Chaos water park in Eau Claire is using a fraction of the chemicals and chlorine they once used because PoolNaturally. A product made from Sphagnum moss that’s imported from New Zealand but the future of this water treatment system is a bit closer to home.

Click on the link for the full story: First water park in the world to use sphagnum moss to treat water

Yet, as we know from recent events, water fun can swiftly become tragedy if some simple, basic safety rules aren’t observed. Make sure you and your family are water safe by following these safety policies:

BASIC WATER SAFETY

Learn to swim

The best thing anyone can do to stay safe in and around the water is to learn to swim. The American Red Cross has swimming courses for people of any age and swimming ability.

Learn CPR and insist that babysitters, grandparents, and others who care for your child know CPR. The American Red Cross and the Minnesota National Safety Council both offer CPR classes.

Never leave a child unobserved around water—any water, including pools, spas, bath tubs, etc. Adult eyes must be on children at all times when around water.  The average child stays on the surface of the water for only 10 seconds and the drowning process can start after they are submerged within 20 seconds.

It takes as little as 2 inches of water and 2 minutes for a child to drown. Toilets and buckets of water can be deadly to toddlers, who are top-heavy and can fall over head first. If you have toddlers in your home, always keep the toilet seat down and never leave a bucket of water unattended.

Always swim with a buddy; never swim alone, even in your own pool.

Wear a lifejacket or PFD whenever possible, the Personal Floatation Device must be US Coastguard approved and fit properly.

Don’t swim if you’re under the influence of alcohol or other drugs.

POOL SAFETY

Make sure the depths of your pool are clearly marked. Teach children and other inexperienced or non-swimmers to stay in the shallow end.

Post CPR instructions in the pool area.

If you have a cordless (not cell) phone, keep it with you at the pool. If there is any pool emergency, call 911 IMMEDIATELY; then attempt rescue efforts.

Always keep basic lifesaving equipment by the pool and know how to use it. Pole, rope, and personal flotation devices are recommended.

Enclose the pool completely with a self-locking, self-closing fence with vertical bars. Openings in the fence should be no more than four inches wide. The house should not be included as a part of the barrier.

Pool covers should always be completely removed prior to pool use.

Consider installing an alarm that will sound if anyone or anything falls in the pool. Remember: A child can drown in less than two minutes.
Never leave furniture near the fence that would enable a child to climb over the fence.

Keep toys away from the pool when it is not in use. Toys can attract young children into the pool.

If a child is missing, check the pool first. Go to the edge of the pool and scan the entire pool, bottom, and surface, as well as the surrounding pool area. Keep your pool water sparkling clean so if someone is on the bottom, they can be seen.

Make sure your pool deck is made of or treated with slip-resistant materials.

In public swimming pools, always swim in areas supervised by a lifeguard and read and obey all rules and posted signs.

LAKE & RIVER SAFETY

Children or inexperienced swimmers should ALWAYS wear a US Coast Guard-approved personal floatation device/life jacket when around the water.

Watch out for the dangerous “too’s” – too tired, too cold, too far from safety, too much sun, too much strenuous activity.

Set water safety rules for the whole family based on swimming abilities (for example, inexperienced swimmers should stay in water less than chest deep).

Be knowledgeable of the water environment you are in and its potential hazards, such as deep and shallow areas, currents, depth charges, obstructions and where the entry and exit points are located. The more informed you are, the less likely you are to be injured or killed.

Use a feet-first entry when entering the water.

Spring Start Up/Opening

Install the PoolNaturally® system at the beginning of the pool season for best results, but better late than never!  Returning PoolNaturally users report much easier pool start up the following summer.  Excellent opening results are seen even if users installed PoolNaturally as late as August of the last pool season.  

Start with a fresh filter

Remove filter media (sand, DE) and replace with fresh media if you are just starting the PoolNaturally system. If you have a cartridge filter, for best results replace it or please ensure the cartridge is well cleaned.  Why?  If you are new to PoolNaturally, your pool has years of accumulation of biofilm and the filter will contain a large amount of it.  The easiest way to get rid of much of it fast is to change out the media or replace the cartridge filter.

If you used PoolNaturally last season, be sure to backwash the sand filter after filling your pool with water.  Place cleaned or new cartridge filters back in the system. 

Less is more!

When starting/opening your pool, know what you are putting in it!  If you used PoolNaturally last summer, don’t start by adding shock, algaecides and cyanuric acid.  Expect that your pool will start up with a minimum amount of additives.

-Add chlorine to get desired free chlorine.

-Adjust pH, alkalinity, hardness , and CYA to recommended levels below:

• Free chlorine     1-2 ppm
• pH          7.2-7.6
• Alkalinity              40-120
• Hardness             200-300
• CYA                        *less than 20 ppm

-Once water has been balanced, add PoolNaturally® PoolRefills to PoolNaturally® contact chamber according to the dosage chart below.  It is important that once there is enough water in your pool to start the pumps, get it balanced and add PoolRefills as soon as possible, to begin experiencing the conditioning effects of moss.

How Your Pool Will Change With PoolNaturally

Depending on the age and how much your pool is used, there could be a lot of material (including scale) that is shed from the pipes, pumps, heater, and pool surfaces – this is evidence that the PoolNaturally system is working!  Use a pool vacuum to get rid of the larger particles that settle out in the pool and clean or backwash filters to get rid of the smaller particles.

Maintain 1-2 ppm of chlorine – you won’t need anything higher.  With PoolNaturally, your pool is no longer precariously on the edge of ‘going bad.’  It will take less chlorine to maintain this 1-2 ppm free available chlorine, so turn down your automatic chlorinator or salt generator to the lowest settings.

Able to Swim Again

In fact one lady wrote to me about her inability to swim indoors due to her asthma.  She was a competitive swimmer in her younger years and had to stop swimming because of severe breathing problems from asthma caused by the air in the pool.  She heard about the sphagnum moss treated pools and how people could swim without using their inhalers so she tried swimming again.  She reported that she could do a full workout without breathing problems and thanked me for “giving her back her favorite sport”.

With a little research the relationship between recreational and home water, chlorine and asthma became clear.

The Chemical Reactions

Here is what happens when we use chlorine to sanitize water in a pool or in our municipal water supply.  As it turns out chlorine is not the problem.  A byproduct of chlorine and biological molecules that contain nitrogen is the formation chloramines.  These chloramines come in many different forms such as mono, di, and trichloramines.  One of these compounds, a molecule called trinitrochlorine, has been implicated in causing airway irritation.

Trinitrochlorine is a volatile molecule that is extremely irritating to tissues such as your eyes, skin and airways.  Because the molecule is volatile, it rises to the surface of water and is easily inhaled.  In fact, in a pool, the levels of trichloronitrate are highest in the air right on top of the water.  So every time a swimmer takes a breath, they inhale an irritant that causes airway constriction called reactive airway disease.  The smell we all associate with a chlorine pool is actually the smell of the multiple species of chloamines, not chlorine.  The problem is that chlorine is so reactive, it immediately finds and combines with nitrogen containing compounds to create chloramines..

Correlation between Pools and Asthma

A recent study reported in the pediatric literature, showed that children who are repeatedly exposed to swimming pools have a significantly higher incidence of reactive airway disease or asthma, than those who aren’t exposed to pools.

In our research laboratory, we are currently studying why the pools treated with PoolNaturally Plus don’t cause this reactive airway response, skin irritation, or burning eyes and don’t smell.  We know that for chlorine to become trichloronitrate you need chlorine, nitrogen containing biological molecules and a low pH.  It could be that the amount of biofilm in the pool correlates with the amount of trichloronitrate because biofilm contains and produces huge amounts of nitrogen containing molecules and it creates a local microenvironment that has a very low pH.  It could therefore be the “engine” that drives the formation of these toxic molecules.  In the laboratory we know that the moss in PoolNaturally Plus inhibits the formation of biofilm and if our hypothesis is correct it could greatly reduce the formation of chlorine to trichloronitrate by removing the  primary nitrogen source, the biofilm .  We will find out with further research

One lesson we learned involved cyanuric acid, outdoor pools, and chlorine.  The accepted dogma is that cyanuric acid is required for outdoor pools and spas to stabilize the chlorine against UV degradation.  In fact, most granular or solid chlorine sold in stores is stabilized with cyanuric acid.  Dichlor and Trichlor have cyanuric acid in the formula.

When cyanuric acid interferes with chlorine

We started to try and understand the chemistry and science of cyanuric acid because of its side effects.  Cyanuric acid above a certain concentration (which is dependent on pH) inhibits chlorine’s (hypochlorous acid to be precise) ability to oxidize bacteria.  Failure to oxidize means no killing.

We also found that cyanuric acid is denser than water so it sinks to the bottom of a body of water.  Therefore, the level of cyanuric acid on the surface of the pool or spa is the lowest level in the pool and it increases from there to the bottom.  It will be the highest in the deepest part of the pool.

We tested this at the Olympic-sized pool.  We sampled water at the bottom, middle and top of the pool.  The cyanuric acid was set for 40 ppm.  At the surface the level was 30-40 ppm, in the middle it was 60-70 ppm and at the bottom it was 100 ppm.  From the middle of the pool to the bottom hypochlorous acid was essentially ineffective.

The other fact about cyanuric is that it is nonvolatile.  That means as you add more and more to your pool or spa the concentration continues to increase.  The only way to decrease the concentration is to empty some water and replace it with fresh water without cyanuric acid so you dilute out the chemical.  In places where the spa or pool is full all year long, the concentration of cyanuric acid can increase to the point where the pool has no effective chlorine.  I think this is why most pools have algae outbreaks starting in the bottom of the pool.  The high cyanuric acid levels inhibit hypochlorous acid so no killing of algae occurs.

The experiment

So, after we learned this, I decided to decrease the cyanuric acid level in the pools gradually to see if it is really needed.  The pool engineers told me “if you do that there will be no free chlorine in this pool in the morning.” We agreed to decrease cyanuric acid by 10 ppm each week and monitor the results.  The free chlorine levels never decreased and the combined chlorine remained at 0.  We decreased the cyanuric acid to zero and never added any more for the rest of the summer.  The levels slowly decreased to zero as makeup water diluted out the cyanuric acid.  The children’s activity pool behaved exactly the same.

In another pool we treated we were able to manage the large pool all summer without any cyanuric acid and maintained free chlorine levels from 1-3 ppm with no combined chlorine all summer.

Water treated with moss doesn’t need cyanuric acid

The bottom line is that with moss treated water, cyanuric acid is not needed.  The mechanism for this probably centers around biofilm.  I don’t think that cyanuric acid prevents chlorine from UV degradation or the free chlorine levels would have decreased in the outdoor pools we treated.  We know the moss inhibits biofilm formation in the laboratory and know that biofilm absorbs chlorine.  We know that free chlorine levels skyrocket when moss is added to the pool and to maintain a level of 1-3 ppm free chlorine, the chlorine added to the pool decreases by over half.  So a pool with moss doesn’t need cyanuric acid.  That allows the chlorine added to the pool to remain active providing effective microbial control.

How did this all get started?  That’s a question I get asked daily when people realize that my background is in Vascular Surgery, Cellular Biology and Wound Healing.  The answer is a fascinating story of serendipity.  I was returning from a trip to Germany.  Somewhere over Nova Scotia I ran out of reading material and paper work.  I got bored and asked the flight attendant for anything to read.  She brought back Atlantic Monthly, People Magazine and Golf Digest.  I golf poorly but enjoy the process and the outdoors.  I usually don’t read People Magazine unless I’m waiting in a doctor’s office so I chose Atlantic Monthly.

Moss for Treating Wounds

In that issue there was a single page article about the use of Sphagnum moss in WWI to treat battle wounds.  The Germans and the English found that if they packed their soldiers wounds in a special species of Sphagnum Moss that they survived in higher numbers than if they packed the wounds in cotton.  The author postulated that the effect was due to the amazing absorbency of the moss.  Being an expert in wound healing, a trauma surgeon, and knowledgeable about wounds and infection, I postulated that this moss must have an effect on bacterial growth.

When I got back home, Vance and I got the articles about this from the archives of the library and corroborated the story in the magazine.  In fact, we found out that Northern Minnesota had large bogs filled with the kind of moss used in WWI.  Vance drove to Northern Minnesota and with the help of two peat experts from the NRRI (Natural Resources Research Institute, http://www.nrri.umn.edu/default/) in Duluth, he brought back some moss to test.

Preventing Growth of Bacteria, Algae, Fungus and Mold

We found that this moss would not let bacteria, algae, fungus or mold grow in its presence.  It did not kill the microorganisms – it prevented their growth.  When they were re-fed with media that did not contain the moss they took off and grew without difficulty.  Initially, we were interested in using moss in wounds.  At that time I had a swim spa in my home.  My kids and I loved the small pool in the basement.  My wife hated it.  It smelled, was “dirty” and irritated her skin when and if she consented to swim with us.

Saving Our Spa

I have a degree in chemistry from college and with all my chemical education I was totally unable to control the water chemistry.  I either had too much chlorine or too little.  The pH was too high or too low.  The water never stayed clear.  Periodically, black, white, and orange slimy strings grew in the water.  I learned from others that everyone had this problem and it came with having a pool or spa.

One day, after we discussed (argued) about draining the spa and filling it in with concrete, I remembered our canoeing experiences in the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness in Northern Minnesota.  I remembered the clear water that I could drink from the middle of the lakes and made the connection that maybe that crystal clean water was due to the huge area of bogs that condition the water of those lakes.  I decided to get some moss from the lab and see if it would work its magic in my swim spa.  I bought a paint strainer bag from Home Depot, filled it with the moss plants that had been sterilized, and threw it in the pool.  Within one week the water was improved and by two weeks it didn’t smell and was crystal clear.  As a result Creative Water Solutions was formed.

It’s taken nine years of research and study to bring the miracle of this long forgotten plant to commercialization.

In future blogs, we’ll talk about all things moss and water.  We’ll talk about the numerous applications for the moss in different water applications.  I’ll keep you up to date on the latest scientific discoveries being made on water treatment and moss.  You’ll hear about the people on our team and what they do.  I’ll attempt to answer your questions and promise to tell you when we don’t know the answer.

I am looking forward to this dialog and hope you enjoy it as much as I do.