Chlorine or Ozone

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VF

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Jul 16, 2009
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Hi everyone, I am in the process of building a pool and boy did I not except the big decisions I was up against. Everyone is trying to sell their product saying theirs is the best blah blah blah...
Anyway, I am now about to decide whether I wanna go go with Chlorine or Ozone, my family is very sensitive to chemicals and I am almost sold on teh Ozone but i am afraid I am making a bad choice?!
Please let me know your opinions,
Best Regards
VF
 
Ozone does not leave a sanitizer in the bulk pool water. Because of this ozone is always used with chlorine. As long as you are going to have chlorine, it is much simpler, less expensive, and more reliable to go with chlorine only. In an out door residential pool, ozone is essentially a waste of time and money.

Chlorine is really not bad for use in a pool. The vast majority of the problems attributed to chlorine are actually caused by poor pool maintenance. If you follow the directions we provide, you won;t have those problems and shouldn't have any issues.
 
what do u mean by "Ozone does not leave a sanitizer in the bulk pool water?"-so what u r saying is that no matter if I put an Ozone system in I will always have Chlorine in it anyway? What do people with terrible allergies do? Txs Vera
 
Yes, if you install an Ozone system you still need to use chlorine too.

A true allergy to chlorine is very rare. I expect they simply don't swim. Alot of times when people are reacting to what they think is chlorine is actually Combined Chloramines, a byproduct of disinfection that can occur when pools are not maintained or chlorinated properly.

As Jason said, if you follow the recommended guidelines of TFP you won't have these issues.

If you do a google search (bottom left corner) of chlorine allergies, ozone and any other subject you are curious about, you can read thru many threads that have covered these topics - you may find your answers there.
 
VF said:
what do u mean by "Ozone does not leave a sanitizer in the bulk pool water
Click to expand...

Ozone sanitizes the water as it passes through a chamber, but it can be the biggest part of a day before a given part of the water passes through. None of the ozone goes into the pool itself. Ozone is a supplementary system to be used with chlorine in the water. The chlorine remains in the water and almost immediately kills contaminants that enter the water while you are swimming.

I'd be willing to bet you couldn't tell a glass of my pool water from a glass of bottled water by smell or sight. A properly maintained pool has no odors.

You'd probably be well served by a saltwater chlorine generator.
 
We have ozone because we fell for the sales pitch. Didn't save me from a green pool! :mrgreen: That's how I get here. We started with pucks, dutifully following the pool man's advice. (read: spend lots of $$) Now we follow the advice of all the great folks here. No more green!
 
I have an Ozone generator and in retrospect I don't know if I'd buy it again, but I've turned it off a couple of days lately as an experiment and I've noticed that when it's off, I'll sometimes have .5PPM combined chlorine at the end of the day (which is generally gone by morning when I add bleach to the pool). When it is running it seems I finish the day with no combined chlorine.

Based on these rather unscientific observations, I'd say that you might get a slight reduction (<5%?) in chlorine usage with the ozone (whatever the ozone oxidizes presumably doesn't have to be oxidized by the chlorine), but not much else.

The marketing for ozone touts a larger reduction in chemical usage mostly because you can stretch out the time between shocking (before I went to BBB, I'd shock about every 3 weeks instead of every week). If you're using BBB, you rarely shock anyway, so the savings will be a lot less than the market hype indicates.

One really annoying thing about the ozone generator (and I don't know if it's inherent to the units or a problem with my installation) is that it injects bubbles into the pump basket and they all seem to wind up coming out of one return and there's a constant gurgling coming out of that one. It may not seem like much, but if you're close to the return, the gurgling transmits through the water and can really rattle your rib cage!
 
Personally I think it's a waste of money unless you know for a fact you family is allergic to Chlorine.

I chlorinate my pool via a SWCG (Saltwater Chlorine Generator) which is just like using bleach, but I test my waster daily to ensure a very low CC (aka Combined Chloramine) level. It's the CC's that make your pool smell like chlorine gas.

I keep my FC level fairly high (6ppm-9ppmFC, but my CC is always 0.5 or less) and constantly receive comments like..."wow it's amazing how a salt pool doesn't smell at all like a chlorine pool" What they don't know...is a saltwater pool is a chlorine pool, I just use a SWCG to generate the chlorine :hammer: .
 
After many re-occurrences of cancer and no reason as to the cause I started looking for anything that may cause it. Since I had a pool and heard that chlorine, at the time I didn't know it was the chloramines, is a known carcinogen I began a quest to eliminate chlorine from my pool. Two summers ago an acquaintance stated that his pool was running only using an oxidizer designed by an engineer who normally cleans up swamps from manufacturers like cheese factories. Yup I'm from WI. I think it was a fancy aerator as best as I can tell. His pool looked great. He said he was still using maybe a gallon or two of chlorine a month. I thought wow, this is what I've been looking for. How do I get it. I met with the engineer and he rambled on and on about stuff I never understood but the part I heard was chlorine free and no charge if it did not work. I thought what the heck. So the saga begins...he installed his funky aerators to my returns in a temporary fashion so as to easily remove them if I was not happy. That should have been my first signal of what lie ahead but all I heard was 'chlorine free' and "I have several pools running without chlorine now." Our pool had these 4 foot high PVC pipes aerating away and making lots and lots of noise. Since I wanted this to be chlorine free he also felt as though we needed to put in a commercial corona discharge ozone generator. So that we are all on the same page I was told that my cost would be around $1500 if I was happy with the results. So in goes the CD Ozone. Everything looked great, for about a week. I suppose that is how long it took for the chlorine to be completely depleted. Without dragging this on and on suffice it to say that our pool season was ruined by this test and my pool looked like many of the green swamp pictures you all see posted on this site. My kids were really ticked at me since they could no longer swim. One day I dumped about 34 gallons of chlorine in the pool and by the next day there was no trace of it. BTW I did not have a good test kit yet.

So I spent the fall and winter months 2 years ago researching all of this and was I yet convinced that this was a stupid idea? Nope. I am stubborn. Even though I read and understood that ozone will eat chlorine and actually saw it occur in my own pool, and that I needed some chlorine residual in my pool. I ordered my own CD ozone generator. I started out the season without the ozone and got my pool sparkling. I did get a test kit over that winter. Suffice it to say that over about a 30-40 day period while monitoring at least once a day I saw my pool slowly degrade. So as not to have a repeat of the previous season I applied all of the knowledge I had gained from this site, thanks BTW, and once again had a sparkling pool. This is my second year of having a sparkling pool. I just added the SWG cell to my Aqua Logic to eliminate the need to add chlorine daily and found that conversion seamless. There was one day when I put the salt in that I heard complaints of a salt taste but that's it.

In a nutshell don't waste your money or your swim season with an ozone generator as your sole sanitizer. Anybody want a Frog or an ozone generator? :p
 

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You can read some of my previous posts on this topic. I have both swg and an ozone system. Here is the short answer:

1. Go with the swg. The ozone is too expensive.
2. Yes ozone will work but you have to install some serious $15000 worth of ozone equipment with a holding/treatment tank ( several hundred gallons), and have an residual ozone carbon scrubber. 99% of people won't do this.

SWG works great when done correctly per TFP recommendations.

Ozone alone or even ozone with low dose chlorine will grow algae.

Good luck... Smart money is on a swg and variable speed filter pump.
 
My parents just put in a new pool and they are using salt water to lessen the amount of chlorine they need to put in the water. By using salt for disinfection, you need much less chlorine and it's much more comfortable for people with sensitive skin. It's not as salty as ocean water, but my kids with eczema and allergies love it. My kids have bad reactions to pools with chlorine, so the salt water pool is much better for them.
As far as ozone in pools goes, we just swam in a pool today that was treated with ozone and my kids were all reacting severely to it with their allergies. This is the first time any of them have swam in an ozone treated pool, and they've never reacted this strongly to chlorinated pools. Has anyone else had this problem with allergy sensitive people and ozone treated pools?
 
Hi, Tracy,

Welcome to the forum.

My kids have bad reactions to pools with chlorine, so the salt water pool is much better for them.
Click to expand...
A salt water pool produces chlorine that is precisely the same chemically as if you poured chlorine into the pool....there's no difference.
 
Tracy said:
My parents just put in a new pool and they are using salt water to lessen the amount of chlorine they need to put in the water. By using salt for disinfection, you need much less chlorine and it's much more comfortable for people with sensitive skin. It's not as salty as ocean water, but my kids with eczema and allergies love it. My kids have bad reactions to pools with chlorine, so the salt water pool is much better for them.
As far as ozone in pools goes, we just swam in a pool today that was treated with ozone and my kids were all reacting severely to it with their allergies. This is the first time any of them have swam in an ozone treated pool, and they've never reacted this strongly to chlorinated pools. Has anyone else had this problem with allergy sensitive people and ozone treated pools?
Click to expand...

saltwater pools = chlorine pools

they are one and the same
 
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