reacting with ammonia and organics that are generally more of concern. You may have slightly increased your cancer risk, but we're talking about risks in the 1 in a 100,000 to one million lifetime risk range getting accelerated by one year so really negligible.
I didn't have any lung, sinus, or skin issues. It seems like if the chlorine was 375 times higher than normal that I should have had some of those symptoms, no? My 6 year old son said his eyes were burning a little, but I don't think it was bad, they weren't red. I didn't get any in my eyes. We did take fresh water showers afterwards but still had chlorine smell on our skin and our clothes were a little bleached out.
Did your swimsuit noticeably fade after this swim?
It was a black cotton tank top I wore, but yes it did.
It takes significantly higher chlorine levels to produce irritation of the nose and throat. In high bather-load commercial/public pools, there can be more chloramines including the very volatile and irritating nitrogen trichloride, but in your pool you wouldn't notice that unless perhaps you smelled your skin sometime after getting out of the pool (and if chlorine reacted with your skin it would be "bad pool smell" but probably not enough to be irritating). Your swimsuits fading or getting bleached out is the clearest indication of the significantly higher chlorine level. Compared to the level we recommend, every day of you using the pool at the high FC with no CYA was equivalent to about a year of such use at FC that is 5% of the CYA level. My wife used to experience this effect (though not nearly as extreme) when swimming in a commercial indoor community center pool with 1-2 ppm FC and no CYA where her swimsuits would degrade (elasticity gets shot) after every winter season while in our own pool with 3-6 ppm FC and 30-40 ppm CYA the swimsuits would last for 7 years before seeing similar effects.