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Comment by filleokus | Hacker News Reader

Probably not as unknown, but the smell in pools that I've always associated with chlorine is in fact the smell of some product when chlorine react with urine.

I wonder what other falsehoods I believe along the same lines. I'm sure there are plenty in the realm of software/hardware.

On the other hand, is there any difference between this kind of misconception and others? I feel there is. The observed correlation is very strong, and the wrong causal relationship is made based on assumptions that are extremely common. We sniff a thing, and what we sense is what we call that thing's smell. But again, this is probably a wrong conclusion very often (depending on how you want to define a "thing's smell"). If I smell a book, is it actually the book that smells or some kind of organic thing that grows on the paper? Is it meaningful to separate the two? </saturday morning philosophizing>

0: https://waterandhealth.org/healthy-pools/busting-chlorine-sw...

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>Probably not as unknown, but the smell in pools that I've always associated with chlorine is in fact the smell of some product when chlorine react with urine.

Chlorine does have a smell, and fresh pools do smell (where nobody has entered, much less, urinated in them yet).

From the linked article itself: "A healthy chlorinated pool can emit a light chemical odor, especially if it is an indoor pool and one with less than ideal ventilation".

The most common smell once people enter a pool is from chloramines from other kind of pollutants (body oils, etc) not urine. If it gets to urination you get much stronger smells.

But the smell you've associated with chlorine is 99% chlorine derivatives, present in any chlorinated pool, i.e. the "chemical odor" mentioned in the article.

nope, Mark Rober did a video on this. It's urine and sweat.

nope, had a pool at my house in California that I never peed in and wouldn’t use sweaty. Distinct chlorine smell.

We can also just drop some drops of chlorine in a bucket of clear water. It smells.

Not sure what the vlogger was exactly testing. Perhaps the "left them sit for 3 days" part, had the chlorine he put dissipate into the air and lose the smell?

> the smell in pools that I've always associated with chlorine is in fact the smell of some product when chlorine react with urine.

The smell I associate with the chlorine in pools is identical with what I smell when opening a bucket of chlorine before chlorine gets put into my pool.

I agree there are some of the strongest-smelling chlorinated pools which seem no different than plain Clorox in the bottle, where we know there is no urine in the reference material.

On an ordinary chromatograph which has been dedicated to a degree for accurate analysis of chloramine, it will not be capable of detecting the amount of free chlorine gas in the same pool air sample.

The actual free chlorine would best be determined on different instrumentation, and correlated to the readings for chloramines to see if further trends can be revealed.

Whatever it takes to keep kids from playing in the toilet water and peeing in the pool.

More anecdata: We also get chlorine smell when putting the chloration powder into our freshly filled pool. So either German tap water contains urine or your claim is not universally true.

> the smell in pools that I've always associated with chlorine is in fact the smell of some product when chlorine react with urine.

A brand new home pool smells exactly like a public swimming pool because chlorine has a very distinctive smell of ... chlorine.

It’s possible that something reacting with chlorine makes it smell more or slightly different, but it’s not like pool with fresh chlorinated water smells nothing or very little. It has a strong chlorine smell.

that might be true. urine leads to ammonia and ammonia + bleach leads to chlorine.

other smells

- I remember reading the cut grass smell is a "trauma signal" from the grass

- the smell of rain.

- why do babies smell good? (and bad?) I've always wondered about that. You know how hearing is acutely tuned for the sound of a baby crying? I think that our brain has been wired up to neutral sounds and smells, but rewired specifically to like babies not reject them, watch out for babies when they cry... and know when to change their diapers.

You can open a fresh gallon of chlorine and prove yourself wrong.

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