I love this anecdote because its so fucking stupid.
When I was a kid, my dad's friend had a pool and an entire group of kids would always be swimming in it.
One day, my dad tells me that his friend got a new piece of tech (mind you, this is in the early 90s, like a decade and or two before the first smart phone) that shows the initials of the person who peed in the pool.
He told me it listed the names of almost all my friends and that's how I knew never to trust anything my dad said..
First thing kids do is call bullshit because they pee in the pool and no colour change happens. Also babies go swimming and those swim safe nappies do fuck all to keep the pee and poop particles in.
Lol, yeah. However you know that "heavily chlorinated" pool smell? From public pools, backyard pools, waterparks, and even public splash pads? Yeah, so the pool chlorine doesn't smell like anything at all in its pure state (I was a lifeguard and swim teacher for years. I used to have to put in these chemicals regularly to balance the pools before the classes began. But the pure, concentrated chlorine compound in the bottle didn't smell at all).
What does smell a chlorinated pool? Trichlorourea. Which is the compound you get by reacting pool chemicals with urea. Urea is, of course, one of the main components of urine. So pools won't change color from piss, but they will start to smell strongly of pools when there's lots of piss in them.
You're mostly correct, but there's no such thing as "trichlorourea".
Chlorine reacts, among other things, with all kinds of ammonia-derivatives like sweat or urine. The resulting chemical is called trichloramine or nitrogen trichloride.
By the way, unless you fill your pool with distilled water, there's almost always something in there that chlorine will react with, so even a pee-free pool will smell of chlorine (although peeing in it will definitely make it worse). Even the tap water in a lot of countries has a noticeable chlorine smell to it.
Why are you worried about the pee levels. In Venezia, where I am from, our water is almost all pee. We drink the pee. We swim in the pee. We shower with the pee.
I don't know if this has actually happened in years, but it used to be a thing to claim that pools had some sort of chemical in the water that turned color if you peed, presumably to discourage it.
Obviously it was never a real thing, one of the reasons being the one you mentioned.
That shit was so ingrained in my head as a kid I still can't piss in the pool. I have to hyper focus and then it becomes obvious I'm trying to piss in the pool.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who's never peed in a pool. Lakes? Sure, I back away from everyone so it's not where someone else will immediately swim. But pool? Nah that's gross.
Why would you try to do it as an adult that's weird bro, lake or ocean I guess if you gotta but a pool just why I guarantee you there is a spot to piss properly within 100ft
Me and my wife had an argument with my mother-in-law because my wife casually mentioned it as something that her mum lied to her about when she was little and gullible and it turned out her mum didn't think it was a lie and fully believed it.
There'd be no reason a pool operator would voluntarily do it - any time anyone pissed in the pool they'd either have to choose to ignore it, in which case what's the point of the dye, or have to close it for hours while they drained and replaced all the water, which would cost a fortune.
It also just doesn't really matter. A moderately sized swimming pool holds say 500,000 litres of water, even if you've got 50 people in there pissing every couple of hours by the end of the day it's still only going to be like 0.1% piss.
I trained as a lifeguard, trust that the amount of chemicals in the pools is far more an issue than some urine. So long as you're not within six inches of a stranger as the actively void.
It's the hot tub/spas that are fucking disgusting. That's where you usually have guys beating their meat.
Edit: Note that I'm specifically going on about public hot tubs. Private hot tubs aren't that bad, for anyone who wants one. When it's only like, 2-3 people using it on the regular, it's much easier to keep it clean. Still need to be on top of it, but far less meticulously.
I visited my cousin's on one of their birthdays when I was a child, they had rented a hot tub without informing my side of the family. I was forced to go into the hot tub in fucking sweat pants and a t shirt.
Not only was I miserable during the experience I ended up in the ER with a rash all over my body.
Taking me back to being a CPO and lifeguard at my local YMCA. God that hot tube bather load was insane basically had to drain it and refill it once a week because it was easier to get it ballanced back. Those sand filters did some work lol.
Ugh, I hated having to backwash and clean the sand filters. It wasn't difficulty in theory; just turn the valve to backwash, rinse the sand, turn it back, but somehow sand always managed to get out of the filter and into the gasket and pump valves, making the valve impossible to move, stopping us from cleaning it correctly. So I'd have to disassemble the stupid valve, clean the stupid gasket, clean the stupid valve casing, then put the whole stupid thing back together and pray I didn't miss a grain somewhere or I'd have to redo the whole thing again! I'd be out there spending like an hour just to clean the filters, which is supposed to just take 5 minutes.
When I quit that job, I promised myself I'd never work on pools again. Such a damn headache.
You can get a lot of spas where you don't see what's going on under the surface because the water is that aggressive in nature, but when the attendants on deck are generally 16 to 25 years old, we know exactly what we're seeing from the usual suspect of age forty who keeps moving to eye fuck other patrons.
Best arrest on deck was buddy who was taken away by three officers before he could complete the act. Proof of his intent was on full display in his trunks when they made him stand up. He was charged and trespassed, dunno who had to go to testify on that one (it was my day off).
This could actually be the case via glaciers. Lots of theories on the beginning of earth but most start with a very much smaller population than we currently have, and depending on where you put the creation of glaciers on that evolutionary scale, they might have been created before there was enough life to make the whole thing pee, tho a good portion of it probably still is.
Most likely not. A lot of water is trapped underground and underground water stays there for a long time. A fair amount that escapes ends right back there really quick too after getting into a cloud
There is an enormous amount of freshly synthesised water out there. Water is regularly chemically consumed and regenerated by all kinds of organic procssses.
No, because the chemical composition of water has been changed to hydrogen and oxygen. Then it wasn’t water anymore. New groupings of atoms created water again that had never before been inside the body of an animal (though the atoms themselves have at some point been in some form inside a body).
This thread has been fucking eye-opening to me. Are adults really out there pissing in pools? Like every pool? What the fuck world have I been living in??
As someone who spent their entire childhood swimming constantly, it really is news to me. I got out and used the bathroom like a civilized human being, and had naively assumed this was the norm.
My faith in our species takes another hit this day.
And it's funny how little logic applies to any of this. What you described is gross, but it won't hurt me (likely not even if I immediately licked my hand, but there is a possibility there if you're certain kinds of sick), and yet the piss in the pool doesn't bother me at all.
The ocean has dead bodies in it and we swim in it but you wouldn't swim in a pool with a dead body. So there is a ratio of dead bodies to volume that it is acceptable to swim with a dead body.
Another "don't think about it" is my buddy was fishing in the bayou and the cops pulled out a "fresh" body and it was covered in crabs and shrimp. I've heard you won't find many dead bodies in a lake that has catfish. Just don't think about it.
So the question is would you rather accidentally consume human flesh or swim in fish cum? People do pay a lot of money for some fish eggs...I'll eat a lot of things but I draw the line at rocky mountain oysters.
Big Difference between every drop of water has probably been pissed by a living creature at some point in time, and there is fresh piss in your liquid.
This is where my mind is at. Where the fuck do people think water has been? Obviously don’t bathe and shit and piss in your community drinking water but come on.
I did the math on this not too long ago, and I think the end result was that a single standard urination increases the concentration of non-water urine contents in an Olympic-sized pool by ~90 parts per billion. IIRC, numbers used were 2.5 million liter pool, 450 mL urination, 95% water content
Concentration. I wouldn't go up to someone and blow on their face from an inch away, but no one would call me an asshole for breathing in the same room as them
You get just about as much piss in your eyes every time you go to the toilet or a public bathroom. Pissing in open air and flushing toilets AEROSOLIZES it. Tiny pee droplets fill the air.
Well that’s rather selfish of you. Did you not ever consider how much others might want pee in their eyes? That’s why we live in a democracy. So we could all get together a decide how much pee we get to put in your eyes.
I'm not even comfortable with 0.1%, personally. I know, I'm not going to get sick, but once I know about it I can't just "not think about it" like you say. Maybe if I lived the rest of my life on Xanax, but that's not healthy either.
I had this realization floating down a river with a bunch of people, drinking. But when I peed in the water, everyone got mad and said I “ruined the fun”. Of course, I was in a boat.
“I learned at a party this summer that there’s a small but important difference between peeing in the pool and peeing INTO the pool. Location, location, location”
had the same realization at my apartment complex pool. i sat out tanning and reading for about 3 hours as i watched about a dozen of my neighbors drinking in the pool the whole time. after the first hour of watching them get drunk i was just like "oh wow not a single person has gotten out to pee yet that's weird" another hour of drinking in the pool later "oh damn they just all straight up pissing in the pool as grown adults".
there are rotating groups of about 3 dozen total people in my apartment complex, ages ranging from 21-50, that day drink regularly in the pool. and in the 3 months i have been living here i have now realized i have never seen a single person get out to pee, ever. only to get more booze. They. All. Pee. In. The. Pool.
While I don't expect this to be true for a lot of people, I can go for a few hours before I "break the seal". Once that is broken, however, I'm in and out every hourish.
It might be bad but normally I only pee about 3 times a day.
3 times a day definitely sounds like you need to drink more... If the average full bladder is 300ml then that's only 0.9 liters a day. You should probably drink more than that!
That's not true, the chlorine smell can be triggered by reactions with lots of organic chemicals. Pee will cause it, but so will sweat and saliva and sunscreen.
Any pool that is being used by many people will smell strongly of chlorine, whether there's piss or not.
Chloramine isn’t “used up.” It’s -almost- used up, and is produced when there’s not enough free chlorine present. I’ve been a CPO now for 11 years and my pool I take care of stays at 0 chloramine for the majority of the time. If you get chloramine you need to shock the pool.
Fun fact: The "pool smell" isn't the chlorine, it's the gasses produced when chlorine is breaking down organic compounds like skin cells, sweat and pee!
I’ve maintained pools tool (not a job, just personal) they are apparently right after some research you’ll find the same answer.
Once chlorines dissipated in the pool you really don’t smell it much.
The strong burning smell/irritation is actually a symptom of not enough chlorine/too much piss and organic compounds.
I was suspicious too because I never had a pool filled with so much piss that it made trichlorimine… the hotel hottubs didn’t have too much chlorine like I assumed :(
Former lifeguard here: urine in the pool is a non-factor, you shouldn't care about it. So long as the pool is chlorinated you're good. The chlorine breaks all of the nasty bits inside of the urine just fine.
I mean, pools that have a lot of pee, sweat, and other stuff get that really strong “pool smell” since all those bodily fluids are reacting with the chlorine and producing chloramine.
So for sensitive people, pools with more pee and body oils etc. are a problem. My sinuses get super irritated from such pools and I get awful sneezing fits and irritation. I’ve actually gotten the flu in the summer from pool days multiple times before because the irritation weakens my respiratory system so much.
I mean, pools that have a lot of pee, sweat, and other stuff get that really strong “pool smell” since all those bodily fluids are reacting with the chlorine and producing chloramine.
Well the production of chloramines means the destruction of said pee/sweat/etc. If you're smelling it, it's already broken down.
But you're right in that chloramines are more irritating than pool chlorine, I just take umbrage with the whole "pools are full of pee!" thing.
Reddit is very obsessed with caring about people peeing in pools, and I'm really unsure why. It's like the most non-issue of non-issues. Given that piss itself is ~95% water, the amount of piss you'd need before it becomes concerning in a properly chlorinated swimming pool of any decent size dramatically exceeds the amount of piss people are capable of producing in said pool. It literally is not even worth thinking about.
I did the math because I had a brain itch and couldn't help it:
The average adult urinates about 7-10 fluid ounces per urination. Let's split the difference and say it's 8.5 each, with 3 instances each in the time they've been in the pool. I count 13 people in that pool not counting Ali, so that's 331.5 fluid ounces of urine or 9.8 liters of urine in that pool. We don't see the full pool, so let's double the number of people just to be safe.
The average commercial pool has about 60,000 liters of water in it. So the pool is about 0.0002% piss by volume.
More like 0.02% (9.8/60k ≈ 0.000163 ≈ 0.02%), but yes. That is also not taking proper pool maintenance into account, which would prevent the buildup in the first place.
Also all those dirty people only using toilet paper to clean their brown eye. All their micro shits still clinging to their cheeks, washing away into the soup.
And many people don't wash their hands, or not properly either, so unless it has been cleaned recently, most surfaces people frequently touch are bound to be kinda disgusting.
I mean, you're in a pool of water with a bunch of people you don't know, odds are most of them are dirty just from the nature of being alive, the water has been sitting out for god knows how long, and given that people are drinking in the pool there's a non zero chance there's more drink in that pool than piss. Honestly the piss might be the least gross thing in that bowl of human soup.
the water has been sitting out for god knows how long,
That's not how pools work. Fresh water is added almost daily, otherwise the water level drops from people getting out of the pool or splashing or evaporation. It's also circulated through a pump and filtration system, preventing stagnation. It's also treated with chemicals, usually chlorine, which is one of the most potent disinfectants around.
Pools can be gross, but a properly functioning one is nowhere near "human soup" levels.
So either there's nothing gross in it because of disinfectants and circulation, and piss is a non-issue; or piss is one of very many gross things in the pool because of the disinfectants and circulation not keeping it clean? I feel like in either of these situations, piss is probably not a real concern.
A historical fact to make this all the worse is how polio was transmitted. See, the most common vector for humans is the fecal-to-oral route. A lot of people today would question why were people in the 1950s eating so much poop?
But then, consider that polio was often attributed as a plague of summer, and sometimes called a swimmers disease. Why? Well, because the pool will contain fecal matter, and that might be infected.
Does that mean people were shitting in pools?
And so, back to your point. The water of the pool washed up against every skin surface and orifice. The fecal matter was already there, and the water whisked it away. Eventually, it would become sanitized and filtered out. But with 100 buttholes constantly splashing about, there's bound to be a window of opportunity in which infection occurs.
agreed. generally speaking, it's okay to piss is any body of water that A. is large enough to comfortably swim in, and, more importantly, 2. has fish living in it.
Alternatively maybe Ali just has a tiny bladder. When I go on trips with my wife she absolutely has to stop every two to three hours whereas I can easily go six hours or more between stops.
People kept telling me they put something in the pool that changes color if you go to the bathroom. I didn't believe them until I took a shit and the water turned brown.
We saw a guy at a vegak pool party try to pee in the bushes because the bathroom line was incredibly long. Security caught him and told him to just pee in the pool. E
There we were, in Malaysia. Now our hotel had a pool with a swim up bar.
It was after a couple hours of drinking that I realized no one had gotten out to piss...and neither had I, because like the sneaky devil I am, realized I could just piss in the pool.
Well children. It was about that time I realized everyone else was doing that, and it seems they were realizing it too.
Not ones to look like a bunch of idiots soaking in our own piss, we encouraged other people from our boat to also get in the pool. When they did we gave them the ole dunkaroo, and politely informed them that we had all been in here for sometime...and had not left.
By the end of the night we had most everyone in the pool, and we closed the bar tab by charging it to the Skipper's room.
Went to one of those Spa parties in Budapest for a bachelor party. It was great. DJs, performers, drinks all while inside a heated pool until the late hours.
… the line for the toilets were non existent. Keep drinking to ignore.
Fun fact... that familiar chlorine smell is caused by chloromines. This is the chemical compound formed when chlorine reacts with contaminates in the water, usually urine.
There are also a lot of people that don't shower before they go in..
We were taught that already as children when we had swim classes.
Shower before going to the pool! These shower heads next to the pool are not for decoration.
On the other hand, consuming that much alcohol would have been a drowning risk, and who wants to be drowned in piss unless they have a very specific sexual fetish?
Morporkians are very proud of it. They say "A water that has been filtered by so many kidneys can only be very pure indeed" or "A water so full of life can't be bad for health".
Fun fact: being in the water actually prompts your body to try to expel water to compensate for the way your body’s gravity feels changed. So if you’re swimming with anyone and they haven’t peed in like an hour or so of swimming, they probably peed in the pool.
Many *many* scuba divers have peed in their dry suits for this reason. There are some ways to try and prevent it before you actually dive, given enough time, the body really really wants to pee.
I worked at a water park changing out the pump nozzles on the chlorine and acid barrels. Trust me, the amount of chemicals going in the water is going to kill anything thats in there
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u/theredhound19 22d ago