This question is obviously intended for those that live in places where tap water is “safe to drink.”
I live in Southern California, where I’m at the end of a long chain of cities. Occasionally, the tap smells of sulfur, hardness changes, or it tastes… odd. I’m curious about the perspective of people that are directly involved and their reasoning.
I’m going to do my best to explain this.
When a pool is tested to see if chlorine needs to be added (if there are impurities) they will typically add free chlorine. The free chlorine will combine with the impurities. The odor that you smell when you go to a pool is the free chlorine evaporating out. but some of the chlorine will stay in the pool as combined chlorine. it combined with the impurities.
After a while there isn’t enough chlorine in the pool and the impurities build back up.
Repeat the process.
The real problem is when you get to much combined chlorine in a pool. The health authorities will tell you to either fix it or close it.
How do you get rid of combined chlorine? You add free chlorine with will break the combined chlorine.
The combined chlorine can cause health issues. (that is why the health authorities will tell you to fix it). usually a good pool maintainer will detect the issue and just fix it before a notice is handed over.
Now our city puts chlorine into the drinking water to get rid of impurities (in laymans terms : the bad things in the water you don’t want to drink). We used to put free chlorine into the drinking water.
The nice thing was they would add the free chlorine it would get rid of the impurities and most of the free chlorine would just go away. (evaporate) .
the down side? we kept having to add more and more (that was expensive.
some genius decided to switch from free chlorine to combined chlorine for the drinking water. combined DOESN’T go away by itself. you have to break combined chlorine.
the benefit was it cost a LOT less doing it this way.
the downside is you shouldn’t be drinking combined chlorine. Think about it. if there is to much combined chlorine in the pool and it’s listed as unsafe to swim in , then why would be it safe to drink it? to fix food in it? to bath in it ? to take a shower in it? it’s illogical.
yet that is exactly what the city did.
i hope that i got that explained correctly.
and yes i can forsee a class action lawsuit.
prolonged exposure to combined chlorine can lead to asthma, allergies and other health issues
Are you talking about using chloramine in disinfection? I think conflating pool water and drinking water standards is a bit of a mistake. Things get added to pools from people’s bodies after chlorination that cause weird combined results. Drinking water is disinfected (chlorinated) as a final step. I would object to my municipality using chloramine, but not because I wouldn’t drink it.