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Formerly Silver Bullet Water Treatment Company is now a part of Clear Comfort.
Silver Bullet Water Treatment Company is now a part of Clear Comfort.

A Case Study: Optimizing For the Future of Aquatics

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Although no one knows how long it will take for aquatics facilities to be operating like before, it’s clear that COVID-19 has already changed the way facilities will operate forever.

To succeed in a post-COVID world, keep staff on payroll, and make patrons happy, we must find opportunities to maximize what we have while we have it.

During the COVID-19 shutdown, Josh Herbert, aquatics division manager at the City of Albuquerque Parks and Recreation Department, tried a new water treatment system to reduce costs and improve air quality. What he discovered was a smarter solution that he wanted to implement on all of the City of Albuquerque’s pools.

Addressing age-old problems

For many indoor aquatics facilities, maintaining fresh air quality takes time, effort, and resources, especially for heavily used pools open all year, such as the West Mesa Aquatic Center’s indoor leisure pool. With water features, a slide, and a zero-slope entry, the leisure pool provides a handicap-accessible swimming environment for the entire community.

“With the high use, the facility was originally designed with an ozone system which lasted a total of six years,” said Herbert. “The air circulation in the building met minimum air changes but did a poor job at exhausting chloramines.”

Many assume that “pool odor” comes from chlorine. However, it’s actually chloramines, or combined chlorine, the disinfection by-product of chlorine reacting to contaminants such as sweat, lotions, or urea. In addition to odor, DBPs can cause red eyes, irritated skin, allergies, asthma, and other health issues.

To help lower chloramines and provide protection against waterborne illnesses, the aquatic center switched from ozone to UV but Herbert explains what resulted. “That UV system was not only costly to procure but maintenance was reaching up to $8K per year,” said Herbert. “Also, after installing the UV system, our chlorine consumption increased significantly.”

“With the UV system reaching its 10th year, we needed to either replace the unit or find an alternative disinfection method,” said Herbert.

An alternative solution

“After researching alternatives to the expensive UV systems, we found Clear Comfort,” said Herbert. “After seeing the benefits of lower energy consumption, ease of installation, lower maintenance costs, and efficacy of the oxidation potential, we were convinced that this would be a good fit to replace the UV system.”

Herbert decided to install…

To learn which water treatment solution Herbert would later install on the remaining pool circulation systems throughout the City of Albuquerque, read the full article on Aquatics International.  

 

Originally appeared on Aquatics International Magazine.  

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