COLUMNIST
Controlled Systems:
The future of pools after MCO?
By Bruce Hope
Pools are back! Post MCO, swimming
pools are allowed to operate under
strict SOP. One of the biggest changes
(and challenges) is testing the water
chemistry (chlorine and pH) every 2
hours. This is to ensure the water is
always safe for use, however testing
every two hours requires having people
available to do the testing, and also
the means to adjust the chemistry (add
chlorine) when required.
Testing is generally performed manually
using a test kit. A water sample is taken
and a reagent added. The resulting
colour indicates the chlorine and pH
levels. While this is effective it is time
consuming. An alternative would be to
install inline realtime chlorine and pH
sensing equipment. The results could be
displayed real time and automatically
logged.
Another area that could be addressed
is the method of pool sanitising: manual
vs semi-automated vs controlled
systems. All have their advantages
and disadvantages. Manual dosing
of chlorine is the cheapest and is the
most common method in Malaysia, if
not globally. Manual dosing is generally
performed daily for hotels, however
condominiums and other facilities may
have a gap of two or three days. Our
definition of semi-automated is the
use of dosing pumps to inject chlorine,
or using salt water chlorinators to
produce chlorine. The advantage of
semi-automated systems is that the
pools are always being sanitised. The
disadvantage for both manual and semiautomated
is that neither of them can
respond to events such as extremely
hot weather, large numbers of bathers
or heavy rain. Controlled systems are
where an automatic control machine
such as a PPM controller uses probes to
check the pool chlorine and pH levels,
and automatically adjust as required.
Rest assured, all three sanitising methods
can provide safe pools, however, the
testing frequency requirement for each
method is different and may require
different rules.
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