Swimng pool water

I have 1500 gals. of swimming pool water in my back yard. What I would like to know is. Is the water save to drink for over an extended period?

I might add that the water is clear and cleaned with clorine, and there is no junk in the pool.

My guess, and it is just a guess, is that if you only used clorine it would probably be OK. But if other chemicals are used all bets are off. I think that I would prefer to use it for cleaning, high temp cooking, things like that, but if push comes to shove I would drink it...

Actually the salt is used to make chlorine, like the MSR MIOX device, but on a larger scale. In large pools this methode is prefered, because this methode does not requite chlorine transports.

If you only have chlorine in your pool then the chlorine can be neutralised with tablets.

That way you would only neutralise what you needed and the treated water would stay in the pool.

Thankfully we no longer have a pool, but over twenty years of tending one makes me wary of what goes in one! In addition to chlorine products, I remember adding algaecides of various types and a number of products to increase or reduce the PH. It seemed we were constantly adding chemicals to make something "right." It is inevitable that swimmers would swallow some water, so I guess a little would not kill you, but no way would I want to drink it routinely except in an extreme emergency.

A pool might be big enough to create some type of solar still with it, but the deeper it is, the harder it's going to be to get water to evaporate. It is too big a resource to pass up planning on using it.

why not just use a good waterfilter with a activated carbon core? Should take out most of the chemicals, is reasonable quick and not much of a hassle.

Local public health departments and some independent labs will test water for bacterial and chemical contamination and pronounce the source potable(or not).

Might be sensible to test your swimming pool water, water from your sump pump, and water from the nearest stream in preparation for use as a backup water source. In my experience, pools collect a lot of nastiness from the environment: bird poop, rodents, reptiles, dogs, cattle, acid rain, engine exhaust particulates, deodorant, sun screen...it is considerably easier to remove the bacteria than to remove the cows.That said, most of the rest of the world depends on water sources much more questionable than the pool.

After the cow fell in, we built a better fence.

Ok Nursemike, I have to ask. How did you get the cow out of the pool?

Thanks for reminding me of all those other nasties. I've also found dead rats, snakes (alive), dead baby rabbits, birds, and insects galore. No cows though!

I don't recall ever seeing a credible source say that drinking pool water "straight" was OK, particularly long term. I have only seen warnings to not drink pool water. You're not going to drop dead from drinking a mouthfull of it, although the pH and chemicals will likely irritate your GI tract and then you'll end up dehydrated because of vomiting or diarrhea, depending on how much you drink. There is also a lot of sodium in most pool water (just from the chemicals, not the salt in "salt water" pools), which will cause other problems. It's just not right for drinking.

Your average activated carbon filter probably does not filter out pool chemicals to any great degree. From a personal kit standpoint, I don't think anything short of RO or distillation would effectively get rid of the pool chemicals.

How effective would a sand filter with a couple of layers of charcoal be for cleansing water from a source like this?

Sue

It's similar to what your municipal supply probably uses with a post filtering treatment w/ chlorine.

IIRC multi layer municipal water filter has layers of:
anthracite coal
sand
two layers of garnet
and gravel.

Walked her to the shallow end and up the improvised ramp. same cow organized a breakout a couple of weeks later, on a Sunday. she and two colleagues broke out of the yard and headed south on Main Street, Gloversville, NY. Brother and I chased them. they took a right and headed up a side street; took another right and ran through the open back door of the church there, a congregation of Baptists. the herd headed down the main aisle, took a left at the altar and proceeded out the open side door. doors were open cuz it was hot, and the congregation tended to generate a lot of heat. We made it to the church shortly after they left, but the parishioners were kind enough to show us the getaway route. Forgiving \folk, the Baptists. We eventually caught up to them and choused them back to the barn, but the folks in the congregation said that the preacher was never quite the same after the incident.

That is one good thing about our hot tub (or more correctly, now the hot tub of the gal renting our house), a cover when no one is in it, and an eight ft high lattace fence around the deck (gotta keep prying eyes out you know)...

Whether your swimming pool water is safe to drink or not may not make much of a difference. Unless your pool has a bottom skimmer or another method to intake water for filtration from the bottom of the pool, you will only be able to use a limited amount of the water. Once the water level drops below the level of the filter intakes, the pool water will go bad pretty quickly.

Never thought of that.(but by making a small change in the intake I can filter from the bottom) but come to think of it,, if the power goes out then no filter. My main question was concering the outher thing in the pool water. It is and has been well clorinated for several years and is nice and clean. Would boiling take care of the problems, or will I have to have a different type of filter to pass the water thru so I can drink it??

When I make an American Red Cross presentation on Disaster Preparedness, I tell people that the chorine sold for use in a swimming pool has other chemicals in it as well and is not a good source of long term drinking water. Most people consume from 1/2 to 1 gallon of water per day, and yet the suggested water use is 3 gallons of water per day per person. I would suggest that you use the swimming pool water for the other things we use water for (hygiene, cleaning, etc...), and not drinking it.
Although the NSF has some very high rated carbon filters, I do not know how well they would work on pool water. In an emergency, my present (unofficial) plan is that if I needed to use pool water to drink, I would put it through the best NSF rated counter top carbon filter I could get.

Big_Al, I've been trying to research this some more for the past couple days, but I still haven't found a definitive "Yes, you can drink pool water" with an explanation why. I guess part of the reason is because there are a variety of chemicals people can use, so it's hard for a blanket statement to cover every chemical. Coming from the filtration side, no one who makes consumer grade activated charcoal filters ever mentions pool chemicals, so it's hard to say if they would work.

Well, trying to be pragmatic here and considering a truly emergency situation, I think SheetBend's advice is as good as you're going to get to this question. Treat the water for microbes by your method of choice at the time of use, and also filter through activated charcoal to try and remove as many chemicals as possible. If it's a matter of dying of dehydration next to your 15,000 gallon pool or drinking pool water, then drinking the pool water is an option.

Boiling might reduce some chemicals, but I'm not sure how many typical pool chemicals are volatile enough to be affected by boiling so it might not really work well at all. I don't think many are. I would rely on the activated charcoal over boiling.

I wonder if the Berkey filters (black) would filter out the chlorine.



http://www.jamesfilter.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=14

LED, why don't you ask them?

Sue

According to these websites, they do remove chlorine.

http://www.berkeyfilter.com/

http://www.berkeyfilters.com/berkeytech.htm

I addressed the question via email to Berkey filter and here is the answer:

Q: Can your filters safely remove the multiple chemicals that are often added to swimming pool water? The idea is to use the pool as a source of drinking water in an emergency.

A: I am not sure of all the chemicals in swimming pool water but a list of removed chems re listed at www.berkeyfilter.com home page. Removal of chlorine for sure.

Thank you,
Dwayne Hinton
Hinton International

Note: The list of chemicals listed on the Berkey website as being removed by their filter is quite extensive. I am not qualified to know if it would remove every harmful chemical used in pools, but using their filter would do a lot to reassure me that the water is safer to drink.

Activated charcoal tends to remove certain classes of chemicals fairly well. Chlorine is one, plus a lot of organic chemicals. But that leaves a lot of things that activated charcoal does not filter at all. I mean, take something simple like sodium. Activated charcoal does not filter sodium, so if you had a home water softening system on your tap that added sodium to the water, the sodium concentration would pass through the activated charcoal filter in your Brita pitcher unchanged.

Anyway, my point is, be careful not to just assume that just because of the extensive list (which I just skimmed on the Berkey website), that this filter will make pool water safe. "Safer" as you point out, maybe, but there is a real possibility that it could also completely miss pool chemicals that would make you sick if you're drinking gallons of it long term.

Actually, that got me to thinking. If you already have an idea early on in some crisis that you're likely to completely run out of your stored water with little hope of resupply and would be forced to start drinking pool water eventually, it would actually make sense to start mixing drinking and pool water early on to dilute the chemicals. Again, I'm talking emergency situation here, but I think the dilution would help to lessen the impact of drinking straight pool water, like maybe GI upset. I guess another possibility is that you find yourself needing to support a lot more people than you were planning for. Again, to stretch your water supply, dilution early on might be something to consider.

This idea goes against everything that emergency managers tell people about pool water, just so everyone is clear. But I'm just raising the point for people to think about in case they're faced with such a choice.

Regarding this sodium question...

I was under the impression that water softeners were attached to the source of water coming into the house. And I also assumed that swimming pools were filled with garden hoses, from the faucet that is between the meter and the house.

If what I understand is correct (one never knows), there shouldn't be any more sodium in the swimming pool water than what is normally found in the local well water or municipal water system.

Right? Wrong?

Sue

Back to the sand filter question. Since chlorine is an issue, and microorganisms are a facet of the sand filter, and chlorine usually kills algae, would swimming pool water make a sand filter useless?

Sue

I found a partial list of the chemicals commonly used in pool water maintenance, and it illustrates the complexity of trying to filter them out. This came from the Morris County Municipal Utilities Authority, NJ website:

"A partial list of pool chemicals includes chlorinated isocyanurates, lithium hypochlorite, sodium bicarbonate, potassium monopersulfate, hydrogen peroxide, sodium hypochlorite , calcium hypochlorite, and certain ammonium, brominated, copper and silver compounds, and muriatic acid."

Perhaps none of these chemicals are harmful in the concentrations found in a home pool, but I do not want to be the one to find out!

How to treat swimming pool water to make it potable.

Take a manageable amount of water from your pool and run it through a cloth filter such as a Milbank bag to remove the large particle matter. Then add chlorine to this water, wait for the proscribed length of time for the chlorine to work. Only after this time is up add Alum to the water and leave to settle. Alum is a flocculent that attracts impurities including chlorine and settles on the bottom if the container, the water above the layer of alum is safe to drink just be careful not to disturb the alum

Sue, there are a number of pool chemicals that may typically be added to pool water that contain sodium, such as sodium bicarbonate, which is where the extra sodium comes from, above and beyond whatever may be in the municipal supply. And many people have "salt water" pool systems these days, too, which create chlorine using the salt in the pool, similar to how the MSR Miox personal water filter works.

As is pool water, assuming it is properly maintained, shouldn't be a problem. Small amounts might be unpalatable due to chlorine but healthy enough. People,especially kids, swim in it and normally take in significant amounts doing so. Even heavily chlorinated pools should be okay to drink as-is in small amounts. The human body handles chlorine pretty well. The normal stomach is awash 0.6 mole hydrochloric acid. Whereas pool water is maintained pretty close to normal Ph.

As time and the situation allows getting rid of the chlorine is simple enough. Simply pouring the water back and forth between containers can get rid of some of it. Less energy intensive simply exposing to air will dissipate the chlorine in time. Faster if the water is warm.

We are talking about survival water here. Your not opening a water bar. Given a choice between a well maintained residential pool or some of the mud puddles I have sucked water out of I would take the pool every time.

Of course if your actively contemplating utilizing a pool as a water source you might invest in a few inexpensive carbon filters. If the pool won't be maintained you would simply treat the water like you would from any other open source. Filtering and chemically treating as needed.

I don't have a pool, nor do I plan to ever own a pool...

Back when I was a teen, in Atlanta, we owned a pool, inground, 18x36, 8ft deep at the deep end. Guess who did most of the daily maintenance

While the water will go funky very fast if not cared for - with or without the filter running. Sunlight and heat would cause the chlorine to evaporate off and wind, rain, and critters would bring contaminates in to the pool.

However, with the winter cover on the water would stay clean for months (September to May).

I think people may be over-reacting a bit to the "all those chemicals in the pool" fear.

My pool has chlorine (yes, it's the exact same thing as Clorox, just double the concentration, and the same thing the water utility puts in the water), and occasionally a pH increaser or reducer, which is a simple grocery store acid or base, like Borax. And I'm talking a cup or two of this for 7000 gallons. At the beginning of the season I put in some stabilizer, which is cyanuric acid. Again, a cup or so for 7000 gallons.

I don't use any other algaecides or other stuff, and don't need to. Some people do go overboard and put in every chemical their pool supply shop recommends. Some pool chlorine has the stabilizer already in it, which is unnecessary and dumb.

Chlorine, maybe a little acid or base, a little stabilizer. That's it.

I'd drink it in a heartbeat. If it was too chlorine-ey, I'd come up with a way to put some of it in buckets or something open to the air to let the chlorine evaporate off over a couple of days. If I was really nervous, maybe some sort of simple charcoal filter for the other stuff, but probably wouldn't bother.

David