---
title: "How Much Pee Is In Pools And Hot Tubs? Let This New Science Horrify You"
date: "2017-03-01"
modified: "2017-03-01"
authors:
  - name: "Adam Weinstein"
    link: "https://taskandpurpose.com/authors/adamweinstein/"
url: "https://taskandpurpose.com/news/much-pee-pools-hot-tubs-let-new-science-horrify/"
categories:
  - "Culture"
  - "Humor"
---

# How Much Pee Is In Pools And Hot Tubs? Let This New Science Horrify You

![](<https://taskandpurpose.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/03/19038999-1.jpg>)

Researchers in Canada have developed a new test to gauge urine content in pool water, and mostly what they’ve learned is that you dirty animals let it go in public pools and hot tubs *a lot*. How much? Read on if you dare.

Lindsay Blackstock, head of the five-person University of Alberta research team, explained their new testing process [in an interview with The Guardian](<https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/mar/01/how-much-pee-is-in-our-swimming-pools-new-urine-test-reveals-the-truth>) on Wednesday. Essentially, they gauge how much of a certain artificial sweetener is present in a pool or a tub. That sweetener, acesulfame potassium or Ace-K, “is commonly found in processed food and passes through the body unaltered,” The Guardian writes.

Measure the Ace-K content in the water, the researchers say, and what you pee is what you get.

So what did they get? Says Blackstock: “Our study provides additional evidence that people are indeed urinating in public pools and hot tubs.” They found Ace-K in 100% of the 31 pools and tubs they tested in two Canadian cities. The hot-tub situation is a total piss show. All eight hot tubs listed had high urine content; a Jacuzzi in one hotel “had more than three times the concentration of sweetener than in the worst swimming pool.”

That said, the worst swimming pool ain’t great, either:

*"After tracking the levels of the sweetener in two public pools in Canada over a three-week period they calculated that swimmers had released 75 litres of urine – enough to fill a medium-sized dustbin – into a large pool (about 830,000 litres, one-third the size of an Olympic pool) and 30 litres into a second pool, around half the size of the first."*

Seventy-five liters of urine is about 20 gallons, in the space of 21 days. So if anyone ever says you’re not worth a gallon of warm piss, you can tell them that’s basically a day’s worth of public-pool pee. How can something that keeps kids warm while they swim *not* be worth something?