Sump Stories: The 50-cent, Emergency-only, Chlorine Feeder

In this day of high tech feed systems and sophisticated automation, it is fun to discover something simple that really works. Well, sorta'...

One of our members tells us of the day he was in a hurry to lock up and leave his community-association pool for the night. Our man was already dressed for his date, anticipating a pleasant dinner and movie. There was a problem, however; the chlorine pump was down for the count, the residual was near zero, and the pool was to be opened by the coach in the morning.

A couple of gallons of sodium hypo should be poured into the pool for sure. Yet, even if he took the time to do so, there'd probably be no chlorine reading when he arrived back at the pool mid-day tomorrow. That loud swim-team mom with the test kit is sure to be here then, too. And he surely didn't want to splash chlorine on his new jeans right now either. What to do...

"'Wonder what would happen if I took the lid off two, one-gallon jugs and gently dropped them directly into the pool," he thought. No pouring, no splashing, no five more minutes of fooling around... But would the chlorine make its way out of that little top opening on each jug with no encouragement? Probably not. Maybe. No time to waste. Don't want to be late... Plunk, splunk. The two jugs were heading for the bottom of the deep end as our intrepid operator was heading down the street. He'd worry about his experiment later.

Next day he arrived quietly, on schedule, about lunchtime. The jugs were down at the deep-end bottom, somehow unnoticed by the morning swim team. They didn't look so yellow now... Check the chlorine; take a test. Just over a part per mil... It worked! At 60,000 gallons, two jugs worth would be four parts so, with consumption, our now-confident operator figured that about half the chlorine had been "fed" into the pool and half still remained in the jugs. Cool.

By the end of that long summer's day the jugs' color was as clear as the pool's, and the test-kit residual had just dipped below the one-ppm mark, finally on its way down. What a discovery! Sodium hypochlorite apparently transferred, gradually, from high concentration in the bottle to low concentration outside – just like science class. Patent-able, he wondered? Nahh... Just a lucky, one-time solution to a problem. It was no more that that.

The clock struck 7 PM. Time to go home. Plunk, splunk...