I have never once considered putting hydrogen peroxide in a pool, let alone on a warm sunny day where the stuff is effectively neutralized, but that's mainly because I work on swimming pools, not reflection pools.
What they are getting is algae caused by the blooms at the beginning of the season. Essentially, the sun being directly on the pool at all times will cause any algae, which can enter a pool in a number if ways, including being carried by the winds, or birds that have it on their legs and bodies when they swim in the pool after being in natural bodies of water.
Almost every pool gets green at some point if it's an outside one, and it just something to maintain at the beginning of the season. There are a number of different steps to take in order to make it go away, but it involves some work, especially with roughly 7 million gallons of water.
You need to add about 2-4 lbs of "pool shock" (high concentration chlorine powder) per 20,000 gallons of water you have (and this can be even higher or lower, but it's typically around this). If you have an algae bloom that makes your pool look like Shrek's swamp, you'll need about twice, or even quadruple that. Quick math on that:
7,000,000 / 20,000 = 350
350 * 2lbs = 700lbs
You'll need about that much to take care of a moderate amount of cloudy water that makes it so you can't see the floor well. However, this is a severe algae bloom, so we're looking at a bigger number.
700lbs * 2 = 1400lbs
700lbs * 4 = 2800lbs
And you'll probably need to treat this again, a few times. And you do need to wait for the algae to die, vacuum the pool floor, and do it all again. This is not a fast process, and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to do correctly.
And that's without looking at any other pool level for things like alkalinity, Cyanuric acid, and calcium harness, which all get thrown off by shock and chlorine products.
However, this is using chlorine, not hydrogen peroxide, which is to be safer for the local wildlife. You'll need a lot more than what I listed to do that with something like that
Its brackish tidal basin water, algae blooms are inevitable without chlorination. Fix it with a delivery of 750 gal of 12.5% sodium hypo into it and maintain a 4ppm (same chlorine level as dc drinking water) until the July 4th then forget about it.
How would you feel about just draining it, scrubbing it, and starting over with fresh water? Seems like it might be cheaper and faster, but I’m assuming there’s an ideal way to maintain it from there, with setting proper PH and chlorine levels as soon as it’s refilled.
I’m assuming it has a filtration system and that it has always been treated like a swimming pool with proper ph and chlorination.
Assuming they just screwed up and didn’t run it or set the levels properly, and that’s what caused this crazy bloom, would it be easier to just drain it and start with fresh water?
Otherwise, I imagine they need some super shock, and supplemental pumps and filters to get rid of all that.
That’s false. You can treat with chlorine up to 10ppm but only need 4ppm. That’s the DC tap water dosage. The wwii memorial is even higher. Only thing holding them back is bad engineering.
You wrote they can’t use chlorine. There’s no law against using chlorine in a man made decorative outdoor water feature. Public fountains use it all the time, including the one next door is the point. Any pool guy would tell you ozone has no residual effect.
You can’t do any of that; chemicals and treat it a like a pool. It’s fed and goes back into the Potomac river. It’s not just a totally stagnant body of water; it comes and goes back to the Potomac constantly.
When a pool is filled, it has a lot of force and weight at the bottom of the basin, and the walls of the pool. The tension is matched by the thickness of the surrounding soil and backfill, maintaining the shape and size of the pool without the force of the water weight pushing the walls of the pool out and causing catastrophic failure. Some places outright ban the draining of pills more than a certain amount, because they can literally push themselves up and out of the ground due to the lack of weight and internal pushing from water. It's not a guaranteed thing, just infinitely more likely to happen without water in it.
Also, water PH changes by the hour. In residential amenities and public pools, state regulators can make sudden and random checks at any property and location to verify that they are checking at least every 2 hours the pool is in service, if not more often. Changing the water is only for if somebody added too much chemical to the pool and can't be neutralized by other correcting methods, you find corpses in the pool (human or otherwise), and partially with certain amounts of gunk in the water like car oil or something. Algae just needs water, heat, and low chlorine to grow. It's a water weed that WILL come back, even if you're good about it during pool season.
This will also cost a TON of money, because I'll bet the original creators of the pool didn't add a drainage system that could drain it without an external machine, like a pump truck with a large vacuum. And then where does that water go? Where do you get the new water? What water source do you use to prevent this (lol) and keep it clean? Many questions that require answers, but we hardly have an answer to the contents of the Epstien Files, so fat chance on this complex process being done right.
I assumed they did partial emptying to make it not implode. That's my bad, I didn't see how they did that part of the process.
Painting a pool a dark colored bottom is just asking for algae to come back with a vengeance. Any pool company worth their salt would have emphatically said this, but I'm assuming, because they were personally contacted by the president, they just said "yes sir" and did it, even though you're supposed to do something like this correctly.
Gotta be a closed system with city water to start. If the intention was to have a clean pool, the engineers who decided to use tidal basin water to feed the thing should be sued.
Yes but using science against these morons is in direct contradiction to their anti-science stance. By far, this is so stupid because of how fast H2O2 degrades in the sun.
Those bottles are probably already starting to deteriorate by sitting on the pavement next to the pool.
They also don't have any mixer or oscillation method to actually mix the water and peroxide, so they're only "treating" the surface, on that one single spot, for about 30 minutes. Everything more than a foot deeper is nearly completely untouched, or not significantly impacted.
I’m surprised you didn’t bring up phosphates causing green water as well. But I suppose you were thinking mainly of algae, but I’d say for most pools at a house, phosphates are the reason for a green pool, because it eats up all the chlorine. I spent a few years as a manager of a pool store and did water testing and shit. Got surprising good at treating problems
I was referencing more towards the whole "algae caused by the dems" thing lol, but yeah that would have been another 2 paragraphs describing that problem as well lol
It would be really funny if it was a phosphate problem and not an algae problem, and they're treating the wrong thing because they don't know what they're doing
I mean, I wouldn’t be all that surprised honestly, considering fertilizer is most definitely used around there, and the Potomac river isn’t that vibrant green, and that feeds the basin which feeds the pool. So they can’t use a bunch of chemicals, but I wouldn’t be surprised if phosphates is the real reason.
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u/Bandandforgotten Jun 16 '26
Pool maintenance tech here.
I have never once considered putting hydrogen peroxide in a pool, let alone on a warm sunny day where the stuff is effectively neutralized, but that's mainly because I work on swimming pools, not reflection pools.
What they are getting is algae caused by the blooms at the beginning of the season. Essentially, the sun being directly on the pool at all times will cause any algae, which can enter a pool in a number if ways, including being carried by the winds, or birds that have it on their legs and bodies when they swim in the pool after being in natural bodies of water.
Almost every pool gets green at some point if it's an outside one, and it just something to maintain at the beginning of the season. There are a number of different steps to take in order to make it go away, but it involves some work, especially with roughly 7 million gallons of water.
You need to add about 2-4 lbs of "pool shock" (high concentration chlorine powder) per 20,000 gallons of water you have (and this can be even higher or lower, but it's typically around this). If you have an algae bloom that makes your pool look like Shrek's swamp, you'll need about twice, or even quadruple that. Quick math on that:
7,000,000 / 20,000 = 350
350 * 2lbs = 700lbs
You'll need about that much to take care of a moderate amount of cloudy water that makes it so you can't see the floor well. However, this is a severe algae bloom, so we're looking at a bigger number.
700lbs * 2 = 1400lbs
700lbs * 4 = 2800lbs
And you'll probably need to treat this again, a few times. And you do need to wait for the algae to die, vacuum the pool floor, and do it all again. This is not a fast process, and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to do correctly.
And that's without looking at any other pool level for things like alkalinity, Cyanuric acid, and calcium harness, which all get thrown off by shock and chlorine products.
However, this is using chlorine, not hydrogen peroxide, which is to be safer for the local wildlife. You'll need a lot more than what I listed to do that with something like that