Goldfish Swim School's first franchise operation opened in Birmingham, Mich., 2009. Since then, the school, which provides swim lessons and water safety instruction to infants and children from 4 months up to 12 years of age, has expanded to include more than 80 schools open or in development in the United States and Canada.
Specially trained instructors at the school's locations are currently teaching more than 70,000 students per week to swim and be safer in and around water.
Recently, the school agreed to switch its facilities to salt-based on-site batch chlorine generation. The systems, available through ChlorKing are in use at 30 Goldfish locations.
Steve Pearce, executive vice president for ChlorKing praised Goldfish for its elimination of "… volatile, toxic bulk chlorine, which can be especially harmful to children when they're exposed to chlorine gas by human or mechanical failures." He added, "Pool evacuations and the hospitalization of children because of chlorine-gas exposure, which were in the news all summer, are totally avoidable when pools use salt-based systems to sanitize the water."
The technology used in ChlorKing's NEXGEN 20 system generates pH-neutral liquid chlorine, known as bleach, from salt stored onsite. In addition to eliminating the need to store bulk chlorine, it eliminates the accidental mixing of chlorine and muriatic acid by human error, a major cause of chlorine-gas releases.
In addition to eliminating the safety issues associated with bulk chlorine, chlorine-generation systems provide long-term price stability. Salt, the chemically inert raw material used in the system, costs less than bulk chlorine and is not subject to price volatility. The ststems can produce liquid bleach for sanitization for 43 cents per gallon, about one-fifth the cost of bulk chlorine. Automated feeders add salt to the production tank as required to maintain safe disinfection levels. With the system chosen by Goldfish, no salt is added to the pool, and salt levels don't need to be maintained in the water. Franchisees can also add UV systems as a supplemental disinfection to destroy chloramines and inactivate pathogens on contact.