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Healthy pool water for Aussie kids
Veda Dante, October
2017
Swim school owner-operator Margie Thorpe (not related to Australian swimming star Ian Thorpe but you'll see they share a similar passion) is a long-term resident of Mareeba in Far North Queensland, having lived in the area for 30 years – 20 of those teaching youngsters to swim, ranging from babies aged as young as four months through to early primary school children.
Qualified by AUSTSWIM in Swimming and Water Safety and Infant and Preschool Aquatics, Margie is also a licensed Swim Australia Teacher of Swimming and Teacher of Learners with Disability.
In 2011, after years of working in backyard pools, Margie and her husband Shane decided to build their own pool for her “very young, easily distracted, and special needs” customers. "Margie's Swim School" includes a shallow area for toddlers and fearful learners to experience the fun and safety issues about being in and around water.
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Margie Thorpe, from Mareeba in Far North Queensland uses a chlorine-free sanitation system in her swim school pool.[/caption]
Margie's Swim School teaches youngsters to swim, ranging from babies aged as young as four months through to early primary school children.[/caption]

Finding a healthier alternative to chlorine
Chlorine is notorious for its side effects and, for someone like Margie who spends up to seven hours a day submerged in chemically chlorinated pool water, that meant losing all of her body hair. "I didn't even have eyelashes," she says. Margie believes the combination of corrosive pool chemicals and the fumes produced by the heated water in the enclosed space not only caused significant hair loss, but potentially triggered the two bouts of pneumonia she has suffered from since building her swim school pool. "I constantly smelt like chlorine and I do think it was getting into my lungs because I've had pneumonia twice in three years," she says. After installing a saltwater chlorinator in her custom-built swim school pool – "that was about the only way we could get water in the pool and get it up and functioning" – Margie's husband Shane read an article about Hydroxypure in a pool magazine. "Shane spent years researching different systems and he kept insisting that Hydroxypure was better than all of the others," she says. "He was constantly looking, because, as the pool is basically in a large tin shed, he wanted to preserve the shed as well as me." [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="690"]