Ah, summer: the sun, the ice-cream trucks, and the smell of chlorine that lingers on our skin hours after swimming. As it turns out, the latter of those three things might not be so great for us. As Ed tells Cheryl Tiegs during their green audit, ozone is an eco-friendly alternative to chlorine in pools. Here?s why:
The reason chlorine works for disinfecting pools is that it is essentially diluted bleach. That?s also why our eyes, skin, and hair can feel a bit funny after we?ve been in the water for a while. Ever spent the day at a pool and seen the lifeguard check the chemical levels several times? That?s so the chlorine is strong enough to disinfect the water but not so strong that it harms swimmers. Even with lifeguards keeping us safe, after summers upon summers of swimming, chlorine is not the most people-friendly or earth-friendly option for pool maintenance. One of its biggest drawbacks is the fact that chlorine reacts with substances in the water to form harmful chloro-organic compounds.
Many of us think of ozone merely as that vague substance in the sky that makes us feel guilty about using our air conditioners. Put simply, ozone (or O3)is a gas, present in the air in small amounts, which has oxidizing effects. That means it can get rid of the stuff that dirties up your pool. It also will not create chloro-organic compounds. In an ozonated pool system, a generator converts oxygen from the air into ozone molecules. The ozone molecules make their way into the pool and keep it clean. One of the drawbacks to ozone is that it does not always prevent algae growth, which is why some ozone users retain a small bit of chlorine in their pools. None is best, but less is better.
Ozone may not be perfect, but it safer than chlorine and lacks that strong smell (of which, admittedly, some of us might be irrationally fond). If you are a pool owner or aiming to be one, you owe it to your health to bypass chlorine and go for the O3.
