This month I've been working hard on renovating su-re.co office. Construction is taking an incredible amount of time, but as I love architecture and design so much, there is no reason to pay to outsource this to an architect. The online salon ended last month, and one of my projects was cancelled due to Corona. After being shown a functioning natural swimming pool at Eco Lodge in Bali, which I visited a fortnight ago, I decided to start working on it.
A natural swimming pool is a safe pool for people to swim in without using chemicals such as chlorine. It's about using the ecosystem to naturally clean the swimming pool, which means creating a clean pond. To be more specific, carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) are always needed for the growth of organisms. However, the proportions required vary greatly.
C:N:P = 115:15:1
Unlike carbon and nitrogen, which make up an organism's body, phosphorus is needed because it is a necessary component of the bridge that connects the double helix of DNA. Although the proportion is tiny, organisms cannot reproduce without it. In other words, by removing phosphorus in some way, natural swimming pools create a situation where algae cannot grow.
In fact, I have seen some natural swimming pools in Bali. I will not mention the organisation's name, but some of them are just marketing and change the water once a month. A standard swimming pool with chlorine would be more environmentally friendly, which keeps the water constant.
Before Corona, I travelled to Europe about three times a year, and I visited two European companies with advanced natural swimming pool technology.
At Biotop in Austria, they have a huge natural swimming pool, and I learned a lot about how it works. They also have a system to remove phosphorus mechanically, without using natural grasses. I was very impressed to see geckos swimming in a crystal clear natural swimming pool.
Gartenart, in the UK, investigated the composition of the groundwater in the su-re.co site and we were talking about a consulting contract, but I got too busy, and the project has been on hold for about three years.
One of the problems we have found is that our property's groundwater is too nutrient-rich to be used for a natural swimming pool. The best solution is to use a more extensive system to collect more rainwater. Rainwater is suitable for natural swimming pools because it is pure and low in nutrients, necessary for the development of algae and water plants. In practice, however, collecting rainwater involves collecting water that has fallen on a roof, and it is not clear how much organic matter is on that roof. However, we already have a system in our office that collects about three cubic metres of rainwater, which we filter and have been drinking for about four years, and we have never had any problems with it.
Compared to Europe, the algae bloom is much faster in the summer months because of the higher biological activity. This needs to be controlled. It is good to keep the sun off the water, but the problem is how to grow water plants, keeping the water clean.