Quote Originally Posted by jereece
However someone at work recently gave me a 50lb bucket of Sanuril. They no longer use this product and were getting rid of it. Sanuril comes in solid 3" tablets and the active ingredients are,

- CALCIUM HYPOCHLORITE 69.3%
- 2,4-IMIDAZOLIDINEDIONE, 1-BROMO-3-CHLORO-5,5-DIMETHYL- .94%

My question is can I use this in my pool much like you would use Tri-chlor tablets? I do need to raise the calcium level in my pool becasue my tap water is very soft. However I am concerned about the second ingredient. I am not familiar with it and am wondering if it would mess up my pool chemistry or be of any concern to swimmers. Seems like I read somewhere on Pool Solutions that bromine would mess up chlorine based pool chemistry. The second ingredent does have BROMO as a constituent, but at less than 1% I am not sure if it is enought to be concerned about.
(Emphasis added - Ben)

[Anti-EPA rant]
Yeah, I bet they don't use that any more -- 'bromates' and various brominated organics, which can form downstream of a santitation process using bromine, are the EPA 'panic-chemicals' du jour! Like a long line of chemicals before them, they aren't really sure if all those bromo-thingies are that terrible, but they (the EPA and green lobbies) think that they might be, so like they did with DDT and cyclamates and Alachlor and dioxin and chlorinated organics and asbestos . . . they've decided to scare years off everyone's life in order to save you from yourself, from the evil industrialists putting terrible things in your water, and from those awful bromo-thingies. So far, I think the only thing that's actually turned out to be anywhere as dangerous as they've suggested were the mercury compounds. And the lives they've saved there are a small fraction of the lives lost to malaria (because of the DDT ban) and cholera (due to the
chlorine 'panics').
[/Anti-EPA rant]

But it's all interesting. I'd wondered what was in Sanuril; now I know. It's cal hypo + 1% of pool bromine

Better not use it in your pool; even small amounts of bromine make it impossible to stabilize your pool. It would be fine in a large indoor pool though, as long as you didn't use too much of it. (The dimethyl hydantoin carrier builds up -- like stabilizer from trichlor -- and eventually causes problems.)

Ben "PoolDoc"