[Music] hi welcome to the pool guy podcast show in this episode i'll be talking to bob lowry we're going to go over uv ozone and aop for you here and go over some of the benefits and some of the drawbacks of using one of these systems in your pool and in the podcast bob lowery will mention that he has some tech bulletins on uv and ozone you can find those at pcti.online again that's p c t i dot online and you can read these tech bulletins there you can also register for bob lowry's certified residential course at that website pool service pro open a leslie's wholesale account today and receive wholesale pricing on products you use every day leslie's pool supply offers convenient locations that are open seven days a week another great benefit of opening a lesbian's wholesale account is leslie's referral program get referred to a customer looking for weekly pool service also receive priority service enhanced rebate programs a discount on your general liability insurance through spa a discount on your pool writing software through skimmer and an opportunity to co-brand with leslie's on your social media website truck and more save time and money and grow your pool service route and become a leslie's pro i'm joined again today by bob lowery and i'll let him introduce himself to you here he's definitely one of the experts in the industry and um so how are you doing today bob doing great i'm talking to you all today from lima peru where in my office it's about 80 degrees yeah you showed me the thermometer so you i can vouch for that um so you want to tell listeners a little bit about your background bob and we'll just jump in and we'll talk today about uv ozone and some of the benefits and things they should know about those okay yeah i am i got in the pool industry in 1973 so this is my 48th year in the pool industry i got into the industry by starting a company called robar which is still around um robb of robard came from robert and arb from my partner joe arkesky we actually started that in about 1972. then a few years later i sold that to my partner and moved to california and started leisure time chemical in 1977 and i had a partner with that and we sold it in 19 the end of 1985 i retired for about two weeks and i started a publication that's still around called service service industry news i owned that for about seven years and sold that to my partner right after that i went to work for dell industries as their technology officer um and dell makes ozone and uh i went to work for them for about a year and then right after that i became the director of tech the chemical director at uh leslie's swimming pool supplies i was their technical director for six years until uh northridge earthquake in 1994. that kind of scared me out of california so i i retired again and moved to georgia and became a consultant and independent consultant and um i've been an independent consultant since then all of my information is independent of any manufacturers or anybody telling me what to do i have invented 111 chemicals i have written 21 books on pool chemistry i was a cpo instructor for 21 years and actually certified more than 2500 services to access cpos i've written about uh 175 articles and and couldn't tell you how many seminars i'd give probably 500. i could just sum it up by saying that you have an extensive background in the pool industry right and besides that i'm a degree chemist yeah so you you definitely had the background for these podcast recordings that we've been doing every month and today i thought we could we could touch on some things that we hear a lot about and i think they're gaining tremendous popularity and that's useful uv and ozone in the industry so you know back you know they're probably taking the steam out of the salt generators now they i seem like every other question is uv and ozone now not too many saltwater generator questions so um you want to go over we'll start with the basics and you know what are the benefits of uv and ozone let's start with that well we should i think um i i would like first if we can to to kind of discuss the capabilities and limitations if you will of what these things will and will not do so before you decide on which of these supplements you want and and i use the word supplement because these devices are not standalone primary sanitizers they supplement what you're already doing and how much of what you're already doing just to matters on how big of a supplement you buy so you can eliminate 20 of your chlorine if you buy a small ozonator or a small uv unit you can eliminate 90 percent of it or 95 under maybe even all of it or close to all of it if you get a big unit so it's a matter of kind of your budget or your your customers budget so just to be sure um are you unhappy with your current method is that the reason um do you want better water quality are you trying to reduce chlorine are you interested in something that provides killing and disinfection and oxidation all the time instead of just when the service guy comes or when you dump some in next week um are you trying to kill cryptosporidium or giardia which are fairly chlorine resistant have you just heard about it and it's a buzzword and it's something you think you might want you know those you need to kind of answer those questions but do you really need one of these units or you do you just want some information and so it kind of breaks down into that but builders are wondering if they should include them on their pools service techs are wondering if they should offer them to their customers and cool owners have heard about these but they're not sure if they need them but all of these devices put out a fixed amount of whatever it is they put out they put out uh in the case of say a chlorine generator it puts out a fixed amount of chlorine it doesn't react to how many bathers you put in the water uv light puts out a fixed amount of uv light an ozonator puts out a fixed amount of ozone so they put out a fixed amount and they don't react to how many bathers you have in the water and it's important to understand that so let's talk briefly about the technology of each and then we can talk specifically but uv light is a light and it is contained it's a an ultraviolet bulb uh similar to a black light like you used to see in the discos and stuff it's a black light um it's pretty well invisible there is a tube that's usually about three or four inches in diameter and it has a uv bulb in the middle of it and the bulb may be two or three feet long space around that bulb is where the ultraviolet light uh generates and magnifies and things passing within about an inch or two inches of the bulb um get irradiated by that light and living things the rna is changed not the dna but the rna has changed and when the rna changes the the organism can't replicate can't reproduce and because they have such a short life it essentially kills them because they don't live very long anyway so the other thing is ozone and ozone um has a half-life of between 3 and 18 minutes so the longest it's going to stay in your pool is 18 minutes and probably closer to three minutes most of the time um the reason is because there's always something in your pool to be oxidized you know anything sweat urine sunblock leaves blowing into the pool grass whatever getting into the pool so there's always something to be oxidized so the ozone doesn't stay around very long and this is an important thing to remember that it doesn't stay around very long or it's a device and what the device means is that if you have algae growing on the walls of the pool it's not going through a uv unit if you also if you have those uh algae growing at the shallow end of the pool and the ozone's being put into the deep end of the pool the ozone's not getting anywhere near the algae so um you need to to understand that um ozone is much more powerful than chlorine it oxidizes many many more things and kills a lot faster than chlorine does it kills in a different way ozone kills by what's called cell lysine and what that is is it it pretty much just splits open an organism from the outside chlorine has to diffuse through the cell wall and then interrupt the metabolism so it takes longer to do that ozone is very fast because it just literally rips open the organism the other thing that you may have heard about is called aop and that stands for advanced oxidation process and in the advanced oxidation process they make what are called free radicals and free radicals are a combination of uv ozone and hydrogen peroxide in one or all in two or all three of those things together most ozone generators produce a small amount of ozone i'm sorry most ozone generators produce a small amount of hydrogen peroxide the hydrogen peroxide with ozone makes the ozone degrade so from being ozone it goes backwards and when it goes backwards it makes a free radical and the symbol for a free radical is like a like a bullet and then capital o and capital h so it makes a free radical or what's called a hydro hydroxyl radical and these things are super nuclear bombs in the water they're small but they're really really powerful however they only last for one millisecond so they don't last very long and we talked about you know how much how long ozone lasts in the water this lasts 1 000 of a second in the water so they don't last very long at all they're super powerful but they don't last very long so let me ask bob if uh let's say that you have a customer that approaches you you're a pool pro and they come out one day and they're like hey i'm thinking about getting an ozone or uv system um what would be the benefit for me to get that and so what would you say back to them if you were the pool guy standing there pool gal and the customer asked you that question like if you wanted to do an elevator speech on it you know that you really can't spend 10 minutes like you're doing here telling him this and what would be like the well sure um i would say um you can use ozone and it provides better water quality than you have now and it will reduce the amount of chlorine that you're going to use that we're going to use to take care of your pool it will also kill some things that chlorine doesn't and it will oxidize some things that chlorine doesn't or maybe even oxidize them faster so we find in ozonator pools um the scum and stuff that builds up on the tile doesn't build up because chlorine oxidizes i mean because ozone oxidizes so um we get better water quality we get some things killed that aren't killed either very quickly or killed at all by chlorine so what about the sales pitch for uv then you know it's different than ozone as you've been describing it so let's say you're trying to sell them a uv or they want a uv system what would be some of the selling points of that over the ozone i guess you would say well i don't know that uv can be sold over ozone um uv i think is uv can be sold for two purposes one is to eliminate chloramines and the other is to kill bacteria and algae and things like that and there are two different kinds of uv there's low pressure uv and low pressure uv provides ultraviolet light in only one wavelength and that one wavelength kills bacteria and algae and stuff like that is pretty deadly but the other one called medium pressure puts out a broader range of wavelength and it can be used to reduce chloramines and and and it kills some but it only produces about 10 of the light in the killing range so it's more for reducing chloramines you kind of have to decide on uv what your purpose is you need to kill organisms or do you need to reduce chlorines and then the aop would be like the combination of both of those right yeah and some of those are the ozone manufacturers have found if they tweak their ozonator just a little bit it makes more hydrogen peroxide by making hydrogen peroxide they make the free radicals they make the aot isn't that what turned that cool green in in rio the hydrogen peroxide actually it did um the guy put in the wrong thing and hydrogen peroxide when you put it in a pool especially with chlorine in it hydrogen peroxide dechlorinates the pool and so by by thinking that peroxide was a great thing to put in the pool they dumped it in the pool thinking we're going to oxidize everything and what they did was they dechlorinated the pool i remember that so algae could algae could grow like crazy because they they essentially wiped out the chlorine that's a little embarrassing but you're not too far from that i should have called you in yeah well i believe it or not um i got a call from the guy that that was in charge of that that they made responsible for it but he wasn't the guy that actually dumped the stuff in the pool but one of the guys that worked for him did and so i talked to him right out not too long after it happened that's a pretty famous queen i think that's probably the most famous green pool out there right yes for sure for sure anyway um uv ozone and aop are hot new items but if the pool if the customer is happy with the pool if you're happy with it if everybody's happy you don't need one don't go spending thousands of dollars on something you don't need kind of if it ain't broke don't fix it if you if you do have some problems with your pools if you are getting a lot of chloramines um maybe an ozonator or uv unit might be something you need if you're looking kind of for a pool that doesn't get used very much that you don't have to do much with there's some of these things that you can put in the pool that make aop all the time i i don't like to use brand names as you know so there are two devices that you can put in the pool that float around and make free radicals and if you have a pool that is not um used very much these are great units because they take care of the pool all the time and and having a little too much in the pool there's no downside to it so um those are great things but the problem with having ozone uv or aop is that if you depend on it as they try to depend on it as a primary primary sanitizer you run into a problem of it not being able to handle a vader load you know as i said with ozone ozone lasts between three and 18 minutes so if you have a pool and it's all everything is all done in there it's all everything's killed and everything's cool in the water if you put six or eight people with uh you know kids and adults into the pool what happens now there's zero ozone and the important thing for for everybody for taking care of water is the prevention of vader to bather disease transmission and and i'm using this term more and more these days and the purpose is to understand that you get in the water and you leave off bacteria and then i get in the water and the bacteria is in there and i get your bacteria and if there's no chlorine i let all my bacteria and you get my bacteria and so we kind of swap bacterias and if they're disease-causing then we both can end up getting sick so there needs to be something in the water that produces a residual that is lasting and can be measurable so we can tell how much is there and we do that with chlorine on a regular basis we put in two parts per million of chlorine as a residual in that way when seven people jump into a 15 000 gallon pool they're only going to use up about a half a part per million of chlorine so there's still one and a half parts left in the water to act as that shield against disease so it sounds like the danger would be over relying on uv and ozone and aop and not really keeping an eye on the sanitizer thinking that that's gonna thinking that's gonna take care of everything when it's not that's right and many of the ozone uv and aop manufacturers claim that you can keep a lower residual and the danger with that is the same danger if if you think oh my ozone's going to do this for me so i'm only going to start maintaining a half a part per million of ozone well i ran the numbers the other day and the numbers are that each bather uses four grams of chlorine and in a 15 000 gallon pool a half a part per million of chlorine is 28 grams and if you do the math when seven people get in the pool your chlorine goes to zero if you if you have a pool that's busy on the weekends the family comes over and enjoys it whatever you got mom and dad and two kids and grandma and grandpa whatever they all get in the pool and almost instantly when they get in the pool they use up all the chlorine and so if you have a unit like this you still need to maintain the recommended chlorine level and everyone now all the guidelines and stuff they used to say one to four parts per million of chlorine but nobody's recommending one anymore it's all two parts to four parts per million of chlorine you need to keep that two parts per million and there's no danger there's no problem with with keeping a a residual like that there's not much not much more exposure to chlorine with that level in there and it provides that shield that i was talking about that could be wiped out if you try to keep a low level so it's it's really important that we do that i think the other question too bob i had someone just asked me this morning he's taken over a pool he's in texas and they have an ozone that's eight years old and the customer wants to know if it's working or not well how do you know if the ozone uv are actually working because you said it's a bulb for uv and i think they only have a life of like two years right for the bulbs yeah the the the average like life expectancy of the bulb for making uv ozone is about 6 500 hours and so if you divide that out so you know six or eight hours a day it's on blah blah blah two or three years roughly i would say turns out to be two to three years and that's it how would you know anything maybe able to just replace the bulb and it will be fine what about ozone and how you know if ozone is actually working because that's that's something that can you tell the ozone is working in the pool it may be a little difficult for a homeowner it's not so much for a service ticket they do make ozone test kits there are test strips actually for ozone um but you need to get uh near the source where the ozone is being injected to be able to tell that most of the ozone units actually create a venturi in a suction and the ozone is sucked into the end of the pool into an injector some of them actually have a compressor on them and push ozone into the pool under pressure the ones that are under pressure you can actually take the tube loose and smell whether it's make an ozone or not um the ones that are sucking ozone in are a little more difficult but um there are there are strips and you may be able to take an ozone strip and put it at the return line and see if there's in the ozone in the return line i think your description of the smell was wet hey right is that what you yeah wet hay or um actually the one that most people are familiar with is if you stood by a copy machine and made like 50 copies of something and just had to keep going and you smell that smell most people think that it's a chemical that's in there but it's not it's actually a light that's that's flashing on and making the copies and the light is actually uv light and it's actually making ozone lit the copy machine interesting and i guess the last question would be a lot of people are buying hot tubs and the fiberglass hot tubs and the dealers are selling these with either ozone or uv or both of those right and and they're saying to the customer all you need is this you don't need to add any kind of bromine or sanitizer because you have uv and ozone in your hot tub that's just a bad idea and wrong and i'm not trying to dance around anything you know me i shoot right from the hip so it's a bad idea and it's wrong it doesn't provide any residual at all so there's no residual in the water so what happens when you and a and a friend get in the water there's nothing to prevent anything from me getting your bacteria or you get mine there's nothing there there's not enough ozone being produced that you could measure a residual in the water you can you can measure the presence of ozone where it's being made but not a residual in the water so it's not possible to do that and it can't produce enough ozone to overcome the the contamination from two or three people sitting in there so it's not a good idea to use a unit and let only uv and ozone uh be the sole source of sanitizer it's it's wrong and the best thing you can use is chlorine bromine has a problem especially with ozone we've talked about that before bromine and ozone no matter how you add it if bromine and ozone are added to the water it makes what's called bromate and bromates are cancer coughing so here we are selling a device that's supposed to be a health device and then making a cancer-causing thing with using bromine and ozone it's just not a not good business yeah it's pretty it's pretty crazy when you put it that way you're going to stick around we're going to talk about some other topics here but i think you did a great job giving a prepper on uv zone you want to mention the fact that you have some tech bulletins on your website about this yeah i created i create about a tech bulletin a month and i have a website that you may or may not have heard of called the pool chemistry training institute and rather than having you type that long name out to get to the website you just type pcti dot online and it takes you right to the full chemistry training institute we offer training for service technicians to certify them in pool chemistry and we have some books for sale for service techs and even homeowners there is a homeowner book called easy pool care and a service tech guide called service cool chemistry for service pros but i have 15 or 20 tech bulletins on the website that are free you can view them for free on the website and if you give the website your email address it will allow you to download those tech bulletins as a a pdf file and they are free i have two tech bulletins one that goes through uh what these things are how they work the details of of what the doses are and how you can decide on the right size for your pool and one that goes through as we have discussed and discusses the capabilities and limitations that you need to be aware of um no residual and a fixed amount that they're putting out and using these supplements with chlorine as a residual so um you need to be aware that these are out there you're welcome to to use these uh tech bulletins as you wish so i hope you found that information helpful when you're deciding on selling a uv or ozone or aop system to your customer and this is just one podcast and many series of podcasts that i recorded with bob lowry if you can tune in for the rest of the week we're going to talk about zero chlorine in the pool also the test kits versus test strips we're also going to talk about residential versus commercial pool and then we're going to end with talking about dogs in your pool and some things you can do to help yourself on your pool route if you have dog swimming in the pool and that's in this series of podcasts and of course this is the fourth series of podcast that i recorded bob lowry if you want to listen to the other podcasts with bob lowry just go to my website swimmingforlearning.com and on the banner click on the podcast icon and then you'll have a drop down menu of the podcast that i recorded and of course i have about 600 podcasts there available for you so you can listen at your leisure to those and you can scroll down and find the ones that i recorded at bob lowry which i highly recommend because bob lowery is the premier expert on pool water chemistry and if you're in the industry and you want to enhance your business definitely check out my coaching program at poolguycoaching.com a lot of great benefits for joining including a 10 discount on your general liability insurance to spa again you can learn more at poolguycoaching.com thanks for listening to this podcast regress your week god bless pool service pro open a leslie's wholesale account today and receive wholesale pricing on products you use every day leslie's pool supply offers convenient locations that are open seven days a week another great benefit of opening a leslie's wholesale account is leslie's referral program get referred to a customer looking for weekly pool service save time and money and grow your pool service route and become a leslie's pro