Reversing water waste while purifying your pool

Draining your swimming pool to fill it with fresh water could waste thousands of gallons of water.

We are always talking about conservation when it comes to battling the drought, but what about innovation? One local small business owner is going mobile so you can recycle the water in your pool to make it clean enough to drink.

A typical swimming pool holds about 18,000 gallons of water. Every few years, some pool owners in the Coachella Valley drain their pool and swap it out for fresh clean water. Especially when calcium begins to build film along the edge.

Drew Clark owns Roadrunner Pools and this month his company got a filtration system that uses reverse osmosis to recycle this precious resource during the drought.

“What it does for you is it removes your calcium to removes the total dissolved solids from the pool, so the magnesium salts, the metals like iron and that sort of stuff, any molecule that is bigger than a water molecule doesn’t pass through the filter membrane,” said Clark.

This process has been used in San Diego for a few years but according to Clark he has the first system in the desert.

Water gets sucked up from the deep end, goes trough the filter, then back into the shallow end. The system also blasts the water with UV light.

“It breaks up the cell structure of organic material and sanitizes the water and any viruses that you might have in the water,” said Clark.

The process isn’t perfect; about 15 percent of the water that runs through the system gets wasted.

I called the Coachella Valley Water District to see if it wanted to comment on this new process. A spokesperson told me the CVWD can’t endorse any business, but if a homeowner uses this recycled filtration, they should try to save some of the run-off and use it for their landscaping.

If you have a regular sized pool, having it filtered will set you back about $550. But when that’s compared to water rates and penalties for using too much water if you just tried to refill your swimming pool, it could end up being more affordable.

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