Chlorine Test for Swimwear

I recently received a batch of new swim hardware and I wanted to test it’s durability before being able to properly sell it. Here is a link to my swim hardware.

I know that the gold and silver plated hardware I have been selling is appropriate for swim and was very durable for that purpose. The new swim hardware I received isn’t as shiny, so I began to question its durability.

I do believe that the new hardware was not tumbled prior to plating, which is why the surface is not as shiny as my other hardware. I did have to get this from another factory that I had not purchased hardware from in the past, mainly because finding swim hardware is very hard to do.

I worked out the math with my husband, as as you will see from the video, I’m not 100% sure of what he did, but the gist is we converted teaspoons to gallons, since we know we have a 5 gallon bucket and we also knew that the smallest unit of measure we can gauge is about 1/8 of a teaspoon.

I just had him re-explain it to me, so he is walking me through this math in case you want to do this yourself.

The highest strength a pool should be is 3 parts per million of pool chlorine, which is 10x the concentration of household bleach.

There are 768 teaspoons in as gallon, so to convert the 3ppm, you divide 3 by (1 million teaspoons/768 teaspoons per gallon), which gives you 3 by 1302.08 gallons. We then divide that by 8 because the smallest measure is 1/8″ we can positively do. That gives us 3/8 divided by 162.76 gallons. We then divide by 3 so we have 1/8 tsp on the top, so 1/8 teaspoon per 54.25 gallons and at the 10 times concentration of household bleach, we divide the 54.25 by 10, giving us about 5 gallons.

Don’t ask me to do that again. We did a control of straight tap water, then 1/8 teaspoon diluted in the 5 gallon bucket, but then decided to double that to 1/4 teaspoon for our 3ppm, which really is closer to 5ppm and took a sample. Then we doubled that again and took another sample for our 6ppm (or really 10ppm).

In the end, my hardware was still completely fine after 9 days in the strongest strength of chlorine water. The only item that seemed to break down was the cotton elastic. I don’t know how general wear and tear will affect these items with this extended amount of chlorine exposure, but in chlorine that appear to be fine with minimal, if any, degredation of the material, for a total of 216 hours of chlorine exposure.