Owning a swimming pool in the Southwest often leads to problems during the hot summer months. High temperatures accelerate evaporation, creating elevated calcium levels in the pool from the need to add more water, and thus more calcium. Our fill water is loaded with calcium and other hardness minerals, which can often be problematic for swimming pool owners. We generally suggest that you need to drain a pool once calcium levels exceed 600 ppm, which seems wasteful, especially when water was, and still is, at a premium and drought conditions exist in many parts of the Country.
As a pool service company in San Diego, California, we at Pool Services Technologies Inc. figured there had to be a better solution to this problem. Most of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and other southern U.S. states are well populated with swimming pools and deal with this problem daily. We put our heads together and designed a mobile filtration system that could recycle swimming pool water instead of draining it. As previously mentioned, swimming pool owners are usually told by pool professionals to drain their swimming pools when their TDS climbs above 3,000 ppm, when CYA is over 100 ppm and calcium is above 600 ppm. This is a reality in the southwest, because as the water evaporates-due to high temperatures-the minerals concentrate in the water and stain the tile, the surface of the swimming pool and can damage equipment.
High calcium levels can make taking care of a pool challenging. Calcium deposits are difficult to remove, unsightly and have been said to block chlorines ability to perform at excessive levels. Additionally, these deposits can attach to the interior of plumbing lines, pump shafts and heat exchangers, voiding warrantees and causing damage. Draining a pool to address this issue creates a risk of cracking the interior finish and/or raising a swimming pool out of the ground; both costly, if not impossible to repair.
With that said, we felt that designing a mobile filtration system that could lower TDS, calcium and CYA, along with correcting other problematic water issues, was a perfect option, as it doesn’t ever require a pool to be drained, except to re-plaster. The mobile filtration trailer was designed to filter both commercial and residential pools, and pools can be used during the process. Inside the trailer is a large industrial reverse osmosis system that works on high pressure, thus making water loss extremely minimal (approx. 15%). The trailer is completely self-contained and runs off its own power, and is designed to filter up to 40,000 gallons of water a day. The process is relatively simple: once the trailer is parked onsite, two hoses are rolled out to the pool. The intake hose carries water from the pool into the trailer, where three sets of membranes filter everything out of the water and then returns the clean water to the pool through the output hose. Everything is a function of time. The trailer has many different components that make it possible to know, based on the original chemistry of the pool water, the exact amount of run time to filter the pool. This filtration time will allow for setting the chemistry levels at an optimal stage that is better than the tap water provided from your water provider. The end product is actually drinking water!
The “Puripool” process was designed by Pure Water Industries. to filter nearly any size pool, with any type of surface and in virtually any condition. This is an excellent alternative to draining pools and saves hundreds of thousand gallons of water in a region where water is at a premium. To date, Pool Services Technologies is approaching 10 million gallons of water conserved in the San Diego area, and has its sites set of producing these mobile filtration trailers for pool professionals across the United States.
The price to filter your swimming pool is slightly higher than a drain and refill, but the end product is much better; not to mention conserving on average nearly 20,000 gallons of water per pool, in about a twelve hour timespan. As a pool professional, knowing that this type of service is available is important when the draining of a pool is in question, and the ability to offer an alternative to draining and refilling is something most pool owners appreciate.