How Pool Chemicals Work

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It goes without saying that cleaning your pool is essential. It makes swimming a more leisurely experience and keeps everyone from getting sick or irritated by swimming in dirty water. While there’s equipment like pumps and filters that helps remove large debris like leaves and insects from the water, the job doesn’t stop there. You need to clean out the microorganisms too. Harmful bacteria thrive and accumulate quickly in pools, so it’s important to kill them and balance the water with pool chemicals.

How Pool Chemicals Work

There are a number of common pool chemicals, but the most popular one is chlorine. Chlorine is a disinfecting agent that sanitizes your pool by oxidizing impurities. When you add chlorine to the water, the chlorine breaks down into different chemicals that attack the cell walls of the bacteria and destroy the enzymes within the cell, effectively stopping them from being dangerous.

One way you can use pool chemicals is by shocking the pool. “Shocking” refers to the process of adding pool chemicals to break up chloramines (also known as combined chlorine) and increase the amount of free chlorine. Free chlorine is a good thing because it can oxidize the harmful bacteria. Chloramines, on the other hand, are combinations of chlorine and other elements that render the chlorine useless. Chloramines are incapable of destroying bacteria and other contaminants. To make matters worse, they stink up your pool. Luckily, pool shocking can solve this problem.

If you need pool chemicals, don’t hesitate to give us a call today!