How is your pump room air quality? Every commercial Aquatics facility is bound to have harmful chemicals, both stored and in use, to manage the water chemistry of their swimming pools.
NSPF, CDC, local health departments, all have put forth numerous pages of instructions and guidance on how to store and handle the harmful chemicals used in the Aquatics industry.
Yet, site visit after site visit, we keep finding that pool operators flat out neglect following even the simplest of said guidance. Protective gear nowhere to found in the pump room, Acid drums stored alongside Calcium Hypochlorite tabs, and the most common of all…
Chemical drums wide open to the air. I bet they don’t leave the cap off from their bleach at home because it stinks, yet the leave the big 50 gallon chlorine drum at work without a cap. Really?
The most basic precaution one can take to safeguard the air quality, the health of the operators and the patrons and naturally the health of their HVAC systems and pump room equipment, is to simply seal the feed lines of chemicals in an airtight fashion that that chemical fumes don’t spread out in the pump room and the HVAC system.
Regardless if it’s acid or liquid chlorine drums, they all produce fumes that are highly corrosive. You might not be able to see them, maybe even smell them but the results of those fumes are undeniable.
There are numerous different options out there ranging from proprietary caps (seals) for use with chemicals, specialty drums with corresponding caps and seals for that particular use, to fume scrubbers and propriety feed systems. There’s a host of different options out there and for different budgets as well.
The easiest way to go about it, would be to just poke a hole in the cap your drum already has, run your feed line and then seal around the line with some hot glue or silicone. You might never get to 100% airtight drums or 100% fumes free pump room but at least one must try using some common sense and minimum ingenuity to safeguard their lungs and secondly the very expensive equipment they were tasked with looking after.
