We’ve all been there, excitedly walking into an indoor pool only to be instantly repulsed by air quality. It gets into your nose, your eyes, your lungs. Anywhere that air is able to get, it’s there. You start to rethink your trips to the local pool just to avoid it. Any hint at illness is immediately blamed on it. But this isn’t just a local problem. This air quality issue has become a very legitimate concern at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, most noticeably in the form of airborne chloramines.
Whenever you smell that distinct chlorine smell that you get at your indoor swimming facility, what you’re actually smelling are the chloramines that came from the pool water and have entered the air. There are ways to minimize chloramines by controlling their formation or breaking them up once they do form, but there is no way to fully prevent them once people start to enter the pool. Therefore, the problem turns to what to do with these chloramines when they inevitably form.
The air that contains the chloramines is much denser and heavier than the normal air, and therefore the chloramine air is usually found closer to the pool water’s surface. This can be easily detected by the difference in smell from the surface of the water compared to the smell from head height. This heavier air is also harder to move through a room than normal air, which in turn leads to a problem known as short circuiting. Short circuiting means that only the non-chloramine air, which is much lighter and easier to move, is replaced by the clean, outside air, and in turn the heavier chloramine air is not affected, leaving the room more and more full of the poor smelling air. If you’ve ever walked into a pool and saw those giant fans on the ground, pointing out the door, just know that they most likely aren’t trying to dry the floor but actually trying to get the chloramine filled air out of the area.
One way to try and prevent short circuiting is to use HVAC systems to try and blow large quantities of air from the outdoors, which would in turn push the heavier air up to combine with the lighter air and then remove it by the HVAC system. However, this process requires a high air velocity, somewhat like a big gust of wind, which will in turn make the very patrons you’re trying to please cold and uncomfortable. The process also takes a ton of energy, since the replacement air needs to be reconditioned to the atmosphere of the pool, both in temperature and humidity.
But if you’re thinking that means you’re out of options, don’t fret. This is where the Breathe EZTM comes in. This technology was designed with one goal in mind: to mitigate and inhibit chloramines in the pool, right at the source, using advanced oxidation technology. The equipment produces free radicals at a constant rate, which removes the chloramines and the other contaminants that create them. These free radicals generate over two thousand megavolts of oxidation potential, resulting in a quick demise of chloramines as well as other pollutants the second they hit the surface of the pool. And once the chloramines are destructed, non-contaminated chlorine is liberated and released back in the water, doing what it was made to do: clean. And with the Breathe EZTM properly implemented, your standard HVAC system can focus on the less-offensive air instead of trying to do all the work, leaving you with clean air and lower energy costs.
So next time you walk in to your local swimming complex, take a minute and give a sniff. If you aren’t overwhelmed with the smell of chlorine, that means that the owners of that pool have taken the proper steps to ensure that you are comfortable in all ways under their control. They have their chloramine evacuation system properly installed and are committed to making sure you enjoy your time. And now that you’re done enjoying the cleanliness of the air, dive in!