You Can Measure How Much Pee Is in Your Swimming Pool With This Method

Now that you have spent most of your summer hanging around in your neighbor’s pool, it might be time to find out exactly how much pee is in there. The good guy of science, Mark Rober, makes this much easier with his great video showing you how to figure out what it is you’ve been duck diving in. He enlists the help of a Canadian scientist, Lindsay, to develop a way method of pee measurement. If you thought that would be a simple measurement of urethra, think again. Because urethra is passed out of the body in sweat, so measuring that won’t give you accurate results. But measuring the amount of artificial sugar will. There is only one way the body can get rid of artificial sweetener and that’s through your pee. So Rober and Lindsay use that as a yardstick to estimate just how many people have relieved themselves under water.

Artificial sweetener is in so many food products that it is likely you have consumed some recently and would have at least some in your urine. The idea is simple, know how much artificial sweetener is in the pool and you’ll know how much pee. And it turns out, there is quite a lot. An average pool has about 13 gallons of pee in it and that relaxing hot tub? About 2 gallons.

The most surprising part of the video is that that the smell of swimming pools doesn’t actually come from chlorine. It comes from a chemical called trichloramine which is produced when chlorine and urine are mixed together. Horrifying but true, the nostalgic scent of your childhood holidays is actually someone else’s pee.

Via Mark Rober