I began to notice that I wasn’t happy in my pool. It wasn’t “inviting”. I didn’t know why or how to fix it. I just knew I didn’t like it. I kept paying attention and began to learn things that could really transform my experience. I decided that it was the chlorine. It didn’t smell or feel nice and although it was very subtle, I found it repelling. I found myself not wanting to keep the chlorine at the sanitizing level that others have suggested. Oh my. I spent a summer of green pools. My pool and I were miserable.
First, I deemed the “status” of my pool and my house. At 13,000 gallons, I declared my pool a large spa rather than of a small pool. That way, I have something grand instead of something small. Similarly, I declared my house to be a “cottage”. We enjoy it immensely! It is the perfect place to retire and that’s what we are looking forward to!
I wanted my large spa/small pool to be very healthy. I wanted it to lure me to get in it and to have it be magical when I got there. I wanted it to uplift my body while I enjoyed the water and I wanted to sleep like a baby. I guess that’s the opposite of being miserable. At this moment, I am well on my way to having that experience. There are a few things I would need to tweak.
Alternative water chemistry:
There is lots of alternative water chemistry in the hot tub world. In a hot tub, everything gets much more intense. The heat and the steam reek of whatever is in there and the owners and water maintenance people are acutely aware of it.
My friend Ray is a chemist and health officinado. He had very painful lesions and he was seeking help for them. He researched and found the best alternative doctors after the regular doctors offered no help. One of his alternative doctors understood what he had and within a few weeks, the lesions healed. It was a simple fix! The answer was, massive iodine deficiency.
Iodine is a mineral found in some foods. The body needs iodine to make thyroid hormones. These hormones control the body’s metabolism and many other important functions. The body also needs thyroid hormones for proper bone and brain development during pregnancy and infancy.
Ray taught me about the relationship of iodine to the rest of the chemical group on the periodic table called halogens and how the body uses iodine as a sanitizer but can easily get overshadowed by the heavier halogens. The literature available indicates that there are a billion people with iodine deficiency. Ray’s painful lesions began to heal instantly by taking an iodine supplement. He referred me to this book:
The Iodine Crisis: What You Don’t Know About Iodine Can Wreck Your Life
Basically, in the periodic table, group 7 includes chlorine, bromine, fluorine, then iodine, which all have seven electrons in their outer shell. Here is the problem, in a displacement reaction a less reactive element is removed and replaced by a more reactive element.
The element we need is iodine. The heavier halogens, chlorine, fluorine, and bromine remove iodine in a chemical reaction. Here is the rub: using tap water containing chlorine and fluoride and some fluoride toothpaste is enough to replace the iodine in the halogen receptors. Everyone is trained and reinforced to create a body crisis.
The solutions to this crisis include filtering your water, finding a fluoride free toothpaste and eliminating sources of chlorine, bromine, and fluorine. A chlorine-free environment brought me right back to my swimming pool. I now understood why my body didn’t enjoy being immersed in a chlorine bath! It was time to take my own power back and make my pool clean and wonderful without chlorine.
I decided to research using iodine in my pool. I need iodine, it might make sense, so I went about seeing if it was feasible. In my research, I learned that it was indeed available. Bernie Litman from www.elearnaid.com had a website about it and was kind enough to spend time with me to talk about it. He said that potassium iodide doesn’t evaporate because it doesn’t turn into a gas until it gets over 300 degrees. It will simply stay in the water.
I decided to go for it. I bought some potassium iodide and a Hanna handheld iodine checker. This measured how much iodine was in the pool. Nothing! The instrument read that I had no iodine in the pool! I put more in. Nothing. I had put plenty in the pool and I was expecting a reading of 2.0 ppm or higher which would indicate a significant amount of sanitizer.
After pondering, I realized that the potassium iodide was present but it wasn’t splitting into potassium and iodine, thus I didn’t have a reading. I went back to Barry and he suggested that I needed a clean oxidizer like ozone or hydrogen peroxide to split the potassium iodide into its singular units. I needed more research.
I have ozone jets in my pool system. I have a unit called Solar Eclipse has 5 ozone jets and UV lights. This “should have” worked but didn’t. I was stumped. The answer did come but not at this time. I didn’t have enough water flow to run the Solar Eclipse but at the time I was working on this issue, I was simply stumped. See Healthy Pool: Water Flow
Barry suggested that I needed an oxidizer. He said that chlorine was an oxidizer and that sometimes people use Hydrogen Peroxide as an oxidizer. I began to read. I did learn that H2O2 or Hydrogen Peroxide had been studied as a pool oxidizer and deemed worthy. Perhaps even better than chlorine. Since no one knew how bad the chlorine was for thyroid hormones and that it was more expensive than chlorine, it didn’t catch on. But it did with me! I bought some, put it in the pool and there it was! My iodine showed up on my measurement instrument! Yeah!!
It was a bummer that it was winter and the heater wasn’t hooked up. I watched and worked with the H2O2 until the spring and when I went in, I was amazed at how wonderful it made my body feel. I was hooked! That was the experience I wanted.
The iodine was present, the H2O2 was terrific and the experience was the best. Thank you, Barry Litman! You changed my life by sharing your life experience. It was time to relax and enjoy what I had worked for. A really healthy swim.
Maybe the most amazing part of using hydrogen peroxide for pool and spa treatment is the simplicity of it. It can not chemically build up in your pool. You do not have to continually be balancing chemicals against more chemicals to make it work. It does not require complex filters or machinery. It does not require exact levels of concentration to work.
It bio-degrades completely to only healthy substances of water and oxygen – good for you and your pool/spa. It contains no toxins. You do not have to fear how it interacts with other chemicals. Nothing in hydrogen peroxide causes cancer, sterility, birth defects, brain damage, tumors, nervous system damage. It does not smell bad. Hydrogen peroxide for pool and spa usage does not produce toxic vapors. There is no complex transition to change to H2O2 for pool and spa treatment.
