During the pandemic many families had to stay close to home and some decided to invest in a swimming pool for their backyard.
Now supply chain issues are causing shortages of some pool chemicals, including liquid chorine, which many pool owners rely on to kill germs, bacteria and to keep water sparkling clean.
“It’s no different then when you go to a grocery store and there is no cereal on the shelves, now they are telling us there is no chlorine,” said Walter Ptasznyk, who was buying chlorine to get his pool ready for a weekend pool party .
A transport truck carrying a tanker of liquid chlorine was delivered to an International Pool & Spa location in Oshawa just in time as the location’s main storage tank was almost empty.
“Normally this gets tank filled three times a week and it can hold 10,000 liters of chlorine. Now we are only allowed 8,000 liters per week,” said Darryl Hudgins, with International Pool & Spa.
The store said it is only allowing each customer to have 10 liters of chlorine per visit to make sure there is enough chlorine to go around for other pool owners.
Factory shutdowns and an increase in demand has made liquid chlorine harder to come by with has also led to higher price increases.
“Our costs doubled three weeks ago, but we only increased our prices marginally because we still need to make sure our customers are happy and in the past few days the prices we are charged doubled again” said Hudgins.
Depending on the pool product due to supply chain issues, inflation and increased demand many have increased 30 to 50 per cent or more over the past two years.
There was also a major fire at a US chemical plant in Louisiana in 2020, which has also caused product scarcity.
“Transporting the product has tripled over the past year, you have a tight supply and you put in all together and you have much higher prices,” said Harry Martyniuk with Pioneer Family Pools.
Pool stores say chlorine pucks or granular chlorine are still available and many pool owners also use salt water systems, but liquid chlorine will be more scare this summer and expensive.
“It’s like anything, if you need it you are going to have to pay for it” said Ptasznyk.
It’s not clear if the supply chain issues involving liquid chlorine will persist throughout the summer months, but if you use it, you may want to stock up on it when you can.