I've been conducting an experiment to see if silver can maintain a swilling pool standalone. I have 8 buckets, each 4 gallons in size. Four of the buckets have water taken from the pool (chlorinated). The other 4 are tap water. I have added no silver, 10ppb silver, 30ppb silver, and 70ppb silver to each of the four buckets, for both tap water and pool water cases respectively. There is also a 9th bucket with tap water plus 10ppb silver plus 2.4ppm peroxide.
The source of silver used is silveroxide powder dissolved in concentrated solutions of citric acid, forming presumably silver citrate. Measuring silver down to the ppb takes some work and some serial dilution. It was quite a pain. It has been about 3 weeks into the experiment now. Thus far, none of the 4 pool water buckets has obviously visible scum growing. However, all 5 of the tap water buckets show sign of some green junk (I guess algae) growing in the bucket. The tap water with no added silver does clearly have much more scum growing in it than the other buckets, so there is clearly a substantial benefit to the silver. One strange thing is that the bucket with tap water and 10ppb silver has the least growth as compared to tap water with higher concentrations of silver (30ppb and 70ppb). The tap water plus 10ppb silver plus 2.4ppm peroxide also has more growth in comparison. I am taking both of these last two observations to be a fluke. We allowed junk to just fall into the bucket. So there are some dead flies, plant debris etc. Every few days we had to add tap water to make up for evaporation. The question is what to do now? The obvious thought is to add silver at much higher concentrations and wait for an obvious reversal of the growth to be seen upon doing so. How high a silver concentration would one be willing to swim in? It would probably be therapeutic to swim in 10PPM silver! I presume most of the silver is forming clumps of silver compounds like silver chloride and staying in colloidal suspension. Swimming in high concentrations of such silver should not pose argyria risk, wouldn't you think? My plan has been to find a functional level, then just add some silver each month - enough so you are sure it makes up for any lost silver that last month. Then do a worst case calculation for seeing how high the lifelong silver content in the pool could go, and conclude that even that upper bound is safe. Comments appreciated. I would really like this work in swimming pools. I have a dream of turning a swimming pool into a functional water storage that could be further processed to make it drinkable. David
