NY Times article "Keeping Chlorine Out of the Pool"

[bbb]

Wow. I don't even know where to start - I don't think I agreed with a single thing in the article.

Here's the link (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/garden/29pool.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)

Snippet:
Neil Gross, a retired Wall Street futures trader who lives in Great Neck, N.Y., hired Mr. Paul three years ago to convert his backyard pool to an ozone system by DEL. Mr. Gross and his wife spent in the neighborhood of $10,000 on a chlorine-free system because, he said, “we don’t like inhaling that chlorine smell.” He added, “if an organic will clean just as well, why not use it?”

Ever think the chlorine smell could be caused by using too *little* chlorine ;)

[CarlD]

What's "unnatural" about chlorine? It's all over the place--the ocean is FULL of it--it's called SALT (NaCl) and salt is used in SWGs to make....CHLORINE, which, when it's used up, recombines BACK into ...Salt.

Ozone is a deadly poison and ozone generators are either 1) Ineffective or 2) extremely dangerous high electricity users.

I don't know how you can get greener than a SWG unless you have a wind generator to power it!

[waterbear]

To quote my favorite line from "Forrest Gump":
"Stupid is as stupid does."

[smallpooldad]

Not only did the writer talk about Ozone but also talked about Nature 2. Which I am still convinced stained my pool when I was a Newbie many years ago.

I thought Ozone generators were MAJOR power consumers or am I wrong?

But from this site it does seem that it can be very helpful if PROPERLY SIZED. The technical specifications can be fairly complicated and that is the key but still ideally needs to be used in conjunction with chlorine, albeit with far less chlorine needed:

http://www.alisonosinski.com/pooltips/54.htm

So in the end it was good that the writer brought this up but sadly did not delve much more than skin deep. This unfortunately will let companies maybe not as good as Del to sell wrongly sized products to an uninformed public as a panacea to their smelly pools which they do not look after. This is the real problem with this article.

[DennyB65]

What do you expect from the N.Y. Times???

[CarlD]

Don't blame the Times--it's reporters and media in general. Articles like this make me crazy, because after all these years, I KNOW that a chlorine pool, properly maintained, is the cleanest, safest pool you can have. I KNOW that if you smell chlorine or are irritated by it, you have improper maintanence and need MORE chlorine. I frequently am running an FC of 7 or 8 with a CYA of 40 and there is NO chlorine smell--because MY pool is clean.

The idea the chlorine is "unnatural" is nuts. Part of what keeps the oceans clean is the chlorine ions from the dissolved salt in it.

Besides, a pond is "natural"--with fish, frogs, slimy algae, weeds, mosquito larvae...and typhoid, typhus, and hepatitis if someone or something defecates in it.

It is PRECISELY against those dangerous and deadly diseases that we work to keep our pools "unnaturally" sanitary. And safe.