Does pool water have to be disposed of properly

[coffeeman]

Well, there's chlorine, cyanuric acid, and algecide in the majority of swimming pool water. It kills bacteria and insects, neutralizes pee and poop, and if you thow a fish in a swimming pool it usually dies in a day or so.... so, no, we can't have that.

It'll kill a frog to. As i think about it, maybe they drown??

Cheers

 

[MossRoad]

Funny thing is, we get tree frogs in our pool all the time. You thow them out and they come back the next day.... :confused2:

 

[FTG-05]

Chipmunk did the same thing to our pool, 5 days before our house sale closed. Lawn was fine.
Home pools do not require a high concentration of chlorine. At end of season, ours was always pretty low when we drew the pool down to winterized it. I always drained into the yard with no I'll effect.
On the other hand, years back a nearby municipality mistakenly drained a public pool into a trout stream causing a die off.

I had my pool at my old house for 16 years (this will be the first time I haven't had to winterize it since we sold it last summer).

When winterizing, I always shocked the pool for a day or so, then siphon-drained it into the front yard. It was a 45k gallon pool and I usually dropped it between 18 and 24 inches. Never had a problem with it hurting the grass. Having said that, our grass was Bermuda and we pretty dormant by the time I usually winterized.

 

[WM75Guy]

We had a city ordinance you could not drain a pool into the street that I had to enforce. Pools had to go into sanitary sewer, by the time it hit the sewer treatment plant it was diluted enough it did not cause a problem. It's the guy who just bought the abandoned house where the pool hadn't been taken care of for several years and drained it into the street that caused a problem. Clean pool water into the storm drain wasn't a big problem, but you have to have a clear policy nothing could go into the storm drains. All our storm drains ended up into an area we had to occasionally dredge out. Soil had to be tested and if too contaminated disposed of as hazardous waste.

 

[MossRoad]

Here in good old South Bend, Indiana, we have what are called combined sanitary/storm drains. EVERYTHING from houses and the streets goes to the sewage plant for treatment. Poop and rainwater in the same tube.... UNTIL.... it rains too hard. There are overflow dams in the sytem, so once the flow gets too high, it goes over the edge into pipes that empty directly into the river. So every time it rains hard you get poop in the river that doesn't clear out for three days. Toilet paper, sanitary products, kitchen waste, anything that was in the sewers goes directly to the river. Its that way in several towns up and down the river and fairly common in the midwest, something like 800 cities with this type of system. Fortunately, the EPA has mandated a separation of the sanitary and storm sewers. Its only going to take 20 years and $400,000,000.00 to correct!

 

[boggen]

salt and/or chlorine can wipe out a nearby stream fairly quickly and easily. even if the stream only runs a couple times a year.

streams / lakes / ponds. are not artificial things, they do have there own eco system going on with them. and it does take time for stuff to grow back.. bacteria, single cell organisms, algae, etc.. between on a well, and septic system, a stream on the farm, a couple lakes, plus couple thousand gallon pond down stairs.... have had to learn the hard things, the hard way. (falling flat on face)

contact local water department / city sewers or what not. as others have said it differs every were. some locations charge for incoming water (drinking water), along with (sewage water) and pools are extra costs / fees.

some require water to be trucked in and out.

some places you can dump water but you need to be X feet away from a body of water (stream, lake, pond, etc.. even if water is only there a couple times a year) the X feet, is more about letting the water slowly trickle through the grass / ground, and get filtered out, before it reaches the given body of water.... other words instead of a slow trickle out of the water faucet, ya end up opening a 2" hose powered by a 3HP pump... large difference in GPM. from say 50 gallons an hour to a few thousand gallons per hour... slower is better. and if dumping a huge amount of water, say from a swimming pool. then dump a couple hundred gallons, give it a few hours, dump another couple hundred gallons, etc... all the water to soak in and filter itself as it flows to a given body of water. you may need to wait a day or two between amount you dump.

all systems can take the water, it just depends on how much and how quickly it can handle it. before ya destroy stuff (killing grass, algae, fish, etc...), slower and less amount at a time always better. but generally when ya get to about this for a common person, it is about time ya talked to an engineer familiar with what to do, in the given situation.

 

[kenmac]

When I backwash my sand filter. The backwash water dumps into a ditch. The ditch makes it's way to or terminates ???? I have no idea

 

[MossRoad]

I imagine the gulf of mexico.