What’s in Your Swimming Pool Water? – Find Out With Palintest Technologies
Anyone who has worked with commercial swimming pools will know the importance of having clean and chemically balanced water. Regular and accurate testing of your pool’s water is crucial to maintaining your facility and preventing scale and stain formation, cloudy water, algae growth, and the corrosion of pool surfaces and equipment. But with so many chemicals and tests to be aware of – free and total chlorine, calcium hardness, alkalinity, pH, cyanuric acid to name a few – it can be difficult to know what kind of tool you need. Palintest offers some of the most accurate pool water testing devises thanks to years of engineering and refinement. Palintest calibrates their photometers using certified color standards set by National Physical Laboratory (NPL) standards and Palintest’s quality control team prepares certified standards for their products in their own lab.
In the 1950’s, Dr. Thomas Palin approached chemist and pharmaceutical wholesaler William & Simpson Ltd. in Newcastle, UK, to manufacture reagent tablets for his new method of testing water. Dr. Palin had developed breakpoint chlorination for water and the DPD colorimetric method for the determination of chlorine. DPD reagent tablets react with chlorine in the water to create that recognizable magenta color, the saturation of which reveals the chlorine levels in the water. This method was so effective that it became the standard determination method throughout the world and is still used today.
Palintest photometers use an internal light source and optical chamber to read the wavelength transmitted through the color created when the reagent tablet for a particular test is added to the pool water. Based on the principles of optical absorbance of light, and Beer’s Law, the measured absorbance and transmittance allow Palintest photometers to calculate the concentration of the parameter you are testing.
Palintest offers four basic water testing photometer models to meet the needs of your swimming pool. Each comes with starter pack of reagent tablets and the matching test tubes, test tube brush, reagents, and crushing rods for your particular model.
The PoolTest 9 is capable of analyzing three additional water quality tests for the proper management of your swimming pool and the PoolTest 25 offers the complete range of water quality testing. You can change the chlorine range of the PoolTest 9 and the PoolTest 25, and unlike the 3 and 6, which have a numeric based interface, the 9 and 25 are language based and allow you to change your on-screen prompts to English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Turkish and Mandarin (Chinese).
So, when deciding on which Palintest photometer you should purchase, it really just comes down to how many specific tests you want to perform, how you want your test results and how many you want to keep on file. Recreonics carries all four models of Palintest photometers, including both the standard and extended version of the PoolTest 3 and the PoolTest 6. All Palintest photometers are IP67 waterproof rated and comes with a 2-year warranty.
You can also purchase replacement Palintest test reagent tablets and accessories such as test tubes, crushing rods, measuring syringes, and check standard sets from Recreonics.
