We don’t have a swimming pool. It is only warm enough in the frozen tundra where I live to enjoy a pool for three months at best, and even then only if you have a heater. Or I suppose if you find it invigorating to swim in frigid water, which I definitely do not.

Friends of ours have pools and they are always telling me about the hassle of the chemicals and chlorine. When I was a child my hair used to turn green from the chlorine in the camp pools.

Now in an effort to find a more environmentally friendly way to maintain a pool, people are turning to chlorine free systems. The New York Times profiled a few companies that are revolutionizing the way people keep their pools bacteria free.

TechnoPure, a company based in Uxbridge, Mass., makes a system that pumps pool water through a chamber containing coated titanium plates which oxidize and burn off organic waste. Copper and zinc ions sanitize the water, resulting in a pool that’s virtually maintenance free in terms of chemicals.

Another company takes a different approach,

DEL Ozone, based in San Luis Obispo, Calif., makes generators that inject ozone gas into the water as it recirculates, oxidizing bacteria and killing microorganisms. The generators are usually employed as a supplemental sanitizer to reduce reliance on chlorine.

These systems are on the expensive side, $10-20K in additional costs. Not to mention the hassle of finding someone to maintain the pool.

There are other options which still utilize chlorine as the primary anti bacterial agent, but use much less of it. DEL Ozone and Nature2 both sell for under $1000.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Green Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.