Pool Water

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Sep 3, 2004
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I had a thought the other day that I felt might be appropreate here. In the event of an Emergency/diaster how long would it take for pool water to become drinkable? Assuming you stopped adding chemicals as soon as you could. I know that right off the bat you could use pool water for washing/hygine related needs, but if you started getting low on stored water, when would the pool water be chemical free enough to drink? And would you then need to treat/purify it?

Thanks
Michael
 
lumpymike1 said:
I had a thought the other day that I felt might be appropreate here. In the event of an Emergency/diaster how long would it take for pool water to become drinkable? Assuming you stopped adding chemicals as soon as you could. I know that right off the bat you could use pool water for washing/hygine related needs, but if you started getting low on stored water, when would the pool water be chemical free enough to drink? And would you then need to treat/purify it?

Thanks
Michael

Chlorine will eventually evaporate out, but I am not sure about the algicides.
 
Good question. I wonder if running it through a good water filter/purifier would do the job? Time for a little research....
 
Hey I can answer this!!! I am the greatest pool guy ever!!! Shock (Chlorine) is gone in 12 to 24 hours so that is not a problem. Chlorine that is stableized (tables, sticks ect) takes longer depending on the sun and the level of the Chlorine in the pool at the time. I would say a good week for the Chlorine to disapate. The algeaside is gone in a few days. There are a few different types though so it would also depend on what one it is. Good idea though.
 
If Chlorine was the only chemical in the water I guess you could filter it out or wait for it to evaporate. But I have been tols that Poo; checicals also include salts and those will remain. And added to the chemical salts you have people salts, sweat and other types of suspended salts. These could ammount to quite a load depending how many kids have been in your pool.
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Sweat and other people salts just throws off the PH level in the pool. The same goes for spas and hot tubs. The filter depending on what it is removes most body oils and such. I think maybe you are talking about a salt genorater system. It does not add salt to the pool what it does is create a Chlorine gas and that is added to the pool water.
 
If you run it through most camping filters it will be drinkable if the salt and heavy metal content is not too high, but the chlorine and organic compounds will tend to wear out or use up the carbon much faster than normal.

If you run it through a big carbon block filter and then reverse osmosis it it will be fine. The carbon is required before the RO membrane because just a smidgeon of chlorine will eat the membrane. The membrane should filter out most anything remaining.

If you distill it and run the distillate through a carbon filter it will be fine. Distilling can carry many volatile organic compounds with the water. Carbon filtering can remove these if the filter is efficient enough. This can be partially avoided if the water is brought to a heavy boil driving off most volatiles at the start and that first steam allowed to escape before starting to capture the rest of the steam.

By the time the chemicals are out of the pool water due to breaking down and evaporating, or combining with stuff in the pool water, the other stuff in the water will start growing all kinds of nasty stuff, so a "safe window" may be awfully short if all you are concerned with is the added chemicals.

Adding chlorine to the pool will kill most "germs", but it does not remove anything from the water. Chemical treating of any water does not "purify" it. The bodies of all killed microorganisms, the skin cells of swimmers (and worse secretions), the bugs and spiders and leaves etc. are not removed from the water by the chemicals. Some of the chemicals make the pool filter able to grab a bit more of all the junk, but not much. Worse, the action of chlorination on organic compounds inherently adds carcinogenic and other organic compounds to the water.

Boiling the water will kill the living nasties, and drive off much of the volatile (low boiling point or low vapor pressure) contaminants. On the other hand, any remaining chemicals, salts or heavy metals (lead, cadmium, arsenic, uranium, plutonium, etc.) will be more concentrated than before boiling off some of the water. This can definitely kick marginal water into EPA failure. Short term this is not likely to be a big deal, but long term it can accumulate terribly.

Running the water through a Dalton or Berkey type ceramic filter will remove almost all the living nasties, and most of the bodies and twigs. It will not remove salts, heavy metals or organic compounds. Adding specific filter media for specific contaminants will help but starts to get really exspensive if you want to filter out each possible metal, compound and salt.

Drinking unfiltered pool water for a week or 2 will almost always be better than dehydration and death. However there is a distinct possibility that you will wish that you had died before you get better.
 
Thank you for all of your answers, there is a lot more too it than I thought. Our emergency place is at my in-laws, they have a full hot tub where I figured I could get wash water, and there are many pools in the nieghborhood. The San Diego river is about 2 miles off, would hate to have to lug water from there.

Thanks

Mike
 
you could drop a baby ruth candy bar in it to keep the neighbors from wanting to grab some of your water...
 
The only problem with the baby ruth is that it might be too effective. Sort of like the guy in the bar, leaves a note on his beer that he spit in it so no one else will mess with it. When he comes back there is an addendum saying "I spit in it too". What if you come back and there are additional floaters, or unknown additives? The purity level is simply not knowable. Someone might decide that it is a safe place to dump sewage since someone else already did. You either have to decide to trust it, or decide to be prepared for whatever.

I think the best approach would be a pool cover and some really good filtration as previously described. And a really good fence.
 
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