Is chlorine still the pool cleaner of choice? There was a time when everything was ruled by the presence of chlorine. When, if you had a pool, every two days you would have to trot around the pool with a big cup of chlorine and make sure that it fell in evenly. Then, you would have to avoid the pool for a few hours, while the chlorine settled. The next day, everyone would go swimming and the same thing would invariably happen. You would find your skin going dry and white. Most of the time, you may have thought that this was chlorine damage, but it’s not.

Studies have shown that if it is used correctly, chlorine is actually not harmful at all! So yes, one could say that it is still the pool cleaner of choice. Besides not being harmful to your skin, it is also one of the only types of pool cleaners that provides impact cleaning, as well as residual cleaning. Impact cleaning is, of course, what happens to the bacteria when you put the chlorine into the water. They get killed instantly. The residual cleaning refers to the fact that water with chlorine in it will kill bacteria that arrive in the water hours after the initial lot of chlorine has reached the bottom of the surface.

Why you should still be using chlorine?

Apart from the fact that chlorine will make sure that your pool stays clean at all times, you should also be using it because the types of bacteria that can breed in bodies of stagnant water such as pools are a lot more dangerous for your health than chlorine is. There are some bacteria that can only be killed by something that has the strength of chlorine, so you need to make sure that you regularly chlorinate your pool. Chlorine helps to kill diseases like dysentery and hepatitis, so it is not difficult to see why people still reach for chlorine as their number one source of pool cleaning.

Of course, as with any chemical, use it sparingly and use it wisely. Over-chlorination can cause irritation of the skin and eyes, as well as an allergic reaction if the person who swims in the pool is very sensitive. If you notice dry, white skin after swimming, you are definitely overdoing it!

There are other methods of pool cleaning such as ozone filtration and UV irradiation that are used to clean pools. However, there is nothing as effective as chlorine.

Is all this talk of a beautifully clean pool making you want one? Or perhaps sparking the desire to upgrade your pool? Do not despair, there is help that you can seek for this issue!