Water – How to filter iron out of kiddie pool water

This is more of a comment but too long...

I was a pool boy through college. I have also owned 3 pools. What you are doing has too many variables. You have temperature, environment, chlorine levels, quality of original water, amount of swimmers, pump size, plumbing size, pool depth, almost anything around the pool is a variable.

So as a kid I would clean pools, add chemicals and often people had me set up their timers. But I was a dumb kid and was told 12 hours minimum and 16 hours for bigger pools. Usually in 2 shifts a day and we tried to set up timer to hours they were not swimming.

Some customers though set up their own timers and the times were literally all over the place. I have seen oversized pumps on for 2 x 2 hour shifts and the pool never had an issue (pool was in the middle of a yard not close to house, trees, and wasn't swam in a ton). I have seen algae grow in a pool that was being pumped 12 hours a day.

I would think that for your size pool and pump your baseline is 2 x 4 hours. I would consider 3 x 2.5 hours too. From there you can work your way down or up as needed. The big thing is if you are playing with the filter times then you need to keep an eye on the pool. You have to figure that each hour a day might be $8-15 a month in electric costs. But at the same time will you have to spend a ton of money on chemicals to fight an algae problem and all the time that goes with that.

After enough research and talking with a few different companies, this is what I have found out.

Water Softener - this is good for removing Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, etc out of the water. It mainly used for getting a small degree of minerals out of the water. Using it primarily for high iron removal will decrease the life of the softener.

Chlorination - this will technically work for iron. You can get a pellet dispenser directly on the well. This would also help for bacteria. However, it would increase the arsenic levels which we are bordering high already. Its also not the greatest to be drinking chlorine.

Ozone Iron Filter - the benefit from what I researched with this is that the ozone will kill off bacteria. The maintenance can be somewhat costly from what I hear. Its once a year but costs 100 to 200.

Air Iron Filter - this is what we ended up going with. Maintenance is going to be around 20 for a new part each year, otherwise don't have to do much with it. Its going to cost about 1700 to 2100 which is close to the same price for ozone filter.

The average life of each system seems to be about the same, 10 - 15 - 20 years depending on the amount of iron or other minerals its filtering.

Update - we purchased an air iron filter because we had very high iron content. The water softener didn't remove enough of the iron. The new iron filter works very well, can't smell the iron anymore and the faucets don't get red. It does cycle through water quite frequently (2 to 3 days) and is pretty loud when it does. Overall though, it works well.