Moblaine's pool

[PoolDoc]

I contacted King Technology -- they tell me there is NO copper in their Mineral Reservoir. What do you make of that?

image and quote from: http://www.kingtechnology.com/produc...s-poolfrog.htm; archived 7Jun2012
The POOL FROG® Mineral Reservoir, which contains our EPA registered mineral formula and fits inside the Cycler. The minerals continually replenish themselves for added protection against bacteria, as well as keeping your pool's pH balanced by acting as a neutralizer. One Mineral Reservoir will last the full season or up to 6 months; use two reservoirs for year-round pools.

In the pool industry, the term "minerals" has been applied to three things: copper, silver, and zinc. At effective levels, copper kills algae, inhibits bacteria a little, and stains hair and pools. At effective levels, silver inhibits algae, kills some bacteria slowly, and stains pools gray or black. I've seen no evidence to date that zinc can be added to pools at levels that are effective at anything . . . but it doesn't stain.

I'm going to try to look up the King Tech EPA registration, but it may be they've revised it to remove copper (which stains) and silver (which stains and is expensive) and left zinc (which AFAIK does nothing much). This allows them to keep the claim "minerals", charge more, and still not stain your pool. Of course, if they DON'T have copper or silver, then the question would be, why replace the unit . . . EVER?

Ok, I found it (below) -- the mineral pack is 99.5% inert and 0.5% AgCl, silver chloride. Now, that's interesting: silver chloride is not likely to stain your pool, because it's so very insoluble in water. The "efficacy" data (last link below) is also very interesting: in a glaring typo, not only does it ID the effective agent as "0.5% sodium chloride" (salt) in the front of the report, the efficacy data appears to me to show that the added silver has ZERO effect on sanitation.

I'm going to ask Chem_Geek to take a look, and see if it looks as weird to him, as it does to me; he's much more familiar with EPA registration standards.

But it appears to me that, when you purchase a "mineral reservoir", you are buying a product that's almost perfectly safe to use . . . because it does almost nothing!

Just a caution: this discussion is likely to get into deep technical waters, resulting in this thread moving to the "China Shop" section.

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Found it:
http://iaspub.epa.gov/apex/pesticide...PLS:4:0::NO::: - King Tech index
http://iaspub.epa.gov/apex/pesticide...EG_NUM:53735-2 - Trichlor pack
http://iaspub.epa.gov/apex/pesticide...P8_PUID:463787 - Mineral reservoir
http://www.epa.gov/opp00001/chem_sea...7-Oct-06_a.pdf - Efficacy data

All reports archived 07 June 2012 @ SwimmingPoolResearch