The simple answer is yes but you’ve got to be careful about how you do it. Recycling bodies of water has been around for eons but it was only recently that the thought of recycling swimming pool came around. As the drought in California began to take national stage, looking for different types of ways to conserve water was at the forefront of many people’s minds. Seven years ago, we ourselves were faced with the reality of needing to change out the water in our swimming pool due to high calcium, total dissolved solids and cyanuric acid levels. This is commonplace for many swimming pool owners especially in the Southwest United States. In other areas of the country, calcium hardness isn’t as big of a factor but they still deal with high cyanuric acid levels which forces one to change out the water in their swimming pools. With that said, the thought of wasting approximately 20,000 gallons of water by draining a swimming pool was crazy to us. We thought, “there has to be a better way” and there is. Reverse Osmosis (RO) according to Wikipedia is, “a water purification technology that uses a semipermeable membrane to remove larger particles from drinking water. In reverse osmosis, an applied pressure is used to overcome osmotic pressure, a colligative property, that is driven by chemical potential, a thermodynamic parameter. Reverse osmosis can remove many types of molecules and ions from solutions, including bacteria, and is used in both industrial processes and the production of potable water. The result is that the solute is retained on the pressurized side of the membrane and the pure solvent is allowed to pass to the other side.
The key with RO was to make sure that using it on swimming pool water could be done. We researched and met up with a gentleman who has been treating water for the past 50 years. The result was to build mobile filtration systems that could travel all over the country and recycle bodies of water including swimming pool water to prevent the unnecessary need of draining and wasting water. For a majority of the last seven years we have been traveling around the San Diego area recycling swimming pool water which has enabled us to conserve close to 20 million gallons of water. In the last 2 years we’ve built 13 mobile filtration trailers for our service providers all over the country. We strongly feel that with this technology and the knowledge we’ve gained over the last seven years that we have the best solution for tackling not only a need in the swimming pool industry but also a way to make a serious dent in water conservation as well.
With this technology, there is some water loss but only about 15% of the total volume of the swimming pool. As we continue to build more mobile filtration trailers for companies around the United States we feel that the “Puripool Process” is the answer to not only the drought issues we are having in California but across the country as well.