NaturAqua -All in one pool Sanitizer

[Bilben1]

You can say that again. I've looked at hundreds if not thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers published in respected journals and that one from 1974 is one of the best I have seen in the detail and care they took to get accurate results, in their comparisons to previous investigations, in the cleverness of some of their methods and techniques, in their clear presentation of their methods, results, and discussion, and in the absence of typos or other errors.

When I was getting permission to post a scanned PDF copy of their paper, I spoke with James Butler, one of the authors of that paper, and complimented him on that fine work. He said that O'Brien was a main driving force behind it as a graduate student and he was surprised that the paper still was being looked at, but he wasn't aware how the industry had largely ignored it for nearly 40 years in order to promote the "CYA doesn't matter, only FC matters" mantra.



If you want to haul less bleach, then of course automation with a saltwater chlorine generator would eliminate that, but if you don't want to go that route you can probably cut your chlorine usage in half by using a mostly opaque pool cover. If you can't use a cover, then another technique would be to use an algaecide such as Polyquat 60 weekly or a phosphate remover and then set your FC/CYA minimum to around 3% instead of 7.5%. You'll lose less than half as much chlorine due to sunlight so have roughly half the chlorine usage. Unless your phosphate level is rather high or you are using a phosphate-based metal sequestrant (such as HEDP) or have very high phosphates in your fill water with a lot of evaporation and refill, then the phosphate remover will likely be the less expensive mostly one-time dosing approach, but you'll have to figure out whether it saves you money or whether it costs more but is worth it to you for hauling half as much bleach.

My last home in Phoenix had a pebbletec pool that came with an swg and an ozonator. After the electrode wore out in the swg I stopped using both systems. The SWG elements were just too expensive as far as I was concerned and the ozonator despite the manufacturers claim was just a gimmick. Maintenance still required hauling gallon bottles of acid and 40lb bags of salt. Without regret I went back to using tabs , bleach and acid to sanitize the pool. The only difference that we noted was that the water didn't seem as soft and our skin was very dry even though the salt level in the pool was the same. We have always attributed that to higher chlorine levels.

Here in SoCal I try to keep the FC in the 5 -9 range. I do use a phosphate remover as insurance, my pool does not require much. The phosphate level is usually at the low detection limit. I'm looking at adding a solar blanket to cut down on evaporation, heat and chemical loss. I have used them in the past and I think they are well worth the money. The only downside is that my pool has an irregular shape and so the pool cover would not work with a conventional reel system so it becomes a two person job to cover and uncover the pool.