Resort Pool: 85% Less Chlorine and 60% Lower Operating Cost

The starting point

Every large hotel pool operator recognises the pattern behind this project, even where the details differ. A busy resort complex runs a conventional chlorine dosing regime. It works: the water is safe, the tests pass, nobody gets ill. But it generates three costs that are easy to underestimate until somebody adds them up.

• Chemistry. Chlorine has to be bought, delivered, stored, handled and dosed. It is a budget line that only ever moves one way, plus a storage room, plus a set of handling obligations for staff.
• Air. Free chlorine reacts with sweat, sunscreen, urine and skin cells to form chloramines. Chloramines are what people mean when they complain about “too much chlorine” — the sharp smell, the stinging eyes — and they load the ventilation system and corrode fixtures and ductwork.
• Guest experience. In a resort, the pool is a selling point. A hall that smells strongly of chlorine, water that irritates eyes and skin, and swimwear that fades within a fortnight all work against that, quietly and continuously.

None of this is an argument against chlorine as a disinfectant. Chlorine is cheap, effective and better understood than anything that competes with it. The question that leads most operators to look at a resort pool upgrade is narrower: how much of the chlorine load is actually necessary, and what happens to the building and the guests if most of it goes away?

The facility

A 2,500 m² pool complex at a resort in southern Europe. That is the level of detail we are able to publish. The client’s name, precise location and the year of installation are covered by a confidentiality agreement, and we are not going to work around it with hints.

What matters for comparison is scale and type. This is resort-scale water: several basins under one operation, heavy daytime load, seasonal peaks, and a guest population that is there to enjoy itself rather than to help the plant room. If you run a 12-metre hotel pool or a 50-metre municipal competition basin, treat this reference as indicative rather than predictive. Scale changes the arithmetic in both directions.

The project was an upgrade of an existing complex, not a new build — which is the usual situation for anyone reading this. A nanobubble system sits in the circulation loop after filtration, so basins, pipework and filters normally stay as they are. What has to be checked before anything is promised is flow rate, plant-room space and available power.

The solution

The NanoSWIM Pool System was installed in the treatment loop. It generates very large numbers of gas-filled bubbles under roughly 200 nanometres across. Unlike ordinary bubbles these do not rise and burst; they stay suspended, carrying a negative surface charge and an enormous combined surface area.

Two things follow. Gas transfer into the water becomes far more complete than with coarse injection, because almost none of the gas escapes at the surface before it dissolves. And the collapse of individual bubbles releases oxidative energy at microscopic scale, which disrupts pathogens and breaks down the organic load that would otherwise turn into chloramines. That second mechanism is the one that matters most for a hotel: it attacks the source of the smell rather than treating the smell after the fact. The buyer-side explanation of all this is on chlorine-free pools.

It is worth being equally clear about what the system does not do. It is a treatment-loop technology, so it acts on water passing through it, and on its own it leaves no disinfectant residual in the basin. For a hotel or resort pool that is usually acceptable, which is exactly why a reduction of this size is achievable there. For a public municipal pool it usually is not, and a small chlorine residual has to stay in the water regardless of what else is installed.

Before-and-after results

Two figures from this installation are published. Everything under them is a description of what changed, and the final column of the table says which is which. We would rather the table looked thinner and meant something.

What changed	Before	After	How we know
Chlorine consumption	Conventional dosing across the whole complex	85% lower	Published figure for this installation
Water-treatment operating cost	Baseline running cost for the same complex	60% lower	Published figure for this installation
Chloramines and chlorine smell in the hall	The familiar indoor-pool smell, strongest at peak load	Removed along with the chlorine that was producing it	Mechanism and operator description — not a measurement
Water clarity	Acceptable, dulling visibly under heavy use	Visibly clearer, and holding through the busy part of the day	Qualitative
Chemical ordering and storage	Routine deliveries and a stocked chemical store	Far fewer orders and much less held on site	Follows directly from the 85% figure
Complaints about eyes, skin and smell	The normal background level for a busy chlorinated pool	No longer driven by chloramines, because there are far fewer of them	Qualitative

Only the first two rows are figures. Rows three to six describe the direction of change: they are consistent with the chemistry and with what operators report, but nobody attached a number to them at this site, so we are not going to invent one. Note also what the 60% refers to — the cost of treating the water, not the resort’s total operating cost. Those are very different numbers, and suppliers blur them constantly.

What guests noticed

Guests never notice water treatment. They notice its absence.

The changes a resort guest can actually perceive after a conversion like this are consistent and unglamorous. The pool hall stops announcing itself from down the corridor. Eyes do not sting after a long swim. Skin does not feel tight an hour later. Hair and swimwear survive a two-week stay in better condition. And the water looks clearer, which reads as “clean” long before anybody thinks about chemistry at all.

For a resort, this is the part that shows up in reviews rather than in the plant-room log — and it is also the part we cannot put a figure on. Nobody ran a controlled guest satisfaction study here, so any supplier quoting you a percentage improvement in guest satisfaction from a pool conversion is guessing. What can be said honestly is which complaints stop arriving, because they all trace back to the same single cause.

Why this page has no customer quote or logo

The obvious things to put here would be a photograph of the pool, the resort’s logo, and a warm sentence from a named operations manager. We do not have permission for any of the three, so none of them appear.

That is a deliberate choice, not an oversight. A testimonial you cannot attribute is worth nothing to you as a buyer, and a fabricated one is worth considerably less than nothing. Confidentiality on the client side is completely normal in this market; hotel groups in particular do not enjoy publishing what their plant rooms cost to run, and a supplier who leaks that has told you something about how they will treat your data too.

What we can offer instead is more useful than a printed quote. Ask us for a reference conversation and we will go back to operators we work with and request an introduction. Some will decline. When one agrees, you get twenty unfiltered minutes with somebody who has no reason to sell you anything.

The aquaculture write-up is built the same way — see the reference from aquaculture — and more references are added as figures and permission come together.

Payback period

We are not publishing this site’s contract value or its payback period. Partly for the same confidentiality reason, and partly because somebody else’s payback is not transferable: pool volume, turnover rate, local chemical and energy prices, climate and bather load all move the answer substantially.

The arithmetic is simple enough to do yourself before you talk to any supplier, and it is worth doing with your own numbers first so you can judge the quotes you receive:

1. Start with the annual chemical spend for the pool complex alone. Not the whole property — just what the water consumes.
2. Apply a reduction you are willing to believe. Take a conservative fraction of the 85% figure if you prefer. The point of the exercise is the shape of the answer, not the decimal places.
3. Add the costs that move with chemistry. Ventilation load, corrosion and replacement of fixtures and ductwork, and staff hours spent on dosing, handling and testing.
4. Subtract the new running cost. Electricity for the system at your flow rate, plus service and consumables. Ask for kW draw in writing and multiply by your own tariff, not the supplier’s.
5. Divide the capital cost by the annual saving. That is your payback, in years, on your pool, using nobody else’s assumptions.

When you compare quotes, ask every supplier for total cost of ownership over five years on your actual pool volume, including consumables and energy. A supplier who cannot produce that is pricing a box rather than a solution — and that applies to us as much as to anyone else.

Want the same result?

The honest answer is that you may well get a different one, and it is worth understanding why before you spend anything. A resort pool in a warm climate, with a heavy load and no regulatory residual requirement, is close to the best case for this technology. A Norwegian municipal facility operating under the bathing-facility regulations has to keep a measurable chlorine residual in the basin and will see a smaller — though still substantial — hotel pool chlorine reduction equivalent. The mechanism is the same; the ceiling is set by the rules, not by the equipment.

If you run a hotel, spa or resort, the commercial case for your sector is set out under solutions for hotels and spa. Send us your pool volume, turnover rate and current annual chemical spend, and you will get a straight assessment back — including the cases where we would tell you that the pool operating cost saving will not justify the capital. Request a quote when you want figures against your own facility rather than somebody else’s.