Tired of Opening Your Pool in the Spring and Seeing Green!
Try Zebra's Swimming Pool Water Winterizing Chlorinator
Our engineers have constructed the first ever winter chlorinator for swimming pools (residential). Where many homeowners keep their pools filled with a good amount of water through the winter, a common problem becomes the thick amount of algae that grows. The biggest problem a residential pool owner faces is opening the pool for the spring. We have made the problem go away with this device. Drop the winterizing chlorinator into your pool, add a few chlorine tabs (provided with your initial purchase), put the safety cover on your pool and you're done! Check on the unit (depending on ease, how warm your area may be, size of pool, etc.) and add chlorine tabs as necessary. When it gets too cold, turn the unit off. When it thaws again, turn the unit on. When you open the pool in the spring, guess what – no algae! Remove the unit, do the rest of what us pool owners have to do, and go to it!
Laziness makes progress. At least, that's what I tell my wife. How lazy am I? When we inherited a pool along with the new house about 10 years ago, I wasn't quite sure what to do. I followed what directions I could, but when I opened up the sucker in May (because we live in the cold cold climate of Cleveland Ohio, with weather similar to that of Fairbanks, Alaska) I was greeted with something from a B movie – like the swamp that the creature from the green lagoon sprang from. I had the green goo. It was so thick I had to call in an expert. Even he backed off at first. Then, after they extracted most of the gunk with an industrial waste truck, he treated the rest with a ton of chemicals, only then did we have something that looked like water again.
The next year was slightly better because I was more proactive. The next year better yet. Then I took a cue from the place I work (Zebra) and what we do inside factories. You think my pool was bad, you should see some of the places we take care of in the factory! Imagine slime so thick you can cut it with a knife, and it comes out stiff like jello cubes! Image a stench so strong on Monday morning that it makes your lungs collapse, and pushes you out of the building until it clears. Imagine a toxic green cloud rising from the sump, so strong that it start peeling the paint off the machine! That's where we work, and I realized that maybe, just maybe, the technologies we used at work could also help with my pool.
So I kept trying and trying. To make a very long story short, I now have a device that floats at the shallow end of my pool sucking water from the surface. The pump sucks water in so that there is always a surface current coming into the unit. This is very important, because it turns out that moving the surface is what helps keep the entire pool oxygenated. Then the pump pushes out the water about 10 gallons per minute through one of my pool hoses out to the deep end of the pool. In this way I'm continuously pushing water into the deep end, forcing it to the surface at the shallow end, and Hooray! I've got a clean pool in the spring!
Does it really work? Good news, this isn't the first year I've used it. Heck, it's not even the second. I finally mentioned my invention to a friend the other day, and he said, “We've got to tell everyone about this!” Now he's not the usual excited type, so I figured maybe I really had something for once. So here it is. I'll go into a bit more detail below, giving you an idea as to what exactly it looks like and how it works. But the problem right now is that only one exists – and it's working away in my pool even as I write! In fact, I dropped three more chlorine tabs in there this morning. We've had unseasonably warm weather here in Cleveburg this Autumn, and believe me, I'm not complaining, but warmer weather means that the chlorine is going to get consumed a bit faster than usual. I run the chlorine a bit higher in the autumn because none of it's going through the pipes or pool heater. And this way, during the months that the pump is off and the pool is stagnant, the chlorine keeps the lil buggers from setting up residence.
Here's a couple of pics I can show you. I peeled back the cover and took a few shots for you. The first one shows the overall pool in the yard. It's a nice sized pool, 32 x 16, about 7 feet at the deepest, and I figure it holds around 17,000 gallons.
The next picture shows what the unit looks like inside the pool. It's a container made of really good plastic – super thick and durable. It's the same kind of plastic that they make those indestructible kids playgrounds out of, so I know it's going to last a long, long time. The round things on the outside of the container are floats, very similar to the kind of round float that you'd find in a toilet bowl – except that these are also made of the same kind of plastic as the container. This is important, because the pool, with the chlorine, and the weather and everything else, can really destroy your typical plastic float that you'd buy in the hardware store. Luckily I had access to more industrial components from work.
The next thing you notice is the blue hose coming off the right side of the picture. That's the return hose for the discharged water. At a rate of over 10 gallons per minute, water is getting pushed all the way to the bottom of the deep part of the pool. Now, I don't mean to get all mathy on you, but here's the hard numbers. I've got 17,000 gallons of water, I'm pushing it through the device at 10 gallons per minute – so that means 17,000 gallons divided by 10 gpm equals 1,700 minutes. My math is rusty, but if I take 1,700 minutes and pile them into hours (1,700 divided by 60) I get just over 28. So in roughly one day all the water in the pool has gone through this pool winterizing chlorinator. Awesome or what?
The holes that you see in the container are another important aspect. By putting those holes right at the surface of the water I make sure that water is always pouring into the unit from the top of the pool. It's not obvious where the water level is in the picture, partially because the water is so clean. But the placement of the holes depends on where we put the floats – and I made sure that the floats are perfectly placed. This is where it helps to have years of experience, which really means I made all sorts of mistakes along the way. But that's another story.
The good thing about the floats is that, well, they float! No matter what happens to the level of water in the pool – evaporation, giant water-sucking spaceships, or a leaky liner – the unit's going to work. Well, it will work as long as there is water in the pool. If everything leaks out, then you're on your own!
Inside the container you see the right angle PVC pipe; this is standard type pipe material. What you also see is the pipe rising through a hole in a perforated plate. It's the same plate that has the chlorine tablets sitting on top. This is a very critical aspect of the pool winterizing chlorinator because it keeps the chlorine tablets on top so that all the water washing over them gets chlorinated. It also keeps big sticks and bugs from getting down into the container and possibly harming the pump. I had to weld shelves into the sides of the big container, but then again that's something we do at work all the time – so it wasn't that hard.
The only thing you can't see is the other end of the discharge hose. It's got a weight attached to the end of it. It's one of my old weightlifting weights – since I've started yoga I don't do the free weights nearly as much. I attached the weight with some nylon string, dumped it into the deep end and that was it. The other end is attached to the container using a hose clamp.
There it is. I've tried to give you enough information so that if you're incredibly motivated towards being lazy (like me) then you should be able to make this thing work. On the other hand, if you're even more like me, lazy and preferring to buy something to help you be lazy, then drop me an email. You see, here's the sales part of the story. Well, not so much a story as a long excuse. But trust me, if you even have half an inkling of buying this, then you'll appreciate what comes next.
As I write this, there is only one, that's right, one, pool winterizing chlorinator in existence. I made it, I've got it, and it works. It took years to develop, and it cost, well, it cost a lot more than I'd like to admit. Frankly, I've got tons of hours, and more than a thousand dollars worth of parts.
But now that the first is done, it's going to be a lot easier to make the second. And even easier to make the third, and so on. So, if you, and many others like you, are interested in something like the pool winterizing chlorinator and would like to be able to buy it, let me know. Like anything else, the first few units are going to be more expensive than if we were building a thousand at a time. At the same time, you could be among one of the first, the very first, to own such a thing. And after all, the price may not seem very imposing to you either.
So please, drop me a line. Tell me what you think of this idea, if you can think of anything to improve it, and maybe what you think something like this should cost. I'll get back to you with my latest thoughts. If a few people show an interest by next spring, then maybe I'll build a few – no matter what the expense. On the other hand, if 20 people show an interest, then I can look into making all of them at once and that will bring the cost down.
Thanks for your attention and interest,
Respectfully Yours, Steve
PS: Oh yes, for those of you who may be a bit more enterprising than the average person, you should know that we've already taken steps to protect this invention under patent and trademark laws. God Bless America!
