Looking for the right UV light system

[needs advice]

Hello, I need to set up an 8 foot round, 52" deep, heated therapy pool in my garage. It's brightly sunlit with large curtained windows, but no sunlight will directly strike the water, even with the door open when I'm exercising. I need to know what to buy for a UV light sanitation system......and where to go. I know I'll be using chlorine, but as my darn cats will be prowling around the pool when not in use, I need protection from giardia (my cat poop eating dog had to be treated for it). The people I bought the pool from, Arthur's Pools, were a bad experience, and I think it will be the end of me if I have to go through another fiasco when I go for a UV light system. Please help me figure out what to do. The pump is an Intex Model 633T, and it is supposed to pump 41gpm. (I am SO GLAD I found this forum!)

needs advice

 

[duraleigh]

I'm going to bump this just to keep it in the forefront......it's a special situation that begs a better answer than I can give.

 

[needs advice]

Thank you so much. I've been working on this for WEEKS, and not getting very far. About all I've learned is that the UV units are passive, in that they don't have their own pumps to put the water through at any certain speed. But if my filter pumps water at 2,500gph, and the UV units say they proccess 2,400gph, is ALL of the water not getting quite enough time in the tube to kill pathogens because it's being pushed through too fast? And when my filter isn't brand new clean, does it still pump 2,500gph? And in that case, do I have to run the pump longer to get all the water through the tube? Then they talk about the quartz tubes getting clouded with mineral and not really doing the job even though the light is on. So how do you judge how clouded is still ok, and how clouded is unacceptable? A thousand dollars is a lot of money to pay for something that won't be working half the time, but I'm afraid to exercise in HIGH chlorine several hours a day, and they say chlorine doesn't deal with giardia anyway (which we KNOW is in the ground around our place....it can live for 2 months in the ground, and for all we know it's the neighbor's cats continually reinfecting our place).

 

[BadOleRoss]

I have never had any experience with UV lights in swimming pools but I did use UV light filtration on some very large aquariums I had a few years ago. You are correct in that the water needs to pass through the light chamber slow enough so that the pathogens are exposed to the light long enough to kill them. In the aquarium world, we use to "T" off the return line so that one line went straight back to the tank and the other line went through the UV sterilizer. We would add a valve to the line going through the UV sterilizer so we could slow the water down so the UV sterilizer would be effective. I hope this helps a little. Good luck in finding your answers.

 

[JasonLion]

If the pump is moving water faster than the UV system is rated for it will be less effective than its spec, but it will still be doing a portion of the job it is intended to do. Water that is closer to the lamp will still be processed.

Keep in mind that the amount of water a pump moves varies depending on all kinds of factors, water temperature, pipe size, pipe length, filter dirtiness, the number of fitting in the pipe, and so on. A pump "rated" for 2,500 gph is not all that likely to actually move 2,500 gph in the real world, as those specs are normally written for ideal conditions.

Mineral coatings on the glass shouldn't happen at all if you maintain your chemical balances properly.

Chlorine will kill giardia eventually, but amount of time it takes to do that is so long that it isn't likely to ever get all of it when you are in a situation like the one you describe where the water is constantly being re-infected.