thought this would be a good time to put up another best of
Bob Lowry.
And there was a series where I went through a lot of myths,
myths in the industry, and Bob Lowry was, of course, the
perfect person to debunk these myths.
And in this particular episode, we talked about one myth in
particular, and that is that trichlor is the strongest form
of chlorine.
And it kind of looks like that on the surface because you're
getting 99% trichlor and 90% available chlorine.
But Bob Lowry will explain why this is a kind of myth in the
industry as well.
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And here's one that I hear all the time, and you probably hear
this too that the trichlor is the strongest chlorine because
it has 99% chlorine.
And so it's the strongest chlorine product out there,
stronger than liquid, stronger than calhypal, because of that
99% number that's on.
Well, probably not nowadays because of the cheaper tablets
that are out there that are like 91% or 89%.
But still, that percentage throws people off and they
think, wow, this stuff is super strong, and the other chlorine
not getting my money's worth out of it.
What do you say to that kind of myth about that 99% number
that's thrown out there?
SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, there is no chlorine product
that has 99% chlorine in it.
And I don't mean to deceive you, but but there are a number of
ways of stating different things.
And part of it has to do with what happened many years ago
when they started measuring chlorine.
The fact was that when you put chlorine gas in water, that it
is a hundred percent chlorine, correct?
You put it in water, and so it makes some amount of free
chlorine in the pool.
And then they use that as a gauge to gauge everything else,
how it compared to liquid chlorine.
I mean to uh gas chlorine.
Well, the fact of the matter is, you chlorine gas is two atoms of
chlorine.
When you put it in water, one atom of chlorine makes HOCL.
The other atom of chlorine makes HCl without the O in it.
And HCl is acid.
So one of them makes the killing form of chlorine and the other
one doesn't.
But they assigned it a value of a hundred.
Okay, so chlorine gas is a hundred percent, even though in
reality it's only fifty percent.
And as a result, when you compare everything else, they
literally have to double it so that they can get the comparison
correct.
When a label says, first of all, it's 99% chlorine, what they are
referring to is that it is ninety-not of that chemical
product, the the whole word.
That's not the amount of chlorine in it, it's 99% pure
trichlor.
And somewhere on the label it will say that it provides
available chlorine of 90% or 92% or 91.5 or something.
Most of them are between 90 and 92.
Some might say 93.
But it is basically 99% pure trichlor that provides about 90
to 92 percent available chlorine.
And the word available chlorine is on the label because that's
how it compares with a pound of gas chlorine.
When you see a label that says it provides 90% available
chlorine, what that actually means is that it's 45% chlorine,
45% chlorine, and 55% uh cyanuric acid.
And that's the way it's made.
And when you see a label that says that it's 65%, then it's
it's actually 32.5% chlorine by weight.
But when you put it in water, as it compares with a pound of gas
chlorine, it provides 65% of what a pound of of gas chlorine
does.
When you see 99%, it is referring to the purity of the
ingredient and not the amount of chlorine that's in it.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think that's a big thing that people
miss when they see that label because they automatically
correlate that pure trichlorine as being that powerful chlorine.
SPEAKER_01: Technically, you could say if you saw calhypo, it
could actually say 99% calcium hypochlorite.
Yeah.
And then somewhere else on the label, it will say provides 65%
available chlorine.
SPEAKER_00: Got it.
Makes perfect sense.
I mean, if you if you analyze what you just said there, it
makes perfect sense, but it takes a little bit of thinking.
And people don't do that, they just read the label and they
assume that, you know, opposite of what you just said there.
And then this last one, I think you touched on it when we talked
about how liquid chlorine adds salt to the pool.
But I hear this all the time that calhypo doesn't add a lot
of calcium to the pool in the scheme of things, because you're
only adding a small part per million of it, and you know,
it's it's not a big deal to use cal hypo.
And cal hypo is really big in Florida, and it was big here in
California for a while.
I think it's pretty big in Texas as far as using Calhypo.
I think they even make cal hypo in Texas there too with the
dichlor.
So Calhypo, just to clarify, it does add a good amount of
calcium to the pool over time, over usage.
If you're adding, let's just say the pool tech is taking care of
a pool and they're adding two pounds to a pool a week, 15,000
or 10,000 gallon pool, they're adding a lot of cal hypo there,
or even the cal hypo tablets that are slow dissolving.
What's your take again on that the calcium being added by
Calhypo?
SPEAKER_01: Probably the best way to explain it, as we have
with explaining about trichlor.
The best way to explain it is each 10 parts per million of
chlorine that you add to the pool.
That way we don't have to say a pound in a 10,000 gallon pool or
pound in a 15,000 gallon pool, what size is a pool?
You know, this way we're saying for each 10 parts per million
that you add to a pool, you're going to add seven parts per
million of calcium.
And you can figure it out yourself.
So if you put in a pound of of Calhypo and it gives you six
parts per million, and you add another part and it gives you
then twelve parts per million, you've increased the the calcium
level by about eight parts per million in your pool.
So you can figure it out from that.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and so if you're in California where the
tap water is like 400 parts per million of calcium already,
right using Calhypo, I think one reason why it's not super
popular here is because the pool tech noticed right away that
you're getting a you know a calcium ring and you're you're
adding a lot of calcium to the pool.
Maybe in Florida, I think their water is a lot softer.
The calcium hardness is not nearly that coming out of the
tap.
Yeah.
But in areas like California, I don't really use a lot of it.
I mean, I'm using it this season because I can't find liquid.
Um, but on a on a regular basis, I don't really use cal hypo as
my go-to sanitizer, mainly for the fact that you know all the
pools are at four or five hundred calcium hardness
already.
SPEAKER_01: And I I understand that.
And I think that you should also understand that there are five
or six different percentage of of available chlorine of calcium
hypochlorite products, and I have seen them as high as 75%.
Most commonly, when it's in the 70s, is 73% cal hypo.
I've seen 65% cal hypo, I've seen 48%, I've seen 43.
And I think that the calcium ipochlorite tablets, the new
ones, not the old ones, the CCH kind of tablets, but the the new
tablets that are out there are about 48% chlorine.
And that is meaningful because you're gonna have to use more of
it because it's only 48% versus say 90% for trichlor.
So, and that was the purpose of them making those percentages,
is so you can do some comparisons.
And the comparison is that if the label says it's 48 and the
label says it's 90, you're talking about one being almost
twice as more as the other, pound for pound.
So if you put in a pound of one, you need two pounds of the other
one to make up to form them to be equal.
So it's a way of comparison.
The and the part that isn't chlorine is something that's
gonna end up either as TDS or calhypo.
So my my suspicion is that the 48% probably has about the same
amount of calcium in it, but then the rest of it is is
chloride and sodium.
So you're gonna increase TDS and calhypo.
SPEAKER_00: And what uh you mean in calcium, right?
SPEAKER_01: I and calcium, I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_00: I can I can pretty much tell you that's true about
adding more of the cal hypotablists equal trichlor.
And my testing, I'm gonna say that four cal hypotablets is
about equal to using two trichlor tablets in a pool.
And the cal hypo tablets are pretty expensive.
So if you're gonna switch to cal hypotablists, you know, budget
for that because they're not cheap tablets to use in your
pool, and you have to use probably the double amount that
you would use for the trichlore.
The only benefit of the cal hypotablets, I think, is there's
no stabilizer or cyaneric acid in them, but they are they are
pretty pricey, and mainly because there's only one one or
one manufacturer that makes that so dissolving cal hypotablet.
SPEAKER_01: Right.
I did make a an Excel spreadsheet that I've given to
practically anybody that wants it, that you can put in the size
container that you buy and the amount you paid for it, and it
will calculate the amount of money for the equivalent of a
pound of pure chlorine.
And then you can do it for each of the kinds of chlorine and
figure out which chlorine is the cheapest for you to use.
And it's just a little small spreadsheet.
I haven't been able to figure out how to get it on my website
so it can be downloaded for free there.
If you have a method or something, I'd be glad to give
it to you so you can distribute it to your to your listeners if
you'd like.
SPEAKER_00: I can definitely, if you send it over to me, I can
definitely put it on my site on your pages, on your pages where
you have your your information.
Again, your website, pci.org, has a lot of your tech bulletins
that you write.
It also has pctti.online.
Yeah, pccti.online.
Yeah.
It can be confusing.
These websites with the the dot whatever now gets really
confusing.
But thanks again for your time on this.
And I I think the what if one was kind of interesting because
it answered a lot of questions for people.
And these common myths definitely are necessary to
unpack because they get propagated out there and then
they just become kind of truth in the industry in some way,
just like the one that I hear.
I've heard probably for 30 years now that you can't use chlorine
in a in a hot tub that's using bromine tabs.
We've debunked that one in a previous episode before, too.
And that's been around since I started Pool Service.
I don't know where that one came from, and I hear it from
everybody, and I even get comments sometimes that's like,
hey, you can't use liquid chlorine in a hot tub.
And so these things turn in the truth in a way.
You don't you don't spend time debunking them.
So again, I thank you for that.
And the listeners really appreciate all the information
you give them in these podcasts.
This is the most popular series that I have, all the ones that I
have with you.
If you look at the numbers of the most popular podcasts that I
have recorded, and you know, your your big personality in the
industry, whether you think you are or not, people like your
material and they quote you everywhere now.
It's like, as Bob Lowry says, so I hope you appreciate or feel
honored by the quotes from people that they preface
everything by saying Bob Lowry says this.
So that you know that that means something to someone in the
industry for as long as you have been in it.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I've been around a long time.
You know, in my career, I've gone from who is he to he's a a
jerk to he's a an idiot to I think he's crazy.
Is he really a chemist?
I've I've heard practically everything from he's a maverick
to to all kinds of things.
And probably in the last two to five years, I've gone from being
a maverick to being a genius.
That's funny.
You know, it's it's one of those things where, you know, I wrote
a whole book about pool chemistry, and if you look at
the CPO manual, there's there's 34 guys with PhDs that wrote
that book.
And and there's one of me.
You know, and and so I've got all of that knowledge, and and
I've been able to pass it along to people, and I'm glad to do
it.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
Well, again, we appreciate your time.
And I don't know how many of these we recorded, but we'll
keep going as long as you want to keep recording them and
putting them out there.
And so I wish you the best over there in Peru.
All right.
If you're looking for other podcasts, you go to my website,
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Just click on the podcast icon.
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Thanks for listening to this podcast.
Have a good rest of your week and God bless.