The Pool Biz

Salt Peddlers Respond to IPSSA report. Send out Hired Guns and Crackpots to take Pot Shots.

2011-03-05T07:27:00.000-08:00

Pool & Spa News reports that people are already taking exception to the NPIRC/IPSSA report on how hard it is to take care of salt pools with weekly service visits. The crux of their complaint is that IPSSA used the wrong Total Alkalinity standard for their testing because salt chlorine generators are a base type sanitizer, so a lower Total Alkalinity should have been used for testing.

IPPSA responded by pretty much rolling over, beating their breast, crying, "We're sorry!", and swearing it'll never happen again. Here's what they said; "We didn’t really take total alkalinity into account," (I just can't believe anyone would ever allow themselves to be quoted saying that) "and we should have... For all our calculations, we were working from the IPSSA point of view and based our figures on IPSSA’s general alkalinity, pH and hardness recommendations. I admit we didn’t test any further than those.”

What they should have said was, "You people have been lying in all of your advertising for all of these years that your salt based chlorine generators produce a 'pH neutral' chlorine - not a base type chlorine - and so we tested your sorry salt boxes based on the claims made in your own ads. You've been building and selling these machines in mass quantities for the last 8 or 10 years and never once did any of you do a minute of research into these questions, leaving it up to non-profits and not-for-profits to do the testing that you, as allegedly responsible manufacturers, should have done before the first unit went out the factory door. Builders and service folks have been crying for guidance for years on this technology and all you've done is obfuscate, mislead and misdirect, changing your mind more often than Italy changed governments in the sixties, never once setting forth concrete water chemistry guidelines for your own equipment, and then repeatedly denied salt damage to stone and metals. And now you send out the same old 'aquarium-laboratory-in-the-garage guys' to throw rocks at us."

But they didn't. Search me why.

This Just In: Industry Admits, "The Pool Guy Was Right."

2011-01-22T07:57:00.000-08:00

Yep. I'm still the same old humble, lovable Pool Guy. Those of you who know me well can attest to that.

Those who only know me through what I write in this blog? Well, let's just say it's a skewed opinion you may have of me. Skewed either by my sometimes inflammatory rhetoric - some people just don't like the bomb-throwers among us, think that all discourse should be couched in temperate language - or, your opinion may be skewed by your inability to see beyond your own money-grubbing determination to saddle your pool customers with unmanageable, highly destructive technology for a buck.

Up until now my detractors have always been able to rationalize away what I say by taking harbor in the lie that, "everything the Pool Guy writes is just hearsay. It's not research. It's just anecdotal. Or worse yet, just his opinion," even though I always try to post a link to some type of research or plain old scientific fact along with anything I state in this blog. The few who would admit that I did back up what I said with credible links were usually able to maintain their continued suspension of belief by saying, "yeah, but those aren't links about pools. They're studies of salt damage to winter roads, or salt damage to architectural stone in coastal areas. There's no real studies done with test pools."

In fact, one idiot, kinda famous around the blog here (coincidentally, his name rhymes with Con), was always fond of responding with challenges to show records for the "alleged affected pools". You see, his Out was always the fact that almost no one keeps daily or even weekly records on their private residential pools. That's the kind of thing you only do once a problem presents, a problem like metal corrosion, or stone and concrete deterioration. But he would insist that since no one had any records going back to Day One of startup, he and his company - and by extension, the whole family of companies involved in salt based chorine generation technology - were off the hook, that it was all clearly the homeowner's fault for sloppy water chemistry and the Pool Guy was just mean for trying to pin it on that benevolent gang of guys and gals who populate the sales staffs and board rooms of the corporate world.

So these corporate humanitarians would go about their business, as if none of what I was documenting was occurring. They just carried on the pretense of being helpful, responsible equipment manufacturers and representatives, answering everyone's technical questions about how best to install this nearly unmanageable and highly destructive technology on pools, and just ignore the issues I was raising here in this blog, throwing the old "show me your papers" routine at anyone who might raise their hand and ask why their pool was dissolving. And these ploys worked for a long time.

Because the truth is, I'm just a pool cleaner in Dallas, Texas, and I sure didn't have the pockets deep enough to fund the kind of research to reproduce in a lab the problems I was seeing with salt based chlorine generators.

But IPSSA did. That's the Independent Pool & Spa Service Professionals. They're pretty close to being a nationwide organization of, like the name says, independent pool & spa pros, who had been seeing the same problems I've been seeing for all these many years. Too, they had an organization with deep enough pockets to go and get answers to at least some of the questions.

Now, as you look down this page, if you're saying to yourself, "I ain't reading all this", just stick with me for a few more paragraphs before you close your browser. I'll hit the highlights for those of you lacking the Geek Factor one might need to get all the way through a piece like this. And I encourage you to read at least these next few paragraphs. Because this is it; the Smoking Gun, as it were. This is a document that no one selling salt based chlorine generators can hide from. Because it is true, unbiased research, conducted by research scientists at Cal Poly State University, in real swimming pools built for the specific purpose of conducting research for the pool industry by the National Pool Industry Research Center.

IPSSA's research protocal #1 asked the simple question: Can a Salt Water Pool Be Maintained Properly With Once-a-Week Service?

The short answer is NO. And here's why: The research concluded that salt based chlorine generators "do not provide for stable, in-specification, pool water chemistry parameters". What they found was that the pH would rise "very rapidly" after the weekly adjustments were made. This is something that all of us who service pools on a weekly basis have known about salt based chlorine generators since they first came back into vogue around 2002. Of course, you can still find manufacturer's literature that swears salt based chlorine generators make pH neutral chlorine. I explained why that's a load of crap back on November 4th, 2006 in the blog piece Welcome to the Caveat Emptorium. Here's what I said then:

"Now, if you look up the manufacturers sales pitch stuff, this is where they get that myth that the type of chlorine they generate is pH neutral because these three thing [chlorine gas, caustic soda and hydrogen gas] balance each other out. Not true. Much of the hydrogen gas rises to the surface and leaves the water. It gasses off, being a gas and all. Duh. That reduces the amount of hydrochloric acid created, and so the caustic soda - sodium hydroxide - neutralizes the hydrochloric acid and what’s left raises the overall pH.

But if you’re a pool cleaner like me, you already knew that without all them fancy words. Because every week when you go to your salt pools, the pH is through the roof."

And here, five years later, IPSSA and the NPIRC have proved that I was right, proved it in their test pools monitored by their research scientists.

Now, what has happened in that five years? According to an article in Casual Living magazine, in "2002, only 15% of new pool installations were salt water. Today, [2009] an estimated 70% of all new pools are being built with electrolytic chlorine generators and the nation has more than 1.3 million salt water pools".

In 2005, when the problems with salt chlorine generators began to present and people like me started talking about it, not only did the industry ignore what we were saying, but they made an active effort to thwart our message, with lip service to the problems we were reporting by promising manufacturer funded research. I remember around March of 2007 a group of seven salt system manufacturers claimed - via a Pool & Spa News article, "Coping With Salt" - that they were investigating these issues and that results would be forthcoming. But absolutely nothing ever came of that, except that those manufacturers redoubled their efforts to sell a salt system to every pool owner worldwide.

So now we have salt systems on about 40% of the pools out there, and the most credible pool & spa service association on the planet (IPSSA), after reviewing the results from the most credible pool & spa research entity on the planet (NPIRC), says that these things aren't manageable on a week to week basis.

But the damage is done. The money's been made. And the consumer is still left with the impression that Salt's Great, because that's what the Sales & Marketing Guys have been preaching at them for a decade. Unfortunately, if the Average Pool Owner goes off-script and tries to find any information on their own about salt, they're more likely to read the article in Casual Living about how great salt pools are than they are to read an article in Pool & Spa News about the results of IPSSA funded NPIRC research on the problems with salt pools.

And even though some of the manufacturers have modified their pitch to tone down their outrageous claims of the benefits of salt, while totally avoiding any admission that there's any downside to salt at all, you can still find manufacturers Living the Lie on "pH neutral chlorine". Like this ChlorKing pdf from January 2010, touting the delivery of pH neutral chlorine from it's X-Gen On Site chlorine generator. In bold print, no less. It used to be that nearly all the manufacturers would say it, but most of them stopped when they saw the writing on the wall about those pesky old facts finally getting into print somewhere besides a pool cleaner's blog.

Now, let's look a little bit deeper at the research that was done. If you want to read the full report, you can download it here, at the IPPSA website. The pools that were used for this research are located in San Luis Obispo, CA on the campus of Cal Poly State University. The pools are small, approximately 8,000 gallons of water. You can see the pools here, at the NPIRC website. They're located at the top of a hill, with a 7 or 8 foot chain link fence surrounding them. The deck area around the pools is large and there is no vegetation growing near the pools. So, although they get some debris blown in over the fence from the surrounding trees on the campus, I wouldn't say it comes close to the level of debris that we get here in Texas in our older city neighborhoods with mature, heavily landscaped yards and lots of pool side foliage and tree overhang. Too, the weather in that area is pretty mild, with the average high temperature in July being 80.3 degrees. Here in Dallas, our average high in July is 96 degrees, resulting in 88 to 90 degree pool water. So, it's a pretty safe bet that the average Dallas residential pool would have about 3 times the chlorine demand from the salt cell as would be required to maintain the FC's detailed in the NPIRC report.

Another reason I think that would be true is my own personal experience with other forms of sanitizer in different climates. I lived in San Diego, CA for many years, and I distinctly remember keeping my pools on the high side of normal FC with 1 to 3, 7 oz. tabs every week (3 tabs being a very big old deep diver), shocking the pool with a gallon of liquid chlorine about once every never. Here in Dallas, it's typical to add 5 to 6 tabs every week during the summer, and shocking with a couple lbs. of cal hypo (equivalent to 1 gallon of liquid) about every two weeks.

So, I bet that the salt cells at NPIRC were running about 20% to 30% output, whereas we run salt pools through the swimming season at 100% output. The result being that we have two to three times the output in high pH chlorine in our salt pools, resulting in a much more rapid rise in pH.

I would bet it's the same in Arizona or New Mexico, or to the east of me across the sunbelt all the way to Florida: Higher ambient temps and water temps resulting in higher chlorine demand, resulting in higher output from all those salt cells and higher and higher pH's.

You know, when I was younger and more naive about the motivations of industry and the products they sold, I used to have this theory I would share about 7 oz. trichlor tablets, and it went something like this; pool water, given the parameters we need to protect the plaster surface, which is basically an alkaline, high pH surface, tends toward high pH. And trichlor tablets tend toward low pH. The two create a symmetry, a balance of sorts, that results in pretty rock solid pH right where we want it to be at 7.5. Because week after week, on pool after pool, out in San Diego and here in Dallas - two areas with vastly different fill water - given a proper Corrected Total Alkalinity (80 ppm to 120 ppm) - I would see the same pH on all of my pools; 7.5. And as long as I compensated for the high pH of my other chlorine products (sodium hypochlorite in San Diego and cal hypo in Dallas) when it came time to shock by adding a little muriatic acid in the deep end, I had no problem maintaining that perfect pH. The result was I never scaled or etched a pool. And I used to think this was by design, that thought and effort on the part of the industry went into all this.

But the full court press to ram salt chlorine generation down the throats of the industry by the manufacturers has proved to me that the trichlor thing was just a coincidence, and the only real design is making money, even if it scales the pool, corrodes all the metal and erodes the stone and concrete.

Thank goodness for organizations like IPSSA and NPIRC and their efforts to bring the facts out into the light of day. Too bad they don't have the advertising budget the manufacturers have to neutralize the good they try to do.

Stray Currents Are Still Destroying Your Pool... and Spa... Especially Your Heater

2010-06-10T07:52:00.001-07:00

Got this great comment today from PFLOVING in response to one of my first posts, in October '06, Why Salt Sucks. I didn't want it to just be buried in the comments so I'm creating a post just for it:

Found this blog and boy u guys are onto something. I too am battling this question on corrosion. here is my story. I have a hot tub with a swg eco spa generator. Made it one year and the inline heater started to show signs of corrosion around the heater terminal. It was replaced and my pool guy placed a zinc anode disc in the strainer basket and ran a copper wire to the bonding/ground terminal on the side of the balboa heater box. In 3 months the heater was toast. The stainless turned into a rusty dripy mess. The thought was that the swg was putting out too much clorine and maybe aggressive water since he had installed lots of these swg's without very many problems in our area. I questioned the bonding that was done from Coleman since it wasn't a contiuous wire linking all the pumps and heater together. So that heater was replaced and all the bonding was tightened down the way Coleman had installed it since most connections were very loose and dielectric grease placed on those connections. 2 months later now the new heater is destroyed....eaten up. He doesn't know what to think but I know it is stray current in salt water and dissimiar metals causing this. I also think, from my research, that the titanium plates and the stainless in the heater are reacting. The zinc anode goes uneffected since its not bonded to anything, at least thats my thought. One person in the industry suggested to bond everything together but don't hook that bond up to ground or back to the house panel as this is where you get stray current. This way everything is at the same potential. Also hook the zinc anode to the bond wire which it will complete that circuit and the zinc should dissolve and not the stainless heater. Thoughts?

PF: thanks for the great comment!

And, yes. I have quite a few thoughts on this subject. Your description of the problem fits in exactly with what I've come to believe about salt pools; if there is any Stray Current on the grid, proper bonding and salty water will amplify it's damage. Not to say that every electrical appliance attached to a pool shouldn't be properly bonded. They absolutely should be. That's how we keep people safe in water that is filtered, circulated, sanitized and illuminated via electrical devices; through proper bonding.

That's why I can't say that your idea of creating a separate bonding grid for your spa is a good one; because I don't think it would meet code. Check with an electrician in your area to be sure. But the last thing you want to do is to compromise your bonding where water and people are involved. And you may say that you're just creating a separate grid from the other, so it will be safe and isolated from the problems. But if anyone gets hurt, all that will matter is that you may have violated code to try to create a less susceptible bonding grid.

Second, Ground is Ground the World 'Round. Driving a new rod into the ground a few yards away from where your house's bonding rod is doesn't change much. If there are Stray Currents in the vicinity, they will be felt on your new grid as well.

Any electricians out there who want to contribute here, I'd appreciate it. I think my logic is right on this, but I invite everyone's input.

Having said all that; the fact that your second heater failed faster than your first heater AFTER you cleaned up the bonding indicates that the better the bonding for the appliance, the more susceptible it will be to Stray Current Corrosion. IF there is any Stray Current on the grid, it will be amplified by the highly conductive salt water and the cleaned up bonding grid will present even less resistance and a more conductive path to the equipment, in this case your heater.

So, the issue becomes one of either getting rid of the amplifier (salty water) or troubleshooting the grid to isolate and eliminate the sources of the Stray Currents. Here's a link to a story from a pool builder, Rod Ogilve, who had a similar problem with Stray Currents. It's a thread over at the APSP website about salt pools and what the builders think of them. Scroll down to his post that starts, "at the risk of sounding like another salt blast..." It is very applicable to your problem. After that, scroll through the whole thread while you're there. There's lots of great Horror Show pictures of salt damage to pools.

Also, take a look at this post; The Trouble With Heater. Scroll down until you get to the part in italics. it's the latest update to the Never Ending Saga of trying to find a pool heater that plays well with salt. So far, none do.

My best advice is take the salt system off your spa, use a little Twenty Mule Team Borax to soften the water and forget all your problems with Stray Current Corrosion. Or spend hundreds of dollars on electricians to find out that your neighbor two blocks away has a bad sump pump.

Good luck with your spa!

Arch Plaster Study

2009-03-21T07:37:00.000-07:00

I do a lot of reading. The older I get – and the less time I spend in the field – the more I read all the things that I used to tell myself I would get around to reading when I wasn’t too busy cleaning pools.

And, man, oh man, am I disappointed. For most of my career I’ve just had my head down, focusing on taking care of my pools, going to the odd show here or there, attending a water chemistry seminar now and then. But most of my experience and knowledge was gained poolside. I haven’t paid a lot of attention to what The Experts write – with the exception of Bob Lowry of Lowry Consulting Group. I’ve said it elsewhere in this blog; if you passed the IPSSA water chemistry exam in the last 20 or 25 years, you probably used Mr. Lowry’s books to study for it. He writes great, layman’s explanations of what’s happening in pool and spa water. But other than his stuff and what I’ve picked up on my own from textbooks and the like, I haven’t paid a lot of attention to many of the documents that end up, through their influence, controlling the direction of our industry.

They’re not really documents, per se. You seldom, if ever, see the actual study information – like the real research data, for instance. The internet is huge and space on it is free, or next to free. But still, you never get a look at how tests were really done, or all the data that was collected. Mostly they’re just reports, or, more correctly, brochures. And the ones that seem to have the most stacked decks and the most biased information are the ones from companies selling stuff to us.

Imagine that.

Now, if you’re a homeowner wondering what any of this has to do with how salt damaged your pool, it doesn’t. Use the Labels on the right to find blog pieces about your symptoms or about Making Salt Work for your pool, because this blog piece is going to have a huge water chemistry geek factor. But if you’re one of the guys who is in that spot that I was in until about a year ago, busy with your route and your repairs, with your head down and hardly any time to read what it is everybody says are the latest governing documents for how we ought to take care of our pools, take a minute and read this:

There’s this report that’s been rattling around the internet and the trade shows and seminars for the last several years. You can find it here:

Sorry. Dead Link

or here:

http://piscines-apollo.com/docs/arch_plaster_study.pdf

It’s title on that first website is:

High Cyanuric Acid Levels & Plaster Degradation In Swimming Pools

by Ellen M. Meyer, Ph.D

It’s commonly referred to as the Arch Study. It was a three part study; the first part 5 weeks long, the second part 6 months long, and the third part 4 months long. The gist of the first part of the study is that they put some freshly made plaster coupons into some test tanks and then added as much as 500 ppm cyanuric acid to them, and that over a period of 5 weeks, the cyanuric acid level fell from 500 ppm to about 140 ppm in one tank, and from 200 ppm to about 100 ppm in another tank, and that in both tanks, the cyanuric acid collected as a residue on the surface of the plaster. The fourth paragraph says, “surface analysis showed the accumulation of cyanuric acid on the plaster”.

Okay, so just stop. Stop right there and think for a minute. We’ve all seen pools with 200 ppm stabilizer, right? If you’re honest with yourself, unless you’re Super Poolman, you probably have a handful of pools like that on service right now. I know I do. Most of my pools are under 100. But there are some that are higher. I admit it.

Now, ask yourself a simple question; have you ever seen the cyanuric acid level in those pools drop to as low as 100 ppm and deposit as a residue on the plaster in a 5 week period?

I didn’t think so. In fact, I know so. In fact, it is safe to say – through thirty years of empirical observation - this has never happened anywhere outside the laboratories of Arch Chemicals.

So, how much stabilizer is 500 ppm? Well, it’s about 42 lbs. of stabilizer dissolved into your average 20,000 gallon pool. I’m talking pure, granular stabilizer melted into a freshly plastered backyard pool. Because that’s how this study was done. They took freshly troweled plaster coupons and put them in a tank and put in an amount equal to you putting 42 lbs of stabilizer on Day One of start-up. And how do I know that? Because I finally sat down and gave it several careful readings – something I don’t think many of us have done – and down in the 5th paragraph, in talking about pH control during the 6 month study, they say “because the plaster coupons were new, the pH rose continuously…”

Oh, yeah, that’s Real World. Throwing 42 lbs. of stabilizer into a freshly plastered pool.

So, the assumption I make about that first 5 week test was that they put these new plaster coupons into tanks and didn’t adjust the pH during the 5 week test, and viola! The pH skyrockets and the cyanuric acid falls out of solution, accumulating on the surface of the plaster. Here’s a quote from Dr. Meyer in a Pool & Spa News article: “The cyanuric acid was no longer in solution… It was on the plaster surface, having some kind of affect.”

http://www.poolspanews.com/2008/052/052acid.html

Now, that’s not really a scathing indictment, is it? Having some kind of affect?

I promise you, if you plastered and filled a 20,000 gallon pool, and on Day One you dissolved 42 lbs. of cyanuric acid into the water, then went away for 5 weeks, when you come back, it would be a logical result to have more than half your cyanuric acid plated out on that pool’s surface.

But then, if you didn’t have any pH control for 5 weeks, you’d have to demo that plaster and start over, because a little cyanuric acid on the surface of the plaster would be the least of your problems.

So, based on these shocking results, this company - that coincidentally makes cal hypo products and owns a few non-chlorine alternative sanitizer labels - decided to do a 6 month tank test. Now they introduce water chemistry parameters. I know that because the say so, a conversation conspicuously absent from the 5 week test. They say the “water in the test tank was adjusted to try and maintain pH between 7.2 and 7.8 and alkalinity between 60 to 100 ppm”. The key phrase there is “try and maintain”. Note that it doesn’t say, like it does later when talking about the 4 month test in test pools “were maintained at…” Old “try and maintain” indicates that boat was missed. So we can assume, from the very language of the report, that, because they were using new plaster coupons, they weren’t able to maintain their own stated water chemistry parameters. You know how it is; three day weekends, somebody forgot, etc.

Too, repeat those water chemistry parameters back to yourself; 7.2 to 7.8 pH and 60 to 100 ppm alkalinity. What happened to 7.4 to 7.6 and 80 to 120? That’s industry standard, isn’t it? Then, after stating these parameters, they contradict them in the next to the last paragraph, where they admit “that pH and alkalinity of the tanks ran on the high side (pH~8, TA~90 ppm), but then they say that despite “the high pH and alkalinity in the test tank, plaster degradation was still seen.

Really? Look at the 3 photos, labeled 100 ppm, 250 ppm & 500 ppm. Those are the ones from the test tanks. Looks like scaling to me, which is exactly what you get when you run your pool water scaling on the Saturation Index.

Now, these “dramatic results” prompted them to do yet a third study; “additional tests were initiated in larger bodies of water where the water balance could be maintained more easily”. They operated five test pools, maintaining their water chemistry at 7.2 to 7.6 pH, alkalinity at 80 to 120 ppm and calcium hardness at 180 to 250.

After four months, they took pictures, which you can see at the bottom of their page. On the left, you have 14X magnified plaster coupon immersed for 4 months in 0 ppm cyanuric acid. Look hard at that photo. Doesn’t that surface look like the beginning of an etched surface? Doesn’t that look like we’ve already burned off the butter and we’re starting to expose the aggregate?

Now look at the plaster coupon on the right, the one that was in the pool with 200-250 ppm cyanuric acid. That’s looks severely etched, doesn’t it? Well, 7.2 pH, 80 ppm alkalinity and 180 ppm calcium hardness is an aggressive environment, all the way up to 80 degrees, assuming a minimum TDS of 430 (their calcium hardness and their cyanuric acid), and all the way up to 90 degrees if the TDS was a little higher, even as little as 80 points higher.

But let’s say that this was done in an air conditioned laboratory in Georgia. A reasonable assumption, right? So, let’s assume a water temperature of 72 degrees. That water is even more corrosive. An extra 0.1, and it being a logarithmic number, 0.1 is a doubling of it’s corrosiveness. Basically, that water is 5 times more corrosive than water balanced to the industry standard of 7.5 pH, 100 ppm TA, 200 minimum Calcium Hardness and average water temp of 78 degrees.

I’m using the handy automated Langelier Index provided by one of the folks who host this study on the internet. You can find it here:

http://www.tricitypool.com/tc-satindex.html

Now, I have a couple of questions about this report.

1. Why did they use such low calcium levels? 180 to 250 isn’t mean calcium as recommended in our industry. When we all start up pools, we make sure the calcium is at least 200 ppm, and I’ve always been told by plaster consultants whose opinions I have come to respect that probably 250 ppm is a better place to start, that 200 ppm is the minimum. And the reason we start our calcium so low is to let the level grow over time, with condensation and the addition of calcium based chlorine products. But why run it so low in the lab? Why not set and hold all pools at 250 or 300 ppm? Because the lower calcium sure clouds the conclusion that it was cyanuric acid, and not out of balance water, that caused the etching.

2. Why is the loss of cyanuric acid only mentioned in the first 5 week study? Did the application of water chemistry parameters in the 2 subsequent tests eliminate that phenomena? Shouldn’t we be able to see the buildup that they talked about in the first test in the 5 photos from the second and third test that accompany this article? Shouldn’t there have been some mention of how they were constantly reintroducing cyanuric acid to the test tanks and test pool in the 6 month and 4 month studies? Remember that quote from Dr. Meyer in a Pool & Spa News article: “The cyanuric acid was no longer in solution… It was on the plaster surface, having some kind of affect.”

Obviously, she’s referring to the first 5 week test. But that quote is mixed in, where the previous paragraph is talking about the 6 and 4 month tests, making it sound like every time you get high stabilizer levels you end up with cyanuric acid falling out of solution. If that were the case, we really wouldn’t have to worry about high stabilizer, would we? Every time it hit 200, we’d just wait a few weeks for it to drop back to 100 and then vacuum the residue to waste.

3. Why in the world would they use freshly troweled plaster coupons to run this test? When would new, uncured plaster ever be exposed to cyanuric acid levels as high as 500 ppm? Not only is it not Real World, it’s not even Real Lab. After all, shouldn’t the lab make an effort to replicate the conditions you’re going to face in your customer’s backyards. Like I said, unless you bring a 50 lbs. bucket of cyanuric acid poolside and dissolve most of it in on Day One of startup, you’re never going to see the conditions they talk about in this report. And by the time you do, you’re going to have two or three year old, very well cured plaster. Of course, there will be folks who will want to play What If on this point. All I can say is that What If is a game for children and not one we ought to be playing in the laboratories and in the professional journals of our industry.

So, why do I care about the Arch Study? Because it is having an affect on our industries perception of cyanuric acid. Look at all the places I’ve found where it’s referenced as the report that shines the light on plaster damage caused by cyanuric acid:

http://www.tricitypool.com/tc-plaster_study.html

http://piscines-apollo.com/docs/arch_plaster_study.pdf

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NTB/is_23_44/ai_n15932555

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-139716069.html

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-139716069.html

http://www.bookrags.com/highbeam/plaster-problem-arch-study-tackles-hb/

http://www.allbusiness.com/arts-entertainment-recreation/875089-1.html

http://www.tricitypool.com/tc-plaster_cyanuric_study.html

http://www.poolspanews.com/2008/052/052acid.html

That took five minutes of googling to come up with those links. And it doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the times this study is linked to in the forums - or the Finger Pulling Contest, as I like to call them - and probably 50 or 100 times throughout the thousands of forum threads discussing pools and plaster problems.

But now, whenever people google for the Arch Plaster Study, a link to this blog piece will come up as well.

What irritates me the most is how easily we were all duped. Honestly, why didn’t everyone say to themselves, “200 ppm stabilizer in the water may be high, but if I wait 5 weeks half of it is not going to fall out of solution, UNLESS I jack around with the water chemistry so much that EVERYTHING is going to fall out of solution.”

And that was the first chart on the page. We’ve all sat here and looked at that for all these years, and none of us, me included, has stopped to say, “Hey, wait a minute. That never happens.”

Is it just politeness that causes us to not ask those basic questions? I mean, when knowledgeable people have interviewed Dr. Meyer over the years, didn’t it come up? Something like, “Gosh, Dr. Meyer, you’re the first person in the history of history to report a 50 to 70% loss of cyanuric acid over a 5 week period. Are you sure you were watching that pH and not, intentionally or unintentionally, creating an environment where that was the only logical outcome?”

The Elephant in the Room, as it were.

Or is it because this report supports what a lot of people want to believe about cyanuric acid, and so it becomes the Straw Man for that camp? If you’re face is reddening as you read this, then maybe there’s some truth to that.

The craziest thing about all this is, I’ve heard there are people trying to DUPLICATE THE RESULTS OF THIS TEST and consider their tests failures when they don’t achieve the same results. You see, this thing has become the standard that other efforts are gauged by. It is now assumed that cyanuric acid damages plaster and it’s just a matter of holding your tongue right to achieve the same “proof” that Dr. Meyer achieved.

All I know is this thing gets referenced all the time, usually as “recent studies indicate that large quantities of cyanuric acid can even damage plaster”.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my!

This study is being used by different groups of people to different ends. The folks at Arch are using it to generate heat for cya based products and a bump for sales of their calcium based chlorine and another reason for people to consider their alternative sanitizers, like Baquacil. People have argued with me that I’m wrong there because Arch also sells cya based products, too. Well, how is encouraging people to keep their cya level between 25 and 50 ppm anything but good for trichlor sales?

That tricity link is on the website of a company that’s big on UV sanitizing. There’s nothing wrong with that. UV sanitizing works and it’s not a scam to be selling the units. And throwing rocks at high cyanuric acid won’t hurt those sales, either.

This report supports a philosophy, a philosophy that high cyanuric acid is bad for us. And it is. The more I read and research, the more convinced I become that high levels of cyanuric acid are inhibiting our ability to effectively combat the growing threat of cryptosporidium outbreaks. Too, from what I've read, it does have the general effect, in high levels, of reducing the kill time of chlorine.

But it doesn’t destroy plaster. Not in the Real World. If a guy lets his pool get to 200 or 300 or 500 ppm cyanuric acid, he’s got enough other bad water chemistry habits to destroy the plaster without cyanuric acid having anything to do with it.

Now, I tried to play fair on this. I e-mailed Dr. Meyer on February 28th and asked her, “when you raised cyanuric acid to 250 and 500 ppm, did you use any correction factor on your observed TA?”

On March, 13th, she wrote back that, “yes, we did use a correction factor on our observed TA for the pool study that was run. We subtracted 1/3 of our CYA reading from the observed total alkalinity to get the carbonate alkalinity.”

I wrote again on March 14th to ask her about the issues of the cyanuric acid falling out of solution, and asked why they used new plaster vice cured plaster coupons for their tests.

She has not responded. If she does, and if she can explain any of this, then I’ll gladly amend what I’ve posted here.

Instead of arguing about whether you can create test tank or test pool environments that will damage plaster, how about somebody asking a useful question, like, "why, when I buy that Chinese cyanuric acid in bulk from my supplier do I end up using twice as much as I used to?"

I'm working on it. I'll have an answer in a couple of months. Sooner, I hope. Also, there’s a second, more “in-depth” brochure about the effects of high cyanuric acid that Arch has produced. I’ll be reviewing it in the next few weeks. So stay tuned.

The Trouble With Heaters, Take III (Updated 5/15/10)

2009-03-13T09:53:00.000-07:00

I don’t know if many of you watched The Daily Show last night. Jim Cramer, that bald headed liar from Mad Money went on Jon Stewart’s show and did everything but crawl across hot coals on his hands and knees to plead his mea culpa for all the years he spent manipulating markets for a Fast Buck as a hedge fund manager, followed by his recent stint on TV where he and his ilk have led the Average Investor to the Slaughter for Big Business.

Stewart gave him Hell, and all Cramer did was sit there and grin like an idiot and take it, nod and shrug his agreement with everything Jon said, which included that some of Cramer’s pronouncements of how to manipulate stock prices bordered on the criminal.

It was Great! And it dovetails nicely with another bit of news I came across this past week. Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE and world renowned Corporate Cutthroat has repented. Here’s a link to a recent Financial Times article where the managerial guru now says, “"On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world… Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy . . . Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.

You see, there’s been a culture for many years in this country, a global culture, actually, a culture that was lionized by the success of Jack Welch in particular, to drive shareholder value as your only guiding principal. Everything was subordinate to that. Everything was based on how it affected shareholder value, which was a combination of stock price and dividends returned to the shareholder.

Now, the Man Who Made It Famous has recanted. He has seen the errors of his way and prostrated himself before the international financial press and acknowledged his errors.

You know, you can see the ripple effect of that philosophy in our industry, especially with our swimming pool heaters. A quick study of heater warranties over the last 8 or so years yields all you need to know of how our manufacturers were infected by the Shareholder Value phenomenon. You see, since the advent of salt systems, heater warranties have plummeted from a typical 5 years for most everything in the box, except for a 2 year warranty on a short list of items that included the heat exchangers, to a one year limited warranty. Under the old warranty, the headers, the devices on either end of the heat exchanger that hold it together, were traditionally warranted for 5 years.

It’s a Cause and Effect kind of a thing. Salt comes along, heater problems skyrocket – I’ll cite particulars to back up that claim in a minute – and the result is a scramble to protect shareholder value by paring down the warranty to an innocuous one year, leaving their customers twisting in the wind.

That’s been our culture for many years. You Go Along to Get Along. If Hayward dumps a dog of a cleaner on the market - and they did - the worst thing anybody says is Nothing. If Jandy marries up a heater to a salt system on a pool and the salt causes the heater to have a failure mode that is absolutely beyond doubt the problem of the salt, unless Jandy makes note of it in a tech bulletin, you Say Nothing.

Until recently, all of this has been a successful model for driving shareholder value. Let’s look at the effects of this by taking a closer look at heater warranties.

The standard warranty on, for example, the Jandy LT/LX heater is one year, and when you read the warranty on the last page of the Owner’s Manual, it lists several exclusions, and #3 on that list of exclusions is:

“Not maintaining a proper chemical balance in your pool and/or spa [pH level between 7.2 and 7.8, Total Alkalinity (TA) between 80 to 120 ppm, Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) less than 2000].”

With Hayward, their warranty is also one year, and as restrictive as Jandy's (see Hayward Onwer's Manual page 14). Under Exceptions, they state: Leakage substantially contributed to by sediment, lime precipitate and/or higher than normal dissolved solids (pH above 7.8) in the tank, copper tubes or waterways".

Higher than normal dissolved solids (pH above 7.8) leaves a lot to the interpretation of whoever shows up to field your complaint. Most salt pools will have constant excursions into the range of 7.8 and above. That's the nature of the beast. So, it's hard to say what they intend with this exclusion.

In their warranty information, Raypak provides a one year warranty, and excludes the situation of "not maintaining a proper chemical balance (PH level must be between 7.4 and 7.8 and total alkalinity between 100 and 150 PPM. Total dissolved solids (TDS) must be no greater than 3000 PPM)".

Pentair has the worst availability for warranty information. They don't post any warranty information anywhere in the public domain. They just say that the warranty info is included on a card that's inside the box when you buy the heater. I don't particularly feel like buying a heater to complete this blog piece.

I have several Pentair and Teledyne Laars (now Jandy) heater Owner’s Manual from as recently as 2003 and in it they specified the industry standard, at the time, 5 year/2 year warranty that I discussed earlier.

What’s particularly tricky here is navigating the water chemistry parameters in light of the addition of salt to as much as 35% of the pools out there. They’ve stuck with their pre-salt water chemistry parameters for TDS. Jandy is less than 2,000 ppm, Raypak is less than 3,000 ppm, Hayward is “higher than normal” and Pentair is unknown. In fact, Jandy makes a point in there 2003/04 LX/LT Owner’s Manual of pointing out that their water chemistry concentration levels are taken from Basic Pool & Spa Technology published by NSPI. NSPI doesn’t exist today. The Association of Pool & Spa Professionals (APSP) has taken their place as the industry recognized advisors on water chemistry standards.

APSP’s thinking on TDS has evolved quite a bit since salt came along. They used to say 3,000 ppm was the upper limit for TDS. Then, they decided that didn’t give enough allowance for the minimum 3,500 ppm salt (TDS) required for those systems. So they amended it to be 1,500 ppm above Start Up level. In other words, if you had 400 ppm TDS tap water, and you added 3,500 ppm salt (more TDS) to it, then your Start UP level would be 3,900 ppm. So your upper limit for that pool would be 5,400 ppm TDS. That’s what APSP and RWQ (Recreational Water Quality) folks say. And they are the industry recognized experts.

Read all about APSP's take on TDS & salty water HERE

But swimming pool heater manufacturers have stuck with 2,000 and 3,000 ppm TDS limits. Salt is definitely part of TDS, so it's hard to imagine that any of these heaters would be covered for any warranty issues related to high TDS. But that’s okay, because they’ve reduced the length of the warranty from the old 5/2 year warranty to one year only.

Do you see the pattern emerging here? They’ve done a brilliant job of protecting shareholder value at the expense of the reputation of their products and at the expense of their customers.

The thing that feeds into this, the Smoking Gun, as it were, comes from the heater manufacturers themselves, when they started offering cupro nickel heat exchanger upgrades on some of their swimming pool heaters right in the middle of the Salt Storm. You see, heat exchangers have turned out to be the most expensive failure items with salt. That and a few other components I’ll talk about later. The heat exchangers fail mainly through the mechanisms of impingement corrosion and erosion corrosion.

I would say that in Texas – at least in the Dallas/Fort Worth area – more than 90% of the pools are built with a heater. Mostly those heaters are 400,000 BTU gas fired heaters. They last anywhere from 7 to 10 years – unless of course it’s a Hayward H400 or a Pentair Mini Max Lo NOX TSI. If you have one of those, your mileage will definitely vary, if-ya-know-what-I-mean. But then, after many years of faithful, or not so faithful service, your heater breaks and the Repair Pool Guy tells you it’s going to be “about $1,000” to get it back in shape. That’s when you have to decide whether you want to be the proud owner of a well maintained Classic Heater, or you buy a new one or – and we hate it when you go this way – you decide you can live without a heater.

If it’s a pool only, then it’s usually live without. If it’s a pool/spa with a computer, then you might be the kind of folks who use your spa enough to cough up the $3,000 for a new heater, installed.

I wrote a blog piece back HERE about a pool owner who uses his pool every day, and that means that with our Dallas weather, he’s using his heater about 6 months of the year. Since he has a salt system, he goes through heaters about every three years, instead of the 7 to 10 years that non-salt pool owners get out of theirs. But he loves that salt. And we love selling him heaters, and we did advise him that he could make them last longer if he just got rid of that salt – commonly referred to as Due Diligence, something often lacking in this, and most other industries – but, like I said, he loves that salt. So, it’s a match made in heaven.

So, three of the heater manufacturers (Raypak, Hayward & Pentair) have added the option to upgrade to a cupro nickel heat exchanger to combat the Impingement/Erosion Corrosion. The heat exchanger is the part of the heater that the water actually flows through. You heat up the finned metal tubing that constitutes the heat exchanger with an open flame, and that makes the water hot. Used to be they were all made of copper. Inexpensive, long lasting copper. Not so much any more.

The reason they’re offering cupro nickel is that a standard copper heat exchanger isn’t designed to stand up to the flow rate of water that has 3,500 ppm salt plus background TDS (Total Dissolved Solids). By that, I mean everything else that’s in the water; calcium, manganese, stabilizer, etc. That’s what I was saying earlier about how the heater manufacturers haven’t amended their position on TDS, even though all of those manufacturers except Raypak also sell a line of salt chlorine generators.

About a year ago, I was communicating with someone who has been a frequent contributor - on background – to this blog. I asked him what he knew about Impingement/Erosion corrosion, the type of corrosion your heater suffers from when the TDS of the water goes too high for your flow rate. And this is what he said then, quoting from the text of a water chemistry seminar he had attended:

“The actual text… is ‘Erosion itself is not corrosion. However, even mildly abrasive conditions may remove a corrosion film from a surface which is protective of a substrate, thus exposing a fresh metal to corrode and thereby accelerate damage. In fresh water pools it is known that flow-rates above 7 to 8 ft/sec will erode copper piping and may remove a protective film from the substrate's surface exposing fresh metal to corrode, accelerating the damage… TDS will accelerate both the galvanic and erosion deterioration processes. High TDS will allow more electric currents to be conducted and will cause copper piping to erode at flow rates in excess of 2.3 ft/sec.’ ”

You see, a certain amount of corrosion can be a good thing. Take copper, for instance. We’ve all seen how a copper portico will weather and turn green with age. That green is a form of corrosion, a tarnish that develops and seals the surface, protecting the underlying strata from any further corrosion. Or like the black tarnish that shows up on silver. That’s oxidation. And what are other names for oxidation? Rust. Corrosion. That’s why ships at sea will use a lot of brass. Because the brass will get that same green tarnish that copper gets – because brass is mostly copper – and that tarnish protects it. On commercial vessels, that’s why they don’t polish their brass. I remember in the Navy we used to polish the brass all the time. “Work it May, Shine it Must” was what they used to tell us. All that effort defeated the purpose of why brass was chosen in the first place. Yet another reason why the term Naval Intelligence in an oxymoron.

So, when you’ve got a 2 horsepower pump pushing 5,000 ppm TDS water through a copper heat exchanger at velocities in excess of 2.3 ft/sec, you start stripping off that protective coating. The result, over time, is a failed copper heat exchanger.

The other thing that is going on is Galvanic Corrosion, also known as Stray Current Corrosion, which I’ve talked about ad nauseam elsewhere in this blog (see the Label Stray Current Corrosion to your right).

So, it’s better for your salt pool if you make sure that the next heater you buy has a cupro nickel heat exchanger. That will make it more resistant to the effects of impingement, or erosion, corrosion.

Another factor, and in fact A Very Big Factor, is your style of heat exchanger. There are two types out there.

The first, and most common type is where a bundle of parallel tubes sits over the burner tray. The water shoots straight down the first tube, makes a 180 degree turn and shoots straight back up the next tube, another 180 degree turn and etc, usually for nine tubes.

The second type is where a coil of copper or cupro nickel tubing is wrapped around a burner tray, with the water navigating a constant curve through the heat exchanger.

The second type is better. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s a link to the ASM Handbook where they talk about these forms of corrosion.

In here they say that most impingement or erosion corrosion damage “occurs first at locations where directions of flow changes, such as elbows or U-bends. Large radius bends are less susceptible to such damage”.

So, here are the heaters that offer the second type of heat exchanger, the one without the 180 degree U-bends, the ones with the coiled tubing around the burner tray, also known as the “large radius bends”:

Sta Rite Max E Therm & Pentair Master Temp.

That’s it. They are, in fact, the same heater. I’m not saying that Pentair bought Sta Rite just so they could get their hands on the Sta Rite heater and put it in a crème colored box, but Pentair bought Sta Rite just so they could get their hands on the Sta Rite heater and put it in a crème colored box.

A Very Good Move.

They’re both great heaters. I have heard of heat exchanger failures with these heaters at the inlet/outlet plate with salt pools, and I heard that from someone who's reputation is sterling in relating data to me about frequent and common failures in pool equipment, but that’s not been my direct experience with the heater.

But, once again, referring to the ASM Handbook, page 999: "When impingement attack occurs in heat exchangers... it is usually confined to a short distance on the inlet end of the tube where the fluid flow is turbulent". That's exactly what my source with the sterling reputation has been telling me.

And now this heater comes with a cupro-nickel upgrade. Your pool professional may not even know about it yet. It's not yet stocked at the wholesale distributors. It's the Catch-22 of distribution; in order for them to regularly stock something, they have to have a history of orders for it. But for you to get something they don't normally stock you have to pay freight from the manufacturer. Add the extra cost of the cupro-nickel heat exchanger and you are probably talking several hundred dollars more. But it's worth every penny.

The Sta Rite Max E Therm & Pentair Master Temp heaters are the best, most reliable heaters on the market. Hands down. And now, with the cupro-nickel heat exchanger upgrade, they earn the first ever Pool Guy Seal of Approval.

Anybody who reads this blog regularly knows that I've never said many nice things about any pool equipment manufacturer's stuff, so this really is a big deal.

I love this heater. And with cupro-nickel, I recommend it.

EDIT 5/15/10: Since I wrote this, yet another Master Temp has failed on one of my salt pools. First the thermostat failed, then the heat exchanger. All within the first year. They had a salt system that required 3,000 ppm. So, then, I took a hard look at everything we were doing on this pool to see what it could be that was contributing to the problem. The local Pentair guy told my heater repairman that he had seen that a lot of companies were running chlorine tabs in the skimmers during the winter and he thought it was probably this. But I take the tablets away from my guys in the winter. It's a real easy way for me to get the stabilizer level down to normal on my tab pools. The guys don't have tabs to use anywhere, so the result is that by spring, after the rains, I have pretty normal stabilizer levels going into summer. During the winter we just add a little cal hypo each week. Our water here is soft (120 ppm calcium from the tap on average), so the extra calcium is usually not an issue.

The reason the Rep thought that guys might be using tabs in the winter is that, when the pool water gets down to 50 or 55 degrees, the systems stop making chlorine. You see, they measure the conductivity of the water to determine the salinity level of the pool, and when the water gets cold, it changes that value enough that at 55 and below, the conductivity measurement is so far out of bed that it can't be used. And the water's so cold that the pool hardly needs chlorine anyway, so it's not a bad thing that it shuts off. But since it does, it requires that small amounts of any other chlorine product be used to keep the chlorine level up. I guess some guys out there drop a tab in the skimmer. But we don't, for the reason I stated.

Then, I got a call from a friend of mine asking me to talk with another pool service company owner here in Dallas about a Master Temp that he's put several heat exchangers on, the last one the cupro nickel that I was so high on last year. The cupro nickel lasted two years. All of the copper ones before that (four in all) lasted a year or less - just like what I saw. I talked to the pool company owner for awhile and we kicked around the idea that the only thing we didn't know in these situations and the only part of all of this that was really out of our control was stray current corrosion.

It reminded me of something I'd read online at an APSP forum, a post by Rod Ogilve:

"...I have an interesting story. First let me tell you a little back ground, we have a water table average of 4' to 5' deep. Virtually every pool has well points. OK, this problem started 9 or so months ago. A customer called to tell me their salt pool has a problem with stray voltage. Whenever they touch the hand rail, they get a little shock. I did not build the pool, but I know the electrician and know the bonding was done correctly. I first checked the obvious to no avail. Eventually, I took up the deck and found the bonding wire to be OK. I installed a copper mat under the deck to increase the grid. This did not help. I had the power company come out and tested everything. They could not find a problem. We drained the pool to get rid of the salt, and the problem was reduced 90% but not perfect. The owners gave up and decided that is life. I have always ran this through my head as to why we could not find the cause. Two weeks ago I drove by just to check, and while I was there, a man drove up and asked if I knew anything about submersible well pumps. I asked him where he lived, and he was about 1/2 mile away. I went over to his house and pulled the pump out of the well casing and noticed the wires at the pump were exposed to the water. I told him to call and get another pump and have it installed. The pool customer called the next day to ask how I fixed the problem on the pool. Would you believe the stray voltage was traveling 1/2 mile and manifesting itself at the pool. I found out today the power company had a faulty ground on a pole, so the voltage was going the pool because it was the best ground in the area due to the faulty power company ground. Well, the pool now is full of salt again, and the customer is happy (at least for now :) "

Rod Ogilve is a very well respected pool builder. He's APSP CPB (Association of Pool & Spa Professionals Certified Pool Builder) and so, as far as pool experts go, he's about as good as it gets.

Here's a link to the whole thread. It's mostly pool builders like Rod who have posted to it. The majority consensus is that salt sucks. There are some great horror show photos of salt damage to stone and slate that rival anything I ever posted in this blog. You ought to take a look:

Link To APSP thread on salt systems

So, getting back to the Master Temp heaters. I still like the Master Temp for any application but salt. I no longer have a recommendation for a heater with a salt system. I strongly believe that there are too many other variables - like the bonding grid throughout a neighborhood and the opportunity for stray currents to be amplified by the more conductive salt water - that you can't control.

Another Flash Bulletin: All of Hayward's heaters now have a Cupro Nickel heat exchanger. You can no longer buy a Hayward heater with a copper heat exchanger. But still, if you ask any Big 3 Rep if salt has an adverse effect on heat exchangers, they will tell you no. And if you come to a Rep with a heat exchanger problem due to salt, he'll tell you he doesn't have this problem with any other installer, it's all your fault, something you're doing or something your guys are doing, like putting tabs in the skimmers.

And the most incredible thing to me is that they do all of this with a straight face. They tell us there's no problem with salt WHILE THEY UPGRADE THEIR HEATERS TO A MORE SALT RESISTANT METAL.

Okay, fine... Back to the blog post:

A new heat exchanger installed is over $1,000.00, and I’ve been noticing a lot of people that got to this blog by Googling for “damaged heat exchanger salt pool”, or variations on that theme. So, it is a worthy investment.

And here’s the Smoking Gun I was talking about. In December, 2006, Hayward had a brochure on their H400 heaters that read: “Cupro nickel is a supremely resilient material that provides product durability and longevity. Cupro nickel aligns well with today’s popular salt -based systems and offers outstanding corrosion resistance".

Yet their warranty as of today is that “higher than normal dissolved solids (pH above 7.8)” will void your one year limited warranty.

These are all things that, once again, dovetail nicely into protecting shareholder value. But over time, as all major corporations are learning the shortcomings of shareholder values as a strategy, it has adversely affected the reputation of their products and the patience of their customers.

Here are some of the real tragedies that have arisen out of Heaters with Salt:

The Jandy LT & LX heaters have a dry well for the high limit switches. The way it works is that these brass dry wells are set into the plastic inlet/outlet header and the high limit switches are pressed against that brass surface. That way, as the water rushes through the header, it’s heat will be transferred to these switches via the brass dry well. That keeps the high limit switch dry so that it won’t become corroded while still allowing it to accurately sense the water temperature. This is how we avoid a runaway heater. If the temperature of the water gets up to 135 degrees, then the first switch will turn off the heater. And if that part fails, then the second high limit will turn it off when it reaches 150 degrees. It’s a great system and all heaters have similar safety devices.

If you look in the Jandy LX/LT Owner’s Manual, you won’t find any mention of the brass wells. On the parts diagram, they show an exploded view of the inlet/outlet header, and they picture the high limit switch assembly. But no brass wells. So, why is all this important?

Because if you put this heater on a pool with a salt system, especially the salt system that Zodiac makes because it uses 4,000 ppm salt, which is even more corrosive than the 3,500 ppm that most of the others use, my experience is that within a year or two, you’ll have your first high limit failure. The threads of the brass well fail and allow water, salty water, to enter into the dry well and corrode the high limit switches. Not a big deal, right? Just replace the high limits and you’re back in business. Problem is, the next time it happens is sooner than the last time. And the next time is sooner than that, etc. You see, the corrosion on the threads gets worse and worse.

So, what’s a mother to do? Well, if you talk to Jandy, at first they tell you to replace the header. But when you price it out and figure that with labor you’re looking at somewhere near $1,000.00 for the job, you call them back and tell them that you’ll recommend your customer buy a different heater before you do that. Then they tell you about this little kit they have, called the LX/LT Sensor Stud Assembly Replacement Kit, Part Number R0383200. It’s carded for easy display. How funny is that? A part that’s not even detailed in the Owner’s Manual, but they had enough call for it that they carded it for wall display.

You order the kit and go take the heater apart, and I mean take it completely apart to get to this thing, and you put the new brass dry well in and you replace the corroded high limits, too, and you’re done for around $350 to $450, depending on how fast you work and what your labor rates are.

Then, in a year or two you get to do it again.

That’s why I strongly recommend against installing a Jandy LT or LX heater anywhere you have a salt system installed.

Now, people will say, “Hey, Pool Guy. Where do you get off badmouthing a perfectly good heater because someone told you they saw something happen on a pool somewhere?”

Allow me to retort: I have 16 pools on service with LT heaters. 13 of them have salt systems and the other three have tablet feeders. I got all those pools on service when they were brand new. Since I put them on service, 11 of the salt pools have had high limit failures, most of them numerous times. None of the pools with tablet feeders have had high limit failures. Fortunately, most of the failures occurred during the three year extended warranty that comes with a new pool when all the equipment is from a single manufacturer. But now they’re all out of warranty and the homeowners are facing these annual repair bills, with no end in sight. Their options are about $150 to $185 per occurrence for high limit switch failures, $350 to $450 per occurrence for dry well & high limit switch replacement, or about $1,000 for inlet/outlet header replacement, or about $3,000 to buy a new heater that doesn’t have this problem.

Now, I’m just a pool cleaner. And my ethic has always been to never sell anything to a customer that isn’t going to work out for them, and if I inadvertently do, go back and clean up my mess. Because just as Jack Welch and Jim Cramer and all the guys at Bear Stearns and AIG et al are finally starting to understand, your main constituencies are your customers and your products.

You see, these are the things that irritated me the most about the Salt Revolution; how cavalierly they threw salt water at pool heaters. It was good for quarterly profitability and for Hitting the Numbers. But, it turns out, not good for much else.

The Great Thing About History...

2009-02-23T06:51:00.001-08:00

I love history. I read all the time, and four out of five times, the book you'll catch me reading is a history book. I think history is important. I think history teaches us all we need to know about the present. It's like the old saying, "those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it".

And, yes, I'm talking about Salt. You knew it was coming, right? Well, this blog - and my customer base - are now old enough to start making some cyclic observations about Salt Damage.

I posted a photo a long time ago, when I first started talking about salt damage to the automatic cleaners - Polaris in particular, because that's what most of my customers have. The picture showed a rusty, chewed to the nub drive shaft on a Polaris 280 Black Max. Here it is again.

Here's what I said the first time I posted about it: "I pulled this Polaris 280 out of a pool on 2/11/06. It came out of a 30,000 gallon pebble finish pool with Oklahoma flagstone coping and decks and waterfall. This pool was brand new and fresh filled on 02/16/04. This pool also has a Zodiac Clearwater LM2-40 salt system. I had to replace the wheel bearings and the wheels when I replaced that drive shaft. At the time, this wasn’t happening to my other two year old Polaris cleaners, so I figured it was a combination of the bumpiness of the pebble finish, in conjunction with the salt, that caused that Stainless Steel Drive Shaft to last about as long as the plastic teeth on the wheel it was meshing with."

So now, just nearly three years later, I had to rebuild that cleaner again, and, you guessed it, the drive shaft was worn down. Here's the photo:

You can see how, once again, the teeth on the drive shaft are worn down to nubs. But notice anything different? Right. There's no rust. Now, the history of this part is that when it failed, I called Polaris and told them the story, how it was only a two year old cleaner and what a bone job it was that my customer was going to have to pay for that part. So, Polaris took a look at the photo I e-mailed them and put a part in the mail to me, even though it was a full year past the one year warranty on parts other than the frame. And I'm assuming that between the time that Polaris 280 was manufactured in the early part of 2004 and when they shipped that replacement drive shaft to me in 2006, they spec'd a higher grade stainless for their drive shaft.

Golly, I wonder why they would do that? I wonder, what was going on about that time that might have prompted them to go out looking for a higher grade stainless for their drive shafts? Oh, yeah, I remember! Salt! It was making a big splash - pun intended - back about that time.

Funny thing is, in 2006 all of the salt system manufacturers were telling you that guys like me were crazy and that what we were seeing we weren't really seeing, and if we were seeing it, it Wasn't Their Fault, or it was God's Will (commonly known as the Bible Belt Defense).

So, bottom line is that the higher grade stainless steel lasted almost exactly a year longer than the first drive shaft. But in the end, the chattering ass-whipping it took from the pebble finish on this pool did it in. But that's not bad. A 50% increase in the life of the part, in probably the most adverse conditions a pool cleaner can be put in; salt, a rough, bumpy surface, and water temps that range from 90 in the summer down to about 45 in the winter.

But notice in that picture there is still a patina of rust back toward the plastic turbine. Here's a picture of the other side of the drive shaft turbine:

You can see that all the rust is emanating from the pin in the drive shaft turbine assembly. I showed a lot of pics of that back in the first post I did about rust damage to auto cleaners. And Polaris paid attention to history there, too. Here's a pic of side by side drive shafts from that post in April 2007, a year after they sent me that first warranty drive shaft:

Conspicuous by it's absence is the pin in the turbine. Polaris gave up on the galvanic cell dissimilar metals thing and just started molding the turbine to the drive shaft, somewhere around the time that this picture was taken.

So, see? Here's a pool manufacturer doing what it can to re-engineer it's product to meet the demands of the harsher salt environment.

Now, if they could just figure out a way to get rid of the brass frame inserts that the stainless axle screws thread into, we'd be all set. Here's a repost of the pics I took back in April 2007 when I first started seeing frame insert failures:

You can see in the top pic how the inserts are just shards. The bottom pic shows where those shards came from. They just pulled right out of the frame, and the wheel - axle and all - came off. But, to their credit, Polaris has a 5 year frame warranty and every time I've called them with a frame failure they've stood behind their frame and sent me a new one, with exchange, free of charge.

Even outside of the five year warranty, the frame price is under $100.00 retail.

In sharp contrast, Letro cleaners have a 1 year warranty on every part, including the frame. Which isn't a big deal until the brass frame inserts pull out, which recently (October 2008) happened to one of my customer's Letro Legend Platinum Grey models. We've been taking care of that pool since it was new, too. It filled in June 2005. So, the frame inserts lasted 3 years and 4 months on a smooth plaster surface. Imagine my surprise when I looked up the cost of a new frame for that cleaner and found that it was 140% of the cost of a whole new Letro Legend Platinum Grey cleaner with hose. That's right; 140% of the cost of a whole cleaner.

Letro is owned by Pentair, and Pentair makes a salt system, too. So, you'd think they would know there are issues with these brass inserts and stainless steel screws. And you'd think that, like Polaris, they'd step up and take care of frame failures due to deterioration of the brass inserts. I mean, the brass inserts are the only way I can imagine the frame failing, short of stripping the cleaner down and taking a ball peen hammer to it. So, you'd think they'd be extending a little more of a helping hand than, in essence, saying, "Sorry about that, but thank you for playing Beat The One Year Warranty".

On the other hand, there's lots of things about Pentair that I like. When I have to replace a pump, most times I'll sell my customers the Pentair Challenger. It's been around forever, and except for those darned tabs on the pump basket handle, it's the best, longest lasting, easiest to fix pump on the market. And I could rave all day about the Sta Rite Max-E-Therm & Pentair Master Temp heaters. If you have a heater, it ought to be one of those.

But that's why - in my continuing series of Making Salt Work for your pool - I recommend that if you have a return side cleaner, you're WAY better off, and will receive a whole lot more support from the manufacturer, if that cleaner is a Polaris.

Making Salt Work

2009-02-16T11:01:00.000-08:00

Did I say that? No, it can't be. Can it?

Has the Pool Guy flipped his lid? Has he gone over to the Dark Side? The truth is, neither. But, contrary to industry opinion, I am a realist. And after all these years of fighting the Good Fight, I think it's time to admit that Salt Is Here To Stay.

I didn't say that was a Good Thing. I said it was A Reality. A Sad Reality. But A Reality nonetheless.

So, after a long hiatus, I'm back with suggestions on how to make your salt system work for you. I still think you ought to remove it from your pool. But if you're sold on your salt system and you just Gotta Have It, then stay tuned to The Pool Biz for articles on how to make it's integration work for you.

In that vein, some time ago, I wrote to the folks at the one of the Diving Board manufacturers - Interfab - and asked them if, in light of all that's gone down with salt over these last several years, they had developed any products that would be more salt compatible. Diving Board folks in general took about the biggest hit on any of the manufacturers that were affected by the salt craze. Imagine being them; three or four years of covering warranty in an environment you never foresaw - the 3500 ppm salt environment - and just when you're getting your feet back under you from that, with a new line of products designed to weather the salt storm, you wake up to the worst economy since 1932. Some days it doesn't pay to get out of bed.

But, when I asked them, toward the end of last summer, which were definitely rosier times, this is what they said:

"We DO in fact have products that are more salt friendly than others and would certainly mitigate rust in a salt pool environment. Products that we would promote for use in a salt pool environment include the following products:

Edge Diving System (NEW)
T7 Diving System
X-Stream Slide
G-Force Slide
Sacrificial Zinc Anode (NEW)
Powder Coated Rail Goods

As always, we’d have to stress to customers that there is no guarantee against rust or corrosion in a salt pool environment. By taking steps to ensure proper pool water/salt chemistry, that any return jets are pointed away from any in-pool rail goods, and that any necessary product maintenance is performed, you can certainly help diminish the risk of rust.

The diving set up that you saw in our counter brochure is called the Edge Diving System™. [Ed. note: I had written and asked about that system in particular. You should take a look at it. It's a unique approach to keeping the salt from corroding the diving board base] It was specifically designed to replace all of the rusting steel Techni-Spring diving bases, and our competitor’s product equal, that are out in the field. The Edge Diving System is comprised of composite materials and fits the same 12” on center jig as the steel Techni-Spring base. I have attached both a photo of a rusty steel Techni-Spring base and an Edge Diving System for reference."

Now, take a look at the second photo, of the Techni-Spring base. It beats the salt by not attaching the base fasteners where the salt water can pool and lay and work it's corrosive magic on the threads. I mean, let's face it, if your jig is buried in the cement of your deck, with the fastening studs projecting up out of that, and the threads of those fastening studs are down at deck level where they can be compromised by the corrosion wrought by salty water, then you're looking at breaking up that deck to replace that jig. So, if you attach the base to those fastening studs about 10 or 12 inches above deck level, then you've put those threads somewhere that it's impossible for the salty water to pool around. It's hard to see where those bolts attach in that photo, you can click on it to enlarge it. Then, look where the spring is attached to the composite base. You'll see the rubber nut caps. That's where it fastens.

Here's a link to the T7 install PDF. Page 9 shows a very good photo of a cutaway of the base and the fasteners. See how they've moved all the attaching hardware off of deck level? Brilliant in it's simplicity.

They go on to say: "The T7 Diving System, X-Stream Slide and G-Force Slide are all upgraded products that are comprised of composite materials and very suitable for salt pools.... This year [2008], we started offering a sacrificial zinc anode, which we designed specifically to fit most residential pool ladders and rails. (1.90” OD) We recommend the use of the anode on any pool rail that comes in contact with the pool water. (Deck to stair rails, pool ladders, etc.) The anode is installed below the waterline and is in direct contact with the metal that it will protect. Generally, only one anode is required, however, if a pool ladder has plastic treads, you will need an anode for each 'arm' of the ladder since the plastic tread will not maintain the current flow. I have attached a PDF copy of the bag card that comes with the anode, along with a couple of photos of an actual anode."

They make a very important point there; if a pool ladder has plastic treads, you will need an anode for each arm of the ladder since the plastic tread will not maintain the current flow. What's interesting about this is how much we've all had to learn in order to deal with adding salt to pool water. These are engineering concerns that didn't need to be addressed before salt came along. Now they're part of ladder design, for example. Each action like this drives the cost of engineering, of the end product and, in the end, the final price tag for the whole pool. And we haven't even talked yet about maintenance, which will be in upcoming blog pieces.

Still think your salt system is cheaper than conventional chlorine? Read on:

"Lastly, powder coated rails offer yet another layer of protection against rust and corrosion for pool rails. The layer of powder coat paint acts as a barrier between the elements and the stainless steel rail. One thing to mention is that if a powder coated pool rail is winterized and continually pulled in and out of the anchor sockets, the risk of paint chips and scratches increases which expands the risk of rust at those damaged paint areas. For optimum rail protection, a powder coated rail in conjunction with a sacrificial zinc anode is the best way to go."

Powder coated rails. They're very effective, and they're beautiful, too. But they are not inexpensive, and you need to consider those costs as part of the price of maintaining your pool when a salt system is installed.

So, as you can see, I'm not selling out here. I'm not saying Salt's Great and I'm not shilling for a ladder manufacturer - although I think these folks have the best idea so far about how to keep that salty water away from their hardware.

Bottom line is I'm still against the idea of you putting salt in your pool. But if you do, do it right, and spend the money you need to spend so that a year from now you don't have a rusty mess on your hands.

It's Still The Environment, Stupid, Part II

2008-09-07T10:40:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to add a little to what I said a couple of weeks ago. I've been doing some light reading. It's pretty interesting stuff. California Assembly Bill 2270, better known as AB2270. It has the whole Water Quality industry in an uproar.

Here's the part they take exception to: "This bill would authorize any local agency that maintains a community sewer system to take action to control residential salinity inputs, including those from water softeners, to protect the quality of the waters of the state, if the appropriate regional board makes a finding that the control of residential salinity input will contribute to the achievement of water quality objectives."

They're really upset about the water softener thing. Because the WQA, or Water Quality Association represents the interests of salt based water softeners lots more than they represent the interests of water quality. If you think I exaggerate, Google AB2270.

See? Every return is some internet snippet about how to go about OPPOSING AB2270. Initially, I Googled AB2270 thinking to read the assembly bill. But the internet is so cluttered with opposition to AB2270 that you can't find it that way. I had to Google California State Assembly and then enter the bill number and get it that way. Oddly, it passed 27-12 on the Senate floor and 53-19 on the Assembly floor.

So, how is it that the opposition can have so much rhetoric on the internet and so little popular support in the government? Too, this bill will cost the State money. They're allotting some bucks in there for reimbursement to people who have to unhook their salt based water softeners. So, it's taking business out of the State and it's going to cost the State money to unhook the systems. Why would they vote for that?

Because they mandated a goal of recycling 1,000,000 acre-feet of USEABLE waste water by the year 2010. As in the 2010 that's two years from now. One year, 3 months to be exact. And that's 1,000,000 acre-feet, which is 326 BILLION gallons of water.

Along the way, they found out that people and plants don't like salty water. So, this bill helps them to get to their goal by allowing the local water authorities to "control residential salinity inputs". Because they want better Water Quality. Then, along comes the Water Quality Association and opposes it.

Odd. Wouldn't you say?

Anyway, with my new found desire to be FOR things, instead of just AGAINST them, I want to announce that I am FOR AB2270. Not that I can vote in California or anything. But then, I don't imagine that many of the folks at WQA really live in California, either. They clearly spend a lot of money lobbying in California. But live there? Not so much.

After all these years, It still stuns me when I run up against a group of people who can't see that what they're FOR is BAD for everybody else. It's only GOOD for their particular pocketbooks. Color me incredibly naive, but I still believe that if they outlawed swimming pools, I'd spend my meager savings on figuring out a New Gig, instead of blowing my reserves trying to hold back the Hands of The Clock.

Which segue's nicely to talking about How Much Salt Pools Suck. I feel pretty certain that the reason AB2270 didn't have any provisions for Salt Pools is because it's not a code requirement that they hook up backwash lines to the sewer in California. Even still, there's the Santa Clarita ban on Salt Pools. But my point is, that once other states start taking a look at what California has done with AB2270, they'll cut and paste it onto their legislative agendas. And if, in those states, it's code for swimming pools to backwash to the sewer, then they'll add that Santa

Clarita addendum to the whole package, and Viola! No More Salt Pools.

PS: I added new links to 2 industry articles about the ravages of salt systems on swimming pools. Click on them to your right under the heading Why Salt Is Eating Up Your Pool. Bon Appetit...

It's Still The Environment, Stupid

2008-08-17T13:24:00.000-07:00

I was looking at my site meter the other day and noticed that one of my biggest fans had been visiting the blog nearly every day. So I dropped him an e-mail to ask if he’d like an alert when I published something new, and he answered back that he was “just visiting your blog to kill time… to see if there was anything new”. It made me realize it’s been awhile since I’ve posted. A lot’s happened in Salt World since my last post.

As a fer instance, Pool & Spa News came out as definitely in the Salt Camp (see Pool & Spa News, July 31, 2008). Hmmm... maybe that's why they quit corresponding with me. You think?

They even titled the whole issue Salt Service Solutions. It has some information that will actually help people stuck taking care of salt pools. But, like all good marketing pieces, it passes that information with a lilt in the author’s voice and skip in his step. Sort of like Snow White doing the housework with the help of chipmunks and bluebirds set to Roger’s & Hammerstein. But when you chase out the critters and cut the music, you see that taking care of salt pools is still just Doing The Dirty Work.

As another fer’instance:

Governor Charlie Crist is going to sign A BILL passed unanimously by both houses of the Florida legislature that will shut down the discharge of something like 300 million gallons of treated waste into the Atlantic Ocean each day. They’re stopping for myriad reasons, one of which is that the discharge is killing the corral reefs. If you’re wondering what that’s got to do with salt systems, it’s what’s going to happen when those municipalities start trying to recycle that wastewater and run up against high salinity levels and the expense of desalinization and start looking for ways to reduce the salinity, and like other municipalities, start restricting chloride discharge into the waste stream, like HERE. Then later, they’ll get around to your salt pool, like HERE and HERE

It goes kind of hand-in-hand with a STORY at the Tampa Tribune Online, about how Pasco County wants to expand a treated waste water program to eventually include 30,000 cusotmers, who will use treated wastewater for their lawns. And that’s where I feel like I’ve “been there, done that”. SCOTTSDALE did the same thing a while ago. Then, within a few years, the golf courses using the treated effluent started yapping that their greens weren’t green anymore, and the culprit was high chloride levels in the treated wastewater. If you read the letter from the Environmental Manager in Thousand Oaks, CA that I LINKED TO about a paragraph back, you know that salinity, chloride in particular, is a pass-through pollutant. In other words, it’s not normally filtered out of wastewater.

That was one of the hinky things about the Pool & Spa article, Grains Of Wisdom. On page 37, in the box titled Salt Select, they quote Bob Harper as saying that it’s okay to use potassium chloride. I quote; “In areas where salt going into the water system is not desirable, it does provide an alternative”.

By the way, his company, Goldline, is the only one who says that. Ecomatic, Jandy, Pentair, Zodiac, Autopilot and The Chlorine Factory all say to use Sodium Chloride Only. Ecomatic, in fact, says, “be sure to use sodium chloride and not potassium chloride.”

Besides, Bob should know better than that. He’s been The Man at Goldline since November 2006. So, he should know that sodium chloride dissociates immediately when it hits the water into sodium and chloride, and potassium chloride does the same thing. HERE'S a quote from Water Technology Magazine about using potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride (remember, these are the folks trying to put a positive spin on water softeners): "potassium chloride is a viable alternative to sodium chloride... when the application requires a... low sodium waste brine". Notice they didn't say Low Chloride. And if you ever notice, when water treatment folks are complaining about this stuff, they always refer to the “elevated chloride levels” in the wastewater stream. Like that pesky Santa Clarita, California Salt Pool Ban, which in the introduction says, "The purpose of this website is to educate the community about the Santa Clara River's high chloride (salt) levels, and the reasons and options for reducing chloride levels", [emphasis mine]. In fact, they don't use the words sodium or potassium anywhere in their introduction.

So, like I was saying, when the potassium hits the water, it turns into potassium and chloride. When it’s pumped out of your pool and onto the ground or into the sewer, it doesn’t resociate and become potassium chloride again. So, the chloride ends up adding to the chloride level of the wastewater stream. It may later combine with potassium and form potassium chloride again. Then again, it may combine with sodium and form sodium chloride, or calcium and form calcium chloride. But as long as it stays in water, it’s just chloride. If it wasn’t dissociated, you couldn’t create chlorine from the chloride ions that result from pitching sodium or potassium chloride in your pool. Get it?

And you may say, “Well, Bob’s degree is in marketing, so why would he know all that?”

My point exactly. But then, it was Pool & Spa News who asked him the question. Not me.

One other note on potassium chloride; it sells for $18.97 a 40 lbs. bag at Lowe’s. Home Depot’s about the same. Sodium chloride runs about five or six bucks a bag.

Another point about that same inset box, they show you a picture of Coarse Solar Salt, Kiln Dried. It is classified as a Water Softener salt by the manufacturer, and on their website, they say it’s “99.5 pure salt”, and “contains small amounts of insoluble particles from the environment”. That would be the 0.5% that’s not-salt.

IMPORTANT PARAGRAPH AHEAD. IF YOU’RE SCANNING AND NOT READING, MAKE SURE TO READ THIS:

What we found here in Dallas, by having similar grade salts from a different manufacturer analyzed by a metallurgist, is that the solid residue was “0.427% of the salt sample, by weight”. Pretty close to 0.5%. These solids split into about a 50/50 mix of gray and red particles, and the “red particle was silica sand (SiO2) containing alumina and iron oxide (red rust)”, hence the reddish stains we were seeing.

You see, we were running into issues of staining as a result of pouring 500 or 600 lbs. of salt on pool start up (after waiting the 30 days, of course) and ending up with stains where the salt laid and dissolved. Some service companies had started noticing less pronounced but still noticeable stains from just adding one or two bags of salt. One company even started to add all salt through the skimmers as a result of the staining problem. So, salt grade became pretty important to us. And, it turned out, important to our supplier, who did The Right Thing and decided to step up their game and only sell Food Grade salt, less the 0.5% insoluble environmental particles.

In fact, Pool & Spa News has been selling ad space to folks selling food grade salt since shortly after this all went down. Coincidence?

I mention this for all the people who like to be dismissive of me by saying “it’s easy to be against something. Why don’t you try being FOR something?” So, there you go. I’m FOR not staining pools by using contaminated salt.

All it took to be FOR that was $5.00 for the bag of salt, about $150.00 for the metallurgist’s analysis and the desire to Right a Wrong. Now, ask yourself, what have YOU done to bring about a positive change in our industry lately? Oh, yeah, let me qualify that; a change that didn’t end up putting money in your pocket.

It’s a Small Club, isn’t it?

Another reason to be a little careful about the salt you select is that if you choose, say, Diamond Crystal salt pellets with Softener Care, you’ll be adding phosphates along with the salt pellets, and Oh-Dear-Lord-In-Heaven-Above, don’t get the Snake Oil… I mean, the Phosphate Remover Guys all riled up about putting phosphates in your pools. You see, the Softener Care additive is sodium hexametahosphate. Each bag is 0.03%. Doesn't sound like a lot, but for a 20,000 gallon pool, 550 lbs. of salt will add 2.6 ounces, by weight, pure sodium hexametaphosphate. 3.2 ounces if you’re running a Zodiac, because they require 670 lbs. for the same size pool.

On the same page in the article, right above the Salt Select box, is a box labeled Mixing metals. It’s nice to see The Industry finally talking about it. I started talking about it on October 14th of 2006, right after Baboosa put me on to the term and I looked it up. I’ve written 10 more pieces to go along with that, because I think it’s that important (see Salt and Metal Parts tag). P&SN gave about 6 column inches to it, and that included their whole discussion of TDS as well. Salt systems nearly sunk two ladder and rail manufacturers, took a huge toll on pool heaters and copper plumbed pools, and just about every other piece of metal that comes in contact with your pool, and Galvanic Corrosion got six column inches. Oh, well.

But enough about that. Let’s go back to the opening paragraph of this article. By the way, that guy pouring the salt in the pool is either photoshopped in or he’s about 8 feet tall. His feet dwarf that brick coping. And he casts no shadow. Hmm… Vampire? No, that’s no reflection in a mirror. Anyway…

“The systems…are dummy-proof,” says Scott Ford of Tropical Aquatics. And using that as an opening statement, P&SN takes up four pages explaining how different and special and destructive salt pools can be.

For example, this article recommends that you maintain salt pools at a 7.2 pH. That is destined to lead people to read that and think that there’s a new standard for salt pools, set around 7.2 instead of 7.5, and so anything from 6.9 to 7.5 will be okay. Huh?

I’m looking at my old NSPI guidelines and it says here that Ideal pH is 7.4 to 7.6. That’s pretty much what’s been taught at every water chemistry seminar that everybody in our industry has ever attended and is pretty much what everybody in our industry lives by. Well, everybody except for the Hamilton Index crowd, or the Tin Foil Hat Brigade, as I like to call them.

Oddly, though, I agree with 7.2. Not as the new center of our scale, but as the lowest allowable for a salt pool, as the target to shoot for each week during service because the one thing you know with a salt pool is the pH is going to rise.

The issue here isn’t whether I agree with a deviation of 0.3 on the pH scale (7.2 vs 7.5), which is still a lot, pH being an exponential scale and all. 7.2 represents water that is 4 times more acidic, hence four times more etching, than 7.5.

The issue is that SOMEONE BESIDES A MAGAZINE needs to go on record as saying that salt pools are different chemically and they need their own well researched and well documented, not to mention well publicized, water chemistry parameters. AJ Wilson, who they’re quoting here, is a sharp guy. He knows his stuff and he’s right about this 7.2 thing.

What he’s getting at is that if you have a salt pool, you’re going to see a rise in pH from week to week. So, if you start at 7.2, maybe you’ll end up at 7.8 by your next visit, instead of starting at 7.5 and ending up at 8.2 by your next visit. 8.2 and any Total Alkalinity between the APSP recommended 80 to 120 ppm will cause lots of scaling with that high calcium San Diego water AJ is dealing with. Not so much here in Dallas, where our tap water is 70 to 120 ppm and we have to add calcium after startup.

So, I agree with what AJ’s saying. But where’s the test pools to prove it? Where's the industry sanctioned research behind these conclusions? The current APSP standards weren't written over dinner and drinks at some pool show, you know. Research went into determining those parameters.

But since we're fiddling with pH, why not fiddle with TA, too? Won’t lowering TA a little, perhaps outside of the biblical 80 to 120 ppm we preach, have a similar effect on this issue? Of course it will. But then we’re right back where we started, aren’t we? It’s just a bunch of pool guys trying to pass on helpful information to other pool guys, and the end result is more likely to be that you’ll get hung out to dry if something goes wrong and you tell your customer or, even worse, the builder, “oh, this magazine I read said to ignore the APSP guidelines for water chemistry, so I’ve been running it acidic the last couple of years”.

This all goes back to when Salt Reps were standing up in front of whole rooms full of pool guys, at association meetings and such, and when we would tell them about the inherent rise in pH of their systems, they would say, “That’s impossible. Salt systems produce pH neutral chlorine.” That was the whole answer. End of discussion. Move on. And while some of them may have since amended their story and admitted that, well, maybe there sorta coulda might be a rise in pH with a salt system, they haven’t done anything to go back and do any real research to come up with water chemistry guidelines unique to salt pools.

Instead, they leave it to guys like AJ Wilson and guys like me to take the liability on our shoulders. Read the owner’s manuals. That’s what they’ll be waving at you in court.

For example, Goldine’s owner’s manual says to follow APSP guidelines and then tells you keep pH between 7.2 to 7.6.

APSP guidelines are 7.4 to 7.6. So, which is it? APSP guidelines or 7.2? Remember, a 0.2 difference is three times as acidic. If 0.1 is twice as acidic, then 0.2 is three times as acidic.

Jandy Aquapure’s owner’s manual says with their system, the “pH produced is close to Neutral pH and tends to stabilize at approximately 7.8.” (You thought I was making it up about the Reps saying that Neutral thing, didn’t you?)

Well, once again, which is it? Neutral or 7.8. Because 7.8 is a long, long way from Neutral. It’s 0.8, in fact, and if you were shaking your head over Goldline’s contradiction about just a few tenths on the pH scale, now we’re talking about water 8 times more scaling than Neutral pH.

Ecomatic recommends 7.2 to 7.8 and then goes into an explanation almost as long as this blog piece about why that, and your TA level might not work for you, and how it’s all sorta…ya’ know… Whhhhhppppp… hold it… hold it…. Phhewwww… Out There, Maaa-a-n, and you’ll know when you have it right because your pH will stop fluctuating – which is true, but their explanation needs about 8 hours of water chemistry classroom training to fill in the gaps. Remember too, we're talking about the Owner’s Manual, geared for everybody down to the pool owner who, going in, knows nothing about balancing water.

Then, Zodiac, who has the highest salt requirement of any mainstream salt system available in the US, recommends 7.4 to 7.6, just like APSP.

Autopilot says 7.2 to 7.8, allowing +- 0.3 pH of saturation. And that’s great if you’re a pool tech. You can look at the charts provided and actually make out what their version of balanced water is supposed to be. But getting back to the Target Audience; Joe Pool Owner. Is he going to get it? Or is he going to let his eyes roll back in his head and say, “Yeah, Honey, everything’s fine. The kids can swim.”

Because the truth is, if he really did wade through all this and used the chart and the calculator and did all the math, what he’ll find out is that come winter, if his pool water is balanced at 60 degrees F, 600 ppm Calcium Hardness, 75 Total Alkalinity and TDS Above 1000, he’s got to tell the wife that they can’t heat the spa to 103 until he either raises the Total Alkalinity to 125 or lowers the pH to 7.2, and then reverts back to the previous readings before the spa cools off again.

A note in passing: Is the fact that no one ever worries about that the reason that plaster in spas on pool/spa combos with salt systems always gets those little calcium nodules? I vote Yes. And voting’s all we’re going to do, anyway. There’s no research going on beyond what Pool Guys are doing, at their own peril of liability, in their customer’s back yards. If I’m wrong, and there’s this whole industry of research happening that none of us out here in the field know about, then somebody write and tell me.

By Golly, Scott’s right. These systems are “dummy-proof”.

Now, I’m going to beat Sean to the punch here. As he’s reading this, he’s hopping up and down behind his laptop, scrolling down to the comments section to write and tell us that if that’s what we’re all worried about, then why not just use AutoPilot’s Total Control System and let the machine monitor and adjust the pH, too?

And I say - like I always say about salt systems - if your idea of “better” is spending yet more and more money on yet more and more “accessories” for your pool, then by all means, buy it.

Or, you could just use chlorine tablets and enjoy pretty much rock solid pH that “tends to stabilize” somewhere around 7.5. Not 7.4. Not 7.2. Not 7.8.

Seven Point Five.

And if you want soft water, buy Twenty Mule Team Borax for $2.99 a 4 lbs. box and really live it up.

Well, we’ve gotten to the second page of the P&SN article… Just kidding. That’s really about it. The only other thing I keyed on, and it’s probably just a poor choice of adverb, was this: “The conditioner – typically cyanuric acid – only protects the chlorine”. Typically? That implies there are other “types” of stabilizer. Did I miss something? I know I’m getting old. Did ya’ll come up with something else to stabilize chlorine while I was taking my afternoon nap?

So, what’s the Governor of Florida and Pasco County got to do with any of this? Well, several years ago, in California, when they started looking really hard at their dwindling water resources and began considering and then implementing reuse, certain areas zeroed in on salt based water softeners as one way to improve their wastewater quality. Soon after, certain water districts banned water softeners. Then, Santa Clarita banned salt systems on pools that backwashed to the sewer. Now, the Governor of California is poised TO SIGN LEGISLATION allowing every water district, at their discretion, to ban salt based water softeners.

California Assemblyman John Laird said this about the Water Softener Industry, who are the only people lobbying against the bill; “ It’s not time to protect somebody that’s polluting groundwater at a time that we have to rely increasingly more on groundwater as part of a comprehensive solution”.

A few years from now, when the water they’re starting to reuse in Florida isn’t working out so well because of its high chloride content, The Governor of Florida, or the Mayor of Tampa will be saying the same thing about water softeners – and later, salt pools – in Florida. And then when you come to this blog, you’ll see a whole list of counties and states and water districts that have banned their use.

It started with Santa Clarita. It spread to Dixon, CA and then Scottsdale, AZ, and now the whole state of California. And the pattern is the same. They try to reuse their wastewater and then they find out how damaging that water is.

And time after time, the only people who oppose the restrictions are people making money off the pollution of our groundwater. That would be people who sell appliances that use tremendous amounts of salt for their operation. You know, like water softeners and pool salt systems and... water softeners and pool salt systems and... Yep. That about covers it.

I stated earlier that the P&SN article talked about how destructive salt systems can be. The very last thing they talk about - almost reluctantly, it seems - is "Compatible equipment". They talk about how hard salt systems can be on the aluminum tracks for an automatic pool cover. They quote Randy Parsons as saying, "I've had a number of [pools] where the tracks have been destroyed by salt." Word here in Texas from the local Automatic Cover Guru is that when those tracks are corroded, they usually have to be jackhammered out of the tile line to replace them. You see, they're set into the tile line at the time of pool construction, and so having a corroded track is just about the worst and most expensive thing that could happen to a pool owner.

Boy, P&SN, talk about Burying The Lead.

Many of you in the industry who read this blog regularly who think I’m So Wrong on So Many Levels, you ought to take a moment here and re-read some of my earlier pieces.

I ranted about stone and concrete damage and the manufacturers and reps called me a liar. Now they have all added disclaimers to their owner’s manuals and websites.

I was the first in the industry, with Baboosa’s nudging, to talk about salt systems causing galvanic corrosion. The manufacturers and the reps called me crazy out of one side of their mouth and told you all to put zinc balls in your pump baskets out the other.

I was the first one to talk about Exploding Salt Cells and everybody and their brother jumped up and down and called me certifiably insane. And then I pointed out half a dozen incidents of it occurring around the world, and can point you now to ANOTHER POOL GUY’S BLOG (scroll down to SAFETY) where he describes first hand his experience with the explosion of a properly installed salt cell.

I’ve talked a lot about the environmental impact of your salt pools on our environment, and you all say I’m overstating the case, even after I’ve pointed out several places where levels of sodium and chloride in wastewater are being legislated and even your salt system manufacturers now work a caution about how salt will “damage or destroy certain types of plants” into their disclaimers. In case you Missed a Memo, those Dead Plants are The Environment.

I can just hear ya’ll at the public hearings when they outlaw these things; “But my kids can swim with their eyes open underwater. That ought to be worth something!”

Good luck with that.

And we haven’t even talked about the lawsuits that have started to pop up, as pool owners file suit against builders and builders turn around and file suit against manufacturers. Oh, you hadn’t heard? And, yes, I predicted that, too.

Folks, the Titanic has hit the Iceberg. You can either make for the Lifeboats or Stand Around and Rearrange the Deckchairs.

To put it literally instead of metaphorically; the manufacturers and the media in our industry are doing everything they can to create a body of work – sometimes referred to as evidence in the event of future litigation – that says, “We warned those pool stores and builders and service guys that there were downsides and that they needed to think really hard before they sold these salt systems. Look, we wrote about it here in our warranties and over here in our media publications and over here on our websites. We Have No Liability if things go astray after installation”.

No one’s going to hold their feet to the fire over what they say in a marketing brochure. No one’s ever going to lose a lawsuit over No More Green Hair! But in the little-read and oft-overlooked Fine Print, they’ve covered their asses quite well.

It’s called The Writing On The Wall. Take a moment and read it.

The 2.6 Million Dollar Salt System (cont.)

2008-06-29T09:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve been keeping an eye on the renovation of the wave pool and enclosure at the Southland Leisure Centre this last year. I first brought it up here where I talked about the City of Calgary being forced to perform a 2.6 million dollar renovation of their wave pool a mere 31 months after the addition of a Lectranator commercial salt system. To recap that story, what happened was, “in a wave pool situation -- which no one could have really anticipated -- the salt is going airborne as a result of the wave action,’ said Ron Krell, manager of Southland Leisure Centre. ‘We're getting a coating of salt in the leisure centre equipment.’, and all that airborne salt caused a whopping 2.6 mil damage.

EDIT:

Well, today I'm doing something that I've never done before on this blog. There was a rather long blog piece that followed that opening paragraph. A little piece of detective work where I tried to put together disparate pieces of the puzzle about what happened with the indoor wave pool at the Southland Leisure Centre, and about halfway through the day I received a very lucid explanation of why I was wrong in some of my assumptions. So, I have deleted the rest of this post.

In it's place, I am posting the contents of an e-mail I received from Mr. Ron Krell, the manager of the Southland Leisure Centre. He talks a lot about the entire renovation of the Centre and all of the contributing factors. I found it all interesting. But if you just want to specifically know How The Salt System Ate The Leisure Centre, I've highlighted those passages. The emphasis (bold print; italics) is mine.

Hi there: I had the opportunity to read your blog and I wanted to let you know that your comments about the renovation and lifecycle replacement of 25 year old equipment are a bit off the mark. It is somewhat understandable as you are not privy to all the information about the project and only gleaning snippets of information from various sources.

I will provide some further background that may assist in clarifying how some of the work for the Southland Leisure Centre project came to be and how that relates to some of your comments and observations. The original renovation that was approved by City Council was for $8 million and approved in June 2006. This was to include upgrades and updating to the Southland Leisure Centre Locker Rooms, add an Aquaplay Family Water Feature, Steamroom, New Fitness Expansion Area with new fitness equipment, Elevator and Accessible Service Counter. The Council approved funding also allowed for painting most of the common areas and pool to provide for an updated look to complete this portion of the renovations as well as a Council mandated Public Art Project which is part of the Capital funding formula. This funding had been provided to keep the Centre updated and make improvements so that our base of Customers would continue to enjoy using it and of course, attract new users. If you have had the opportunity to use the Centre in the last few years, for example, you would not have been impressed with the locker rooms as they were impossible to keep clean, i.e. old tiling, old grout that was difficult to repair and clean, damaged lockers, etc…….many areas were in need of updating………nothing worse than coming into a public facility and finding it in poor condition in spite of our best efforts to make the old stuff look good!

As for the Salt System……a decision was made in 2004 to install a Salt Lectranator system at Southland. It was installed in November 2004 as an add on to our current pool system with the intent that it would replace Chlorine Gas (as you know Chlorine Gas is a volatile, dangerous and difficult substance to work with). The filtration was a DE (Diatemacous Earth) based system. The intent to replace the chlorine gas with the salt system as recommended by a Consultant showed that such a system could work in a large wave pool provided that the proper number of Lectranator cells were specified. Based on this information, the project went ahead. Since the original install date in November 2004, the salt system never quite seemed to work properly, i.e. did not produce enough Chlorine to meet the demand. As a result, the Consultant determined that the lectranator system must have been slightly undersized and additional cells were added in March 2005. Even after the upsized installation, the system never met its targets and further to that, we began experiencing salt issues in our mechanical areas, exposed metal surfaces, humidification systems, etc….

The system did not perform and the situation was deteriorating. As you can imagine, the entire system was original (25 years old) with the exception of the newer salt lectranators. In April 2007, I started as the Manager of this Leisure Centre. After a review of the mechanical areas, the aging equipment, the noticeable salt damage and concerns with our inability to meet chlorine demand versus bather load, concerns with DE (carcinogenic material), leaking and corroded piping, large amounts of staff time trying to troubleshoot the system, assurances from the supplier that the system would work when it repeatedly became more apparent that it was not working, etc…..………It was decided with the support of the Director of Recreation and the General Manager of Community Services to approach City Council outlining the concerns about this situation. As a result of a report to Council in June 2007, approval was given for a further $2.6 million to update the pool system at the Southland Leisure Centre. The salt system and DE were removed and replaced with Liquid Chlorine, UV and Sand Filters along with an older boiler system, piping, etc…. and ……..we know that these systems work well and will position us to operate more efficiently and effectively for the next 20+ years.

In today's dollars, the Southland Leisure Centre's replacement value is in the neighbourhood of $125 million and has approx. 1.8 million visitors per year. The decision to update and upgrade the pool mechanical systems was not taken lightly and the expenditure is a positive one to protect the long term operational integrity of this facility. As you can see, the $8 million and the $2.6 million came about as separate projects. As well, I recognize that some of the facts and assumptions that you flagged were taken from bits and pieces of information, media, etc……..Please note that the Village Square Leisure Centre renovation was also approved by Council in June 2006 in the amount of $8 million. They do 'not' have a salt system, but do have gas chlorine which will be changed out as part of their project. That Centre is also 25 years old and in need of various lifecycle replacements, updating, etc……..

This is the first time that I have viewed your information and I appreciate the opportunity to provide some information that may help clarify why we did the system change here at the Southland Leisure Centre. If you have any questions, please contact me at the numbers provided below.

Thank you
Ron Krell Manager

Southland Leisure Centre # 159

So there you have it. No need to speculate any more. It wasn't high free available chlorine with no stabilizer that caused all that corrosion, as so many members of the Head In The Sand Society have speculated. You have it right here, in the words of the manager who had to deal with all of this. Truth is, the Lectranator never even produced enough chlorine to meet bather load. it's hard to imagine not enough free available chlorine could have destroyed the Leisure Centre equipment in some 31 months, when sufficient free available chlorine from gas cylinders hadn't done it in the twenty plus years prior.

It is exactly as I've always said; It's the Salt, Folks. It's the Salt.

But there's more.

I worte back to Mr. Krell seeeking permission to publish his e-mails in this blog. His response (oncea again, emphasis is mine);

Hi: sorry for not getting back to you sooner. I would be comfortable with you printing my response for your blog....I cannot remove the non disclosure statement as that is automatically added to all of our emails at work. However, I would approve your reprinting my wording verbatim as long as it is stated factually. Would that work for you?? Let me know what you think.

Also, I would be interested to hear more information about salt systems.................my opinion based on the experience here is that I believe that salt systems can work in smaller applications without too much difficulty.....however, I don't trust salt over the longer period as I think that it eventually permeates the equipment and corrodes it.

Mid-size Wave Pools can utilize it with mixed results, i.e. Collicut Centre in Red Deer, but will show damage to equipment eventually. That Centre opened in 2000 and it is showing signs of salt damage here in 2008.....not as bad as what we experienced at Southland, but enough to be of concern.

Large Wave Pools seems to be a non-starter for a salt application. It failed at Millwoods Pool in Edmonton and now had very poor results here at the Southland Leisure Centre (230,000 gallon US). I am not sure that the Engineering Consultant had enough information about salt to determine that it could not work.....I believe that they took the approach that the system designed for Millwoods was undersized and that by merely upsizing the salt lectranators, they could achieve the perfect operating formula. It did not work as outlined in my previous email. I suspect that they were surprised by this, as we were.

My guess is that salt in the larger applications with large bather loads reaches a threshold level at which point the salt cannot convert to chlorine as quickly as required and even adding additional salt cells does not make a difference.....reaches a saturation point. I am not a chemist, but it is the closest that I can come to describing the situation based on my Grade 12 and University Chemistry courses.

I would not be able to prove this theory, but my experience tells that that I am probably not far off on this one. Your thoughts??

Ron

So, we're not just talking about a single facility that experienced heavy and expensive corrosion as a result of installing Lectranator commercial salt systems. According to Mr. Krell, "it failed at Millwood", "had very poor results" at his facility, and after eight years, Colicut Centre in Red Deer "is showing signs of salt damage", "enough to be concerned".

It turns out it's just a matter of time and they all experience these issues. I'm going to try to contact some of these facilities to find out more about their unique situations. Seems to me that with all this Public Money being spent to fix the issues wrought by Salt Chlorine Generation, that some bright-eyed reporter at the CBC should be interested in what is apparently common knowledge among the folks working with these systems in an indoor environment.

Since he'd asked for my thoughts, I wrote back to Mr. Krell and gave him as condensed a version as I could of why I think it's utter insanity to install a salt system on any pool or spa:

My opinion is that the core issue with salt systems is that they use salt. Salt is a corrosive. There's no way around it. All chlorine ends up putting salt (sodium chloride) into our pool or spa water. The new system you mentioned that you've installed on your wave pool, the liquid chlorine feeder, has one of the highest salt contents of any of the bottled/packaged sanitizers. But it's still nowhere near the level of salt that we start with on a salt pool. Typically, our tap water is below 250 ppm (parts per million) chloride. That's been established here in the US as the "level of taste" by EPA and it's the target that most water districts shoot for. So, with a freshly filled pool, that's where you start. Then you introduce sanitizer. Over time, you will increase that sodium chloride level to as much as 1,500 ppm or 2,000 ppm. Usually, that takes years. And especially in something like a wave pool, where so much water is aerated and lost and you're constantly introducing low chloride fill water to make up for it, you may never see those elevated sodium chloride levels. But even if you do someday end up with that high sodium chloride level, you will also have accompanying elevated levels of calcium and manganese and iron and copper and everything else that's in our water supply system and that bathers end up excreting into our pools. That's the point that, before salt systems came along, we would drain and refill our pools. The old standard was 3,000 ppm TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) maximum.

So, we never had reason to worry too much about all the different mechanisms by which sodium chloride could damage our pools and our pool enclosures. There would be isolated incidences of pool enclosure roof collapses, and the investigation would usually point chloride stress corrosion of the supporting bolts. But as a whole, industrywide, these were very isolated instances.

http://corrosion-doctors.org/Forms-SCC/swimming.htm

http://www.thefabricator.com/MetalsMaterials/MetalsMaterials_Article.cfm?ID=731

Both of those links cite the same instance of a pool enclosure roof collapse due to chloride stress corrosion.

However, the use of calcium chloride as an accelerator in the mixing of concrete has been cited in many instances as the main contributor to subsequent chloride stress corrosion that results in the earlier than anticipated failure of metal bolts and support structures worldwide.

So, as you see, it doesn't matter where the chloride comes from, the result is the same; premature aging of the components of whatever structure we are trying to maintain, whether it be a bridge or a swimming pool or it's enclosure... or the bolts in a waterslide.

This is the point where I feel that my industry has departed from reality on the subject, and I think it's for no other reason than greed. Upton Sinclair once said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

And therein lies our problem. The internet is lousy with reports of salt damage to everything in nature. Ask a metallurgist at what level salt will corrode and they'll most likely tell you that, in the right circumstances, pitted against the right substance, salt will corrode at levels as low as 10 and 20 ppm. Ask a highway maintenance engineer what the number one cause of road damage is and he'll tell you it's the salt they use to keep the roads clear in the winter.

The things you've told me in your last e-mail support what I'm saying - and what scientists have been saying for hundreds of years. You mentioned that a mid sized wave pool in Collicut Centre in Red Deer is showing signs of salt damage after 8 years. Your own wave pool showed signs thirty-one months after salt system installation. I have met customers who had stainless steel filter tanks and put salt systems on their residential pools, and within one year they had to buy a new fiberglass filter (about $1,200 for a residential model) and by the next year, their limestone coping and decks were spalled and looked thirty years old instead of two or three. None of these things would have occurred and the normal life cycles in each of these instances would have been 20 and 30 years without salt (I service some stainless steel DE filters that are easily 20 years old, on non-salt pools, of course).

Yet, the pool industry is simply ignoring science so that they have another gadget to sell to pool owners. And it's a gadget that comes with a significant after market. Salt cells, even the best ones out there, are typically rated for about 10,000 hours of operation. In a commercial environment, with 24 hour a day operation, that's not much more than a year. And from everything I can find, manufacturers customarily provide a one year warranty for commercial use. When you imagine the after market in salt cell sales - at $500 to $800 per cell - if every pool were converted to salt chlorine generation, it's easy to see why it's hard to get objective information from the manufacturers. And it's impossible to see where the highly touted savings over other chlorination methods comes in.

I know I'm starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist here. That's not it. I just feel that the sale of salt systems has become Sales and Marketing without Borders. There is applicable research that's been done on the effects of salt on every component that makes up every configuration of a swimming pool. There is research on it's effects on stone, concrete, metals - such as copper, aluminum, brass, cupro nickel, and all types of stainless steel - and in every instance, the research proves that damage is accelerated proportional to the increase in chloride levels over background.

Further, there is abundant research available on the debilitating effects of stray current corrosion on submerged or partially submerged metals - such as ladders, rails, lights, light conduit, heater heat exchangers, etc. Stray current corrosion is often called "electrolysis", the very process whereby we create chlorine from salt. For example. I replaced a 20 amp fuse on a residential salt system the other day. That fuse provided power to the salt cell. Hence, that salt cell was receiving just shy of 20 amps of current from plate to plate, in the water, up until that fuse blew. Stray current corrosion is usually measured in milliamps. There are indications of it's damage nearly everywhere a salt system is installed. There are now pool specialty equipment companies that sell zinc anodes to mute the effects of stray current corrosion. Yet the manufacturers continue to insist that it doesn't exist, that because they met UL 1081 standards in a laboratory environment, that the discussion is off the table.

Well, that's all the news that fit to print for this installment. Happy Trails to all you Salt Reps trying to work up snappy comebacks when this stuff comes up in your Lying Contests.., I mean Sales Seminars.

You Can Get More With A Gun & A Smile Than With A Smile Alone

2008-05-12T08:06:00.000-07:00

I’ve noticed that many of the links on this blog are dead. I’ll be going through the archives and trying to update them this next month or so.

The one that surprised me most - sort of - was that Bio Guard removed all of their Material Safety Data Sheets from their website. They didn’t just move them so that my links would be dead. They completely removed them and put a note, “To request MSDS for BioGuard products, please contact our BioGuard Customer Care by phone at 1.800.932.5943”.

Just a few months ago their entire library was available at their website. Now, they want to control who they release that information to. Why?

Perhaps it’s because they prefer that the public thinks their “essential minerals” in their Mineral Springs program are a “proprietary blend of minerals” instead of common salt and borax. Yes, the same Borax that Ronald Reagan used to shill for on Death Valley Days. I guess if you’re selling common salt and a laundry additive for something like $40.00 a 30 lbs. bag, you need to control who you release that information to.

You can achieve much the same results of a bag of Mineral Springs Beginnings with about $5.00 worth of salt (a forty lbs. bag at the Big Box store), a 4 lbs. box of sodium tetraborate decahydrate (20 Mule Team Borax) that sells for $2.99, and a little over a quart of muriatic acid to neutralize the borax.

If you use the median percentages for a bag of Renew it’s 2.4 lbs salt, about 7 ozs. of 20 Mule Team Borax, and 4 ozs. of liquid muriatic acid. That’s between $1.50 and $2.00, depending on where you shop. How much are you paying for Renew?

Here’s excerpts from an e-mail from a lady whose had quite enough of the whole Mineral Springs program:

“I stumbled across your blog as I was hunting for cheaper prices for Mineral Springs-Renewal that we have to put in our pool every week. I started reading all the articles and although I thought I was a fairly-informed consumer.

I can see I was totally wrong when it comes to these systems. So my question is--what now? Our pool was put in by [Big Pool Company], (Atlanta, Georgia area) in August 2007. We have had no troubles except now--trying to keep the PH low and the cyanuric acid up and the price of the Renewal--it is totally stupid--up to 26-30 dollars per week--no, I did not sign up for this! We take a pool water sample to our local [Big Pool Company] store in Loganville, GA and they test it for free--we never leave there without needing 90-150 dollars of chemicals.....

Our pool is still under warranty and after reading your articles and all the links--I want our of this system--any suggestions???? Any advise would be appreciated.”

$26 to $30 a week for $2.00 worth of salt and laundry powder... Think I’m making it up? Look again at the MSDS for Renew and do the calculations yourself. The “Inorganic salt” is salt. The Boron Salt is a product very similar to 20 Mule Team Borax. The Inorganic Acid is a granular acid to balance the pH from the high pH Boron salt (I substituted an equivalent amount of liquid muriatic acid in my calculations), and the Aluminum salt is just in there as a desiccant, to keep things dry. When you add it all up and replace with off-the -shelf bulk items, it comes out to about $2.00 for 4 lbs.

I’ve talked about all this before. Click on the Label Getting Screwed Buying Salt. It’s all there. And the BioGuard links have been Renewed, for a lot less than $30 a week.

Green Pools - and other nonsense - In Florida

2008-04-06T06:42:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I saw a newspaper story in the Orlando Sentinel titled “Ensure that your swimming pool is on the road to greener pastures”. Now, normally, green is a bad color for a pool. But it’s the latest thing, you know; Green Pools - as in Environmentally Friendly Pools. Here’s the link to the story:

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/home/orl-green0908mar09,0,599071.story

The story goes something like this; while homeowners have become ecologically aware about their homes and their landscaping, they aren’t paying as much attention as they ought to their pools. But the Florida Green Building Coalition has the answers.

To quote the article; “Pools are not environmentally sustainable, according to this nonprofit corporation that sets green-building standards in Florida, oversees green-building certification and serves as a resource for builders and consumers. Although a popular amenity for homes in Florida, swimming pools and spas utilize precious fresh water resources and harmful chemicals in their operation and maintenance,’ the coalition says in its Green Home Standard Reference Guide. If you want your pool to go green, the organization recommends taking steps to minimize or eliminate the use of chemicals, minimize the energy used for pumping and heating and reduce reliance on fresh water by minimizing evaporation.”

So far, so good. I agree with everything they’re saying. Pools aren’t environmentally sustainable. They require tons of extra electricity to filter the water, electricity that wouldn’t be part of the home’s carbon footprint if the pool wasn’t in the backyard. Too, they require an entire industry in chemical manufacturing and subsequent distribution to the end user, the pool owner or your local pool service company. That’s another whole carbon footprint that gets stamped on our society so that a select few people can enjoy a backyard pool. Minimizing energy use for heating and evaporation, too, a good idea. Sounds like a pool cover, either the bubble type or the automatic, track driven safety cover would handle that. The automatic one is going to add to the electrical load, but it’s easier to use and so would get used more often, thus saving more water and heating costs. So, the offset is probably real.

Then, the article veers off into the Twilight Zone. If you know anything about pools and the issues that surround their environmental impact, you can tell that this is where the reporter, G. K. Sharman, exhausted their knowledge of these topics and started cutting and pasting disparate pieces to try to cobble together a middle and an end for the story.

The story goes on; “Use a salt- or UV-sterilization system instead of chlorine. This is the top item on the coalition's list of pool standards.” Now go back to the first quote from the story - “swimming pools and spas utilize precious fresh water resources” - Yes, they do. But nothing makes pool waste water more expensive to reclaim than adding 3,500 ppm salt to it. Desalinization is the most expensive of the waste treatment procedures, and almost no municipalities in the US use the technique. They just rely on dilution to keep the chloride level below their established threshold.

The story goes on; “Pools generally need chlorine concentrations of 2 to 4 parts per million to stay clean. The chemical generally is added weekly and in high quantities, but it can evaporate fairly quickly.”

First of all, chlorine doesn’t “evaporate”. I guess that was just a handy word used for expediency at the cost of accuracy. But if it did, chlorine produced by a salt system would “evaporate” just as quickly as chorine added to a pool through chlorine based products. Further, you’re increasing the carbon footprint of the pool by adding another appliance; the salt system. Not to mention that its a bit misleading to advise people to use a salt system instead of chlorine. In spite of salt systems being at the top of the coalition’s list of ways to reduce chemical use, you’re still using chlorine. The article even says so, after just telling you to use salt INSTEAD OF chlorine, they say, a “ salt system converts salt into chlorine, eliminating the need to transport and handle chlorine tablets or liquid”.

Ah-hah. So, is that what they meant? Eliminate the carbon footprint of the manufacturing and distribution system by making your chlorine at home? Has anyone done any studies that show that inexpensively manufactured (read cheaply made) and inefficient home electrolysis units, usually operated at less than optimum performance by homeowners, are more environmentally friendly than a professionally monitored manufacturing process?

Did you see what I just did? See how I asked them to prove their claims by showing us studies? I learned that from a Salt Rep. There’s this Huge Pain In The Ass Salt Rep who’s always answering every question about the disastrous effects of salt water pools by saying, “Okayfine, just show us the records for that pool with the salt damage for the last thirty years. And then show us contrasting records from other pools that you don’t have these problems with. Oh, you don’t have the records? So very sorry, we cannot help you.”

But getting back to the efficiencies of professionally manufactured chlorine versus homemade chlorine. When you manufacture chlorine, I’m thinking that you’re probably going to be a bit more aware of the process, and things like salt level, conductivity, cell plate condition and cleanliness, etc. - all those things that go into minimizing the cost and greenhouse effects of manufacturing - than a homeowner who looks at a salt meter every once in a while and based on it’s less than accurate readings, dumps a bag or two of salt into the pool and cranks up the salt system output (which increases the energy consumption and increases the carbon footprint... get it?)

But homemade chlorine must be what they think is best, because the very next thing they say is, “A salt system converts salt into chlorine, eliminating the need to transport and handle chlorine tablets or liquid. ‘Chlorine is a toxic chemical,’ said Tracy DeCarlo, a Florida Green Home certifying agent and a home-design function analyst with Detailed Solutions Inc. ‘I don't believe we should be drinking it or swimming in it.’ Pool water that is sanitized by a salt system feels like bath water and won't ruin hair or bathing suits the way chlorine does, DeCarlo says.”

Did you catch that? Ms. DeCarlo says that chlorine’s a toxic chemical and we shouldn’t drink it or swim in it. But chlorine made from a salt system won’t ruin your hair or bathing suit the way that chlorine does. I’m confused. If we’re talking about HOCL, we’re talking about HOCL. I don’t care where you get it.

But doesn’t that sound familiar? That thing about the bathing suits and ruining your hair? Doesn’t that sound like something right out of a salt system marketing brochure? Because it is.

http://www.jandy.com/html/products/chlorinegenerators/

By the way, while you’re checking that out, check out the UPDATE at the bottom of that page. I like to call that the Pool Guy Update. It wasn’t there until I started blogging about all of this stuff a year and a half ago.

So, anyway, I wrote to Ms. DeCarlo about this mix up.

I would have written to the newspaper, but they’ve removed all contact information from their online publication. Last season, this newspaper used to list the e-mail addresses of the editors of their different departments. But this year, they just created a Comments section (or Rant Here Section, as I like to call it) for people with opposing viewpoints. It cuts way down on all the e-mails they have to read, and relieves them of their journalistic responsibility to be responsive to the public. Geez, and they wonder why newspapers are going the way of the dinosaur.

Anyway, getting back to Ms. DeCarlo. I wrote to her and said that her, “salt system recommendation really snows me. I can't think of a single appliance that is less environmentally friendly than a salt system... On your own website [Ms. DeCarlo has a website, a good one, called Detailed Solutions. Here’s the link: http://buildingtips.net/ ] you link to an article you wrote encouraging folks to use salt-free water softeners. In volume 2, issue 4 you state, ‘Traditional water softeners... work by exchanging calcium and magnesium ions with sodium or potassium. These methods lead to increased salt concentrations, which are then carried into drinking water and into the environment’. And you're right about it being carried into the environment. Electrolytic salt chlorination systems do the same thing, either through the release of brackish (3500 to 4500 part per million) backwash effluent, draining the pool for maintenance, and even splash out during use. In every one of those cases, the salt contaminated water finds it's way back into the environment. Even if you discharge it to the sewer system, salt is considered a ‘pass through’ pollutant and is not removed from the waste stream during waste water treatment.”

She responded the same day:

“I certainly appreciate your feedback and wanted to let you know that when asked about pools I specifically told them that I am far from an expert on the subject. I gave them several ideas that can contribute to a green pool and told them to get proper information from someone in the industry. I didn’t expect my input to be included in the article.

Tracy DeCarlo
Detailed Solutions, Inc.
Home Building Function Analyst
Certified Green Professional
Florida Green Home Standard Certifying Agent
Certified Aging in Place Specialist
Free EZINE - 'Tips for Designing a Functional Home'
www.buildingtips.net "

And there’s the rub, you see. Ms. DeCarlo isn’t even in the pool business, and G. K. Sharman knew that, but went ahead and just cobbled together some information from the Green Building Coalition’s website -

Read Page 1 & 2: http://www.floridagreenbuilding.org/db/standards/homes/HomeRefGuide5.pdf

- and some quotes from a person who told them upfront she was not a pool professional, and submitted this mish-mosh of misinformation to the editor for publication.

I wrote back to Ms. DeCarlo and thanked her for responding and tried to provide her with some other information to back up my assertion that a salt pool has no business on the Green Building checklist, except maybe to subtract points if you come across one.

She responded:

“Here in Florida a salt chlorinator is considered a green item by the Florida Green Building Coalition. Points toward green home certification are awarded for the use of ‘Sanitation system that reduces / eliminates chlorine use (prereq)’. I’m glad you addressed this issue and will forward the detailed information from your email to the document committee.”

Now, that response made me think that this Green Building Coalition in Florida wasn’t all bad. So I wrote to the Executive Director, two times, to ask him for comment. His name is Roy Bonnell and his e-mail is execdir@floridagreenbuilding.org

He was, as they say, unavailable for comment. Now, I’ve looked through the rest of the Green Building Coalition’s website and I’ve read over their documentation for building green, and I have to admit, in every area except the pool area, I’m impressed. There is an incredible amount of detail in all of those other areas. It appears that a lot of thought and hard work went into the green building standard for everything else. But then, Im only an expert on pools. Perhaps the other areas are, to the appropriate expert, just a bunch of boilerplate.

For the pools, though, there isn’t even the semblance of boilerplate. It looks like they just called up a Salt Rep and asked them to write them a little ditty, down to and including a WEB PAGE LINK TO A SALT SYSTEM MANUFACTURER IN THE GREEN HOME STANDARD REFERENCE GUIDE! Sorry for shouting. It was just so unexpected after seeing the depth of the other areas. It was almost like they were saying, “We really don’t understand swimming pools, but these guys say they do. So, hold onto your wallet and click on this link.”

But in the final analysis, who cares, right? After all, it’s just one little One Horse State. Can’t even get their elections right, so who’s going to pay any attention to their Green Home Standard?

Well, let me tell you a story. This falls under the category of Folklore. It’s something that someone told me a long time ago. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. But it sounds about right. You be the judge.

A long, long time ago, back when they first started using cyanuric acid to stabilize chlorine, the health departments were wondering what the “safe” level in the water should be. You see, it was brand new back then, and nobody knew if, after swimming in it for a couple of years, their kids might grow six toes or a second head. They knew that when they fed lab rats a 100,000 part per million diet of the stuff, they died. So, they figured that to be on the safe side, they would establish a one thousand fold level of safety for us humans and they set the the maximum level at 100 ppm for pools regulated by the health department. The first health department to adopt that standard was the Los Angeles County health department, which, in those days, led the way for health departments across the nation. So, it became the standard because “Los Angeles said so”.

Now, I’ve looked around the internet at all the green building standards I could find, and so far, Florida’s is the most in depth and complete - except for the part about pools - and I just didn’t want for that to become the standard for a Green Pool, “because Florida said so”. I mean, we already got a President and a War On Adjectives and a Recession because Florida said so. I really think that’s enough.

Don’t you?

2008-02-25T13:33:00.000-08:00

How To Use This Blog

You're probably here because you own a salt system and you're having problems with it damaging your pool or pool equipment. That seems to be the bulk of the traffic that I get. If you are, look over at the Labels and look for your symptom. Click on whatever looks like it's close to what's going wrong with your pool. That will open up a window with the blog entries where I talk about those issues. There are over 50 blog entries, so there may be anywhere from 2 to 10 blog pieces that deal with your topic.

You may also want to watch the video that WFAA did about how much salt sucks. There's a link to it after the labels, along with a link to a text that explains how salt damages stone and concrete. It's pretty technical, but any layperson can understand it. It will come in handy if you're looking for ways to explain to whoever sold you your salt system why they ought to be paying to recope your pool.

If you're here because you're considering buying a salt system, then just click on any of the labels and start reading. Everything you've been told by whoever is trying to sell you a salt system is a lie, and I have done all I can to document the sources that refute the most common lies that they tell when they're trying to twist your arm into buying these things.

2008-01-27T08:41:00.000-08:00

How Salt Systems Don’t Work

There was a Pool Show in town here lately. It was a three day event. Lots of classes. Lots of exhibits. I’m sure a lot of good and sorely needed training got done there.

I didn’t go.

Not to say there’s anything wrong with Pool Shows. But, except for the rare class or two taught by people on the Tech Side of Life With No Monetary Interest In Whether You Buy What They’re Teaching (and you good guys and gals who do that know who you are and we love you for it) the rest of it is just A Show.

But, it’s the only time I ever find myself feeling sorry for Sales Reps. Think about it; standing at a booth all day long, trying to figure out ways to make a black plastic pool pump look and sound sexy. How hard is that?

The reason I bring The Show up at all is that they had one seminar, added to the schedule at the last minute, titled, How Salt Systems Work.

As I said, I didn’t go. I heard, though, through the Pool Guy Grapevine, that in some of the other seminars, those that were water chemistry centric, the main complaint of the folks in attendance was What The Hell To Do About These Damn Salt Systems. Of course, the people attending the water chemistry seminars were the “hands on” folks, the ones who see these systems in the field and try to explain to their customers each day why their pools are falling apart.

But enough about Pool Shows. Let’s talk about what happens when Salt Systems Don’t Work.

Here’s a picture of a salt cell plate that was about three years old when we replaced it.

This is the center plate in a pack of seven plates. This is The Weak Link In The Chain, so to speak. It gets eaten alive by being the return path for all of the current flow. As you can see, it is literally eaten alive. The way it works is that current is applied to one of the Outer Plates in the pack of seven adjacent plates by an insulated conductor. That plate is electrically connected to the outer plate on the other side of the pack by another insulated conductor. Then low voltage, high current is applied to these outer plates. The current jumps from the two outer plates to the next two plates, then in turn to the next two plates, and then, the plates on either side of the center plate deliver their full current flow to it, and it provides a path back to the power supply to complete the path for current flow.

Here’s a basic drawing of what’s going on, using a simpler, three plate pack as an example. Don’t laugh. I don’t use PC Paint very often.

The first plate in the foreground receives current flow from the battery – in our case, a power supply – and it passes that current flow over to the last plate in the background via that heavy dark line, which if you crack open a salt cell with a sledge hammer like I did, you’ll see is an insulated bar to avoid stray conduction to the center plate as the current flows through it. Then, the Magic of Electrolysis occurs. The current flow – up to 8 amps of current – passes from the two outer plates to the center plate through the water. That’s why you have to add some salt to your pool water. Without it, the water wouldn’t be conductive enough to pass the proper amount of current flow.

Part two of why you add the salt is so that, with that big whopping current flow, you zap the inactive chloride ion that got there when you poured the salt into the pool. When you pour it in, the salt immediately dissociated into sodium and chloride. The chloride is just in there, doing nothing, until it passes between those cell plates and the current flow turns it into Cl(little lower case 2), which is an oxidizer, and that Cl(little lower case 2) mixes with the water to form hypochlorous acid, the killing form of chlorine.

That’s where those Salt Reps get off telling you that you only have to add salt once. When hypochlorous acid does its job and kills something, the HOCl (hypochlorous acid) dissociates and that Cl is back to being an inert chloride ion again. Now, the next time it passes through the cell plates, it gets zapped back to life, mixes with some water and makes HOCl all over again.

So that’s true. Once added, you never have to add salt again. As long as your kids never splash even a drop of water out, as long as you never backwash your filter, as long as you don’t have any water features which aerate the chloride rich water, as long as it never rains and dilutes your pool water. Which is why, in spite of the way the Salt Reps twist the science to make it sound like There Really Is A Free Lunch And This Is It… there really isn’t. But you knew that, right? They are, after all, salesmen. What did you expect?

But getting back to why I took pictures of that cell plate. Oh, by the way, for comparison, here’s a picture of what’s left of that cell plate alongside one of the other plates from that pack that was lucky enough not to be in that center, return to battery, position.

When this salt cell failed the only indication we had was that the chlorine level in the pool kept getting lower and lower. Depending on the time of year, you could go more than a couple of weeks before you make the decision to spin the connectors off the cell and take a look inside.

During that time, from the moment that Return To Battery Connection just dissolved away and there was no longer a return path VIA THE SALT SYSTEM for current flow, where was that current flow going? The power supply still had +28 VDC available at it’s output, and the physical connection to the two outer plates was still there, but there was no longer any way for those plates to do their little Jump From Plate To Plate trick and return, finally, to ground.

You see, in a perfect world, current flow follows the path of least resistance. So, on Day One of operation, these salt systems are operating exactly as they did in the lab, when they proved that they were emitting less than the maximum allowed Stray Currents to receive their UL listing. But when the salt cell fails like this one failed, the current flow starts looking for new ways to get to ground, back to battery, as it were. And it will follow any path it can find to get to ground. The more resistance there is, the less current will flow. But when you’re starting with 8 amps, you can still have a pretty healthy current flow when it finds it’s way via other paths to ground.

Paths like: Salt cell plates to bonded (grounded) and very expensive heater. Or salt cell plates to bonded ladder or grabrail. Or salt cell plates to bonded light niche. Or salt cell plates to anything metal that is submerged in your pool. But still you should be safe, right? I mean, that Stray Current flow will go right to ground via the bonding lug, right?

Well, that’s when you get to add in Galvanic Corrosion to the Stray Current Corrosion. Take a pool ladder, for example. Stainless steel mounted into a brass anchor cup set in the deck. Now, splash salt water on it all day every day the pool is being used. The chloride rich water sets up a Galvanic Cell that causes corrosion to form BETWEEN the stainless rail and the brass anchor cup. That presents resistance to current flow. Now, you come along and grab that handrail and you get a tingle. Because you present less resistance to current flow than the corrosion building up in the anchor cup. And when you have that scenario, you go out and Google for:

Salt system conducting electricity on handrails

That showed up on my Site Meter this week. But that’s nothing new. I’ve had lots of hits like that over the last year and a half.

Now let’s take this a step further. Let’s back this scenario up to when the salt cell’s center plate first started to deteriorate. I’m guessing, but from the looks of it, I’d have to say that this plate was in pretty bad shape for over a year. So, for over a year, it wasn’t able to provide as efficient a path to ground as it did when it was brand new, and I’d say that the Stray Currents were ramping up from the minimally allowed level to something that sends people out on the internet Googling for things like:

Pool salt system conducting electricity

How do you troubleshoot a swimming pool heater plumbed with plastic pipe for electrical electrolysis

Stray electric current salt water pools

Zinc anode skimmer basket does it work

“Chlorine generator” “copper pipes”

Dealing with stray currents around pools (from Australia… Imagine that)

Using the old Site Meter info again, in a sample group of the most recent visits, this represents 17.5% of the people who come to my blog via a Google search.

Now let’s take this even a step further. This deterioration of the plate begins the minute you plug the salt system in the very first time. So, it’s a safe bet that the Stray Current Corrosion begins within a few days, weeks, months (?) of your system being brand spanking new.

Every manufacturer admits that your salt cell is only going to last you about 10,000 hours, which under normal use is from three to five years, and the reason why is because they know that from day one, the cell plates are wearing out just like this one did. And my contention is that as they wear out, the Stray Current Corrosion is ramping up.

From Day One.

These cell plates are made of ruthenium coated titanium, which, in the Galvanic Series, is just about the hardest, most noble, least active, least cathodic metal compound around. And still, it disintegrates with current flow. Your brass and copper and stainless steel pool components don’t stand a chance.

Another thing that makes me think I'm on the right track here is something I remembered reading in the Save-T 3 automatic pool cover owner's manual, on page 13:

"Since 1999 when Underwriters Laboratories (UL) dictated that all metal components of automatic pool covers must be bonded to the pool grid, we have seen an increase of galvanic corrosion [emphasis mine] on some of the aluminum components. In addition, the popularity of electric chlorinators where salt is added to the pool water has increased."

Here's the link. It's a slow loader, but it does work.

What that's saying to me is that, as the salt cells age, and as they emit stronger and stronger stray current, we see more and more corrosion in any metal that's bonded to the pool grid, as that stray current seeks a way back to ground. Like the pool covers; the incidence of corrosion INCREASED after they were required to be bonded to the pool grid.

Anyway, that’s why I wanted to write a blog piece about How Salt Systems Don’t Work, because I’m sure that none of this was brought up in that industry sponsored seminar, How Salt Systems Work.

So, the next time one of your customers asks you, "Didn’t you just replace that (fill in the blank with your favorite salt damaged component) a couple of months ago?", just print out this blog piece and hand it to them and say, “Yes, and here’s why we’re going to do it again real soon”.

Unless, of course, you sold them the salt system, too. Then you’ll just have to do what everybody else is doing; shrug your shoulders and pretend that you don’t know what’s going on.

Good luck with that.

2007-12-27T08:35:00.000-08:00

Why I Do What I Do...

Yeah, I know. I said I was gonna talk about stone next. But this is a blog, right? Short for weblog and defined as a person’s inner dialogue splashed across the internet for all to see.

Something about a blog that most folks who visit them don’t realize is that, just as it paints a portrait of who I am for you, it can, in some instances, give me a snapshot of who my visitors are. Or more accurately, what it was they were looking for when they showed up on my doorstep, and ultimately, what information, and hence what impressions, they left here with.

Now, whether they left here thinking about salt and salt systems a bit more critically, I can’t tell. But I can tell by what they read and by the links they click on what I’ve exposed them to. And when it comes to salt systems, this is The Only Place On Planet Earth that they’re going to be exposed to that information. Period.

Kinda sad, huh? I mean, think about it. Of all the hype out there talking up how great salt is, there’s only one place in the whole world that serves as a repository for the Other Side Of The Story, which turns out to be very well documented and TRUE.

Case In Point:

I had a visitor yesterday who got here from a Google search.

They Googled black stain, salt cell. Gee, I wonder why anybody would be Googling for that? Try it and see what you get.

The first hit is The Pool Biz and the excerpt reads like this: “Now, think about your salt cell. What we’re doing is literally jumping .... Black Stains Around the Pool Light The in-line zinc anode is attached to the ...”

The next hit is “Histology learning systems Appendix A”. A couple hits down from that is “Nitric Oxide: NO-dependent photo-toxicity...” Then after that; “The human endothelial cell in tissue culture”.

Gosh... I wonder which reference they clicked on first?

Coming into the blog from that Google search brought them into this piece:

Stray Currents Are Dissolving Your Swimming Pool

That piece starts out with “I finally see how the manufacturers get away with selling you something that does so much damage to your pool while their sales continue to increase and no one comes along and shuts them down.”

Pretty much sets the right tone, wouldn’t you say?

They read down until they got to these links and explored them both:

http://www.pooltoolco.com/catalog4.html

http://www.pooltoolco.com/catalog3.html

These are the links that take you out to The Pool Tool Company’s online catalog and describe some Hot Items that are just flying off the shelves these days; Sacrificial Anodes for your skimmer baskets, in-line plumbing, and to bolt on to your metal ladders and rails. Now, this is a Swimming Pool Tool manufacturing company that sells these items to protect your plaster from staining due to electrolysis. In theory, electrolysis itself isn’t a problem. If you have 100% conduction from cell plate to cell plate, and no stray currents, then you can’t get any black staining. You know, like the black stains this person is trying to find out about that they suspect is caused by their salt cell. But, obviously, there ARE stray currents with most, if not all, of these salt system installations, resulting in a phenomena known as Stray Current Corrosion, and metal stains appearing on plaster is just the tip of the iceberg. As PoolToolCo says:

A Must For Salt Pools

Plaster Discoloration
Metal Erosion
Heater Damage
Black Stains Around The Pool Light

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding! We have a winner! Salt Pools Black Stains... Very close to the original search term, no?

So, anyway, here’s a company that every Pool Guy knows about, and probably owns one or two of their specialty tools - because they’re the only ones who know and make the tools we really need for those special applications - and they say point blank; salt systems damage the heck out of pools. So much so that you better be doing something proactive to protect your plaster, your heater, your other metals - like ladders, handrails, light rings and the metal niches they bolt to - from discoloration, erosion, general damage and staining.

Gosh, I’ve read every salt system owner’s manual in existence, even the ones from Canada and France - believe it, I have - and oddly, they don’t mention any of these phenomena. I wonder why?

Getting back to My Guest; after they read those pages, they watched the video linked as WFAA Report On How Much Salt Sucks - pssst... the link’s on the right side top of this page, under the heading Why Salt Is Eating Up Your Pool.

Then they read the link right under that; The Science Behind Why Salt is Eating Up Your Pool’s Hardscape, which explains how crystallization expansion pressure damages your stone from within through a little thing called sub-florescence. Then they went and read up on the Santa Clarita, California Salt Pool Ban, and then finished up by clicking on the Current Posts icon and spending another 28 minutes reading, probably to the bottom of this page. That exposed them to the warnings from the manufacturers not to use Potassium Chloride in place of Sodium Chloride, about SR Smith’s efforts to create a hardier equipment line to stand up better to the ravages of chloride corrosion, AND the fact that every once in a while, salt cells go BOOM.

Total Elapsed Time spent finding out WAY MORE than why they’re getting black stains in their pool; 50 minutes, 7 seconds. I hope I was of some help.

Now, that visitor was from Florida. Which is funny, because there was a comment left a few posts back saying that all the corrosion I gripe about is just a Texas phenomenon. Seems we don’t know how to bond a pool here in Texas. Here’s an excerpt from those comments:

“Your corrosion issues that you describe are also few and far between here [Florida] probably because we are one of the toughest states with California and Maryland (of all places) to build a pool from the standpoint of inspections and enforcement of proper building practices. Metal connections corrode when current flows over them. Current can't flow over them if the electrical potential is the same between them. There has to a difference in potential for current to flow. How do you know that of all the corrosion issues you have seen, all of them had intact bonding grids with properly made connections to the steel, in the light niches, to the handrails, etc. Salt doesn't create stray current in a pool, it magnifies the problem which is that you have stray current in the pool. As you may know, it provides a more conductive solution for it to move around in. But, in a pool that is PROPERLY bonded, and according to the principle of the Farraday cage, that current won't flow in the cage[,] only out to the ground.”

And while those may sound like very well founded points grounded in firm logic and science, I'd like to contrast it with excerpts from an e-mail I received shortly after I started this blog last year;

"I read your material with great interest and wish to encourage you to keep up the fight. I run a reasonably large pool company here in... Florida that has been building pools... for [lots and lots of] years. We started using salt systems about 15 years ago when they were in their infancy (we tend to be front runners on pool issues). We started with units like the [manufacturer's name withheld] and other arcane units. My initial position with the company was to run the service department. At that time, almost every pool we built (about 200 a year) had a salt system on it. My indoctrination was in the form of countless service calls for staining, 'shocking', and a host of other 'unrelated' issues. When I started here, I spent a year tracking the complaints, making voltage checks, resistance checks, breaking down different units into its components and so forth. What I found was exactly what I expected given the construction of this sytem in the form of a battery. What I could not understand was the industry manufacturers with their (what I understand now to be) scripted answers to my problems. As you say, it ranged from 'grounding issues', improper materials, low grade stainless, and on and on. Especially frustrating was that we all knew how long we had been in the business and that the only common denominator was the salt system. By the time I had amassed my data, based on the soil type and condition of an install, I was able to tell the manufacturer of the last generator we were using what the 'stray' voltage amount would be and how long before the stains and corrosion would appear. Like I said, we tried [every salt system on the market]. In the end, we decided that there was insufficient profit in pursuing what was clearly a damaging component. Over the years, we have dealt with all manner of product that has one or more detrimental effects on a pool. But not until these salt systems had we encountered a unit that deals a blow to the entire pool. I think the biggest single factor was the propensity to negatively effect the grounding system around the pool. The stray current in the system created an environment where the grounding lugs would corrode off and leave large portions of the pool disconnected and very prone to shocking our customers. [Emphasis mine] Whether it was hand rails or coping sections, it made the whole pool experience less inviting."

So that's pretty much in sharp friggin' contrast to what that first guy was saying. It's also in sharp contrast to what I learn by seeing who visits the blog and where they come from and what they want to know.

And that’s the thing about reading my little Site Meter. I really get a sense of what problems people are having with their salt systems, instead of just burying my head in the sand and assuring myself that it can’t be happening and if it is happening then it’s God’s Will or Somebody Else’s Fault, like some people do.

To give you an example, of the last one hundred people who visited this blog, here’s just a few samples of the Google searches that got them here:

Travertine around pools with salt generator (these folks are from Charlotte, North Carolina. So, we can add North Carolina to the list of places where they’re seeing problems with salt eroding travertine pavers and coping.)

Using salt system pool water for irrigation (this person ended up HERE,which is an article I linked to about a proposed California rule to ban salt discharge into waste water. ALL salt discharge into ALL wastewater. Now they know that it’s not the best thing to irrigate with.)

Seal flagstone salt pool (this person lives in Mountain View, California. They followed the link, The Science Behind Why Salt Disintegrates Your Pool’s Hardscape. Now they know why they have flagstone issues. SOMETHING ELSE THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE TO KNOW BEFORE THEY BOUGHT THEIR SALT SYSTEM...)

Salt water pool damage grass (this guest got here through Google Australia. Gosh, I thought that salt pool’s weren’t having any problems Down Under. Could that be just marketing hype? Because we’re always told that the Aussie’s ground water is so saline that they hardly notice the difference in their salt pools. Sorry, mate. Guess you missed that memo.)

Flagstone and salt pool problems (this visitor is from Souther California. Everybody always says the flagstone issues are only occurring in Arizona and Texas. Hmmm... Could everybody be wrong? Or just lying to prop up the sales of a failed technology?)

Pool stray currents (this visitor is from Hollywood, Florida. Oh, no! Another improperly bonded pool in Florida. This week...)

Salt chlorinators and effects on brick coping (these folks are from Leesburg, Florida. If you go to all the forums, they say that Florida’s not having any problems with salt and coping because they get lots of summer rains that flush all the salt out of the coping. I wonder why so many people from Florida and California - both Northern and Southern CA - keep looking for information about problems with salt pools when EVERYBODY KNOWS that they’re not having these problems? It’s only happening in AZ and TX. Right?)

That’s 7 of the last hundred visitors. Google provides me with 17% of the traffic to this site. Thats only 17 of every hundred visitors. So, that means that 41% of the people who get here through Google are searching for answers to problems they’re having with salt chlorine generators, and they are from Maine to Florida, Southern California to Washington State, from Canada to Malaysia to Bahrain to Australia to Sweden... Pretty much all over the world.

I remember last year I was talking to a reporter from one of the trade magazines about my little Site Meter and the insights it gave me. They were working on a story about salt damage to pool coping and decks, and they said, Gosh, that's a story all by itself. They never did a story on it, though. In fact, most everyone's done everything they can to look the other way since then.

And that’s why I Do What I Do.

2007-12-26T06:23:00.000-08:00

UPDATE

My New Year's Resolution is to reorganize the blog. I've started by adding a heading here titled Why Salt Is Eating Up Your Pool. I moved the YouTube clip from the news report here in Dallas about how salt is damaging pools here, and I have put in a link to a technical manual for the preservation of stone buildings and monuments that explains in terrific detail how salt invades and destroys the hardscape around your pool. They're not talking about your pool. They're talking about buildings and such. But limestone is limestone, whether it's used for a building, a sculpture or for pool coping. And as you read about crystallization damage in stone, you see that salt damage is salt damage, whether it's coming from the salt in ground water, ocean spray, or even the trace amounts in the humidity of the air that settles on stone, seeps in and does it's damage, or gets splashed out of your pool and onto the stone by your kids playing.

I hope to expand that section to include more documentation about these processes of destruction, and even more importantly, what steps you can take to arrest the damage that the salt's doing to your pool hardscape. I'm looking hard at stone right now, so bear with me if the next few blog entries seem to be overly stone-centric. After that, I'll tackle the other issues, like galvanic and stray current corrosion, and environmental issues associated with using salt in your pool, and try to give each of those areas a heading and a group of linked reference material, as well.

It just feels like I've done the smart-ass, shooting from the lip thing long enough. No matter how right I am about salt, no matter how cute and funny I say it, and no matter how many references I provide in the text of my rants to prove it, I think that because the references aren't grouped into easily accessible areas, what I say is more easily disputed by the Fast Buck Artists who still want to sell you salt. I'm hoping to make this blog more of a jumping off point for folks trying to prove to themselves that it's not worth trading soft water for tens of thousands of dollars of damage to their pool. Maybe putting the reference material in groups will help accomplish that.

Funny thing... Speaking of smart-ass remarks. I just can't resist here. I only had eight visitors to the blog on Christmas Day. I was surprised that I had that many, being as it was Christmas and all. And one of those eight was a Salt Rep, signing on from his home IP address. It does my heart good to see that they can't even get through Christmas with the family without stopping to see what The Pool Guy is gonna say next about salt.

Like Old Lodge Skins used to say, "My heart soars like a hawk".

Happy Holidays.

2007-12-19T08:49:00.000-08:00

THIS JUST IN: “SALT APPROVED” EQUIPMENT NOT WARRANTIED AGAINST SALT CORROSION.
FILM AT 11…

Yeah, I knew it was too good to be true. I didn’t read the Fine Print. I pointed out in the last blog entry that SR Smith had developed a line of “Salt Friendly” equipment, and even come up with a snazzy SALT APPROVED logo. Then someone wrote to me and pointed out that if you dig a little further, like here:

http://www.srsmith.com/warranty.php

you’ll see that their warranty “specifically excludes… rust or corrosion of any metallic parts”.

And it’s really tempting to take a shot here. I mean, I’m The Pool Guy! I’m supposed to point out when the Emperor Has No Clothes and be really funny and snarky about it.

But I can’t, in good conscience, take that shot. First of all, they’re hardly the Muggers here. In fact, they’re the ones who Got Mugged. Then, when you roam around their website and look at all they’ve done to try to make the stuff they sell more salt resistant, it makes it even harder to take that Cheap & Easy Shot.

If you ask me it’s a miracle that anybody in the ladder/rail/slide/diving board business is still in business after standing warranty these last five years on all this salt damage. If it had been me, I’d have Cried Uncle years ago, and either closed up shop or just come out and said, “no warranty on pools with chloride levels above 2500 ppm”, which pretty much means salt pools.

But they didn’t. Instead, they did what they could to weather the salt storm while developing a product line that is at least an effort to make their stuff more salt resistant. THEN they threw up their hands and said, in effect, no more warranty on salt damage. They just left the word salt out of it, referring to it broadly as “rust or corrosion”.

I don’t blame them one bit.

There are other companies in that business who are still providing Unconditional Warranties against rust and corrosion, and I hope that keeps working for them. Truth is, I see them all as Victims of the Greed of the Big Three, who continue to flog the Dead Horse of Electrolyzed Salt Technology.

And you may be saying to yourself, “But my (fill-in-the-blank-with-your-Favorite-Full-Line-Greedhead-Manufacturer) stood warranty on one of my customer’s (fill-in-the-blank-with-your-Most-Frequently-Ocurring-Salt-Damaged-Equipment; heater, cleaner, etc.) without any questions or problems, so what’s the big deal about these ladder and diving board guys stepping up and standing warranty on their stuff?”

Well, just look behind the curtain and you’ll notice that the Full Line Manufacturer in question also sells a Salt System, and even if it’s not his Salt System hanging on the wall that caused all the damage, it’s a Salt System nonetheless, and it would be a hypocrisy that even a starry eyed Pool Guy who just thinks that the Sales & Tech Reps are the Coolest Guys On Earth (like I did when I was younger and more easily awestruck) would see through and point out that they ought not to try to Seek Shelter from The Rain that They Made.

Moving On…

I get Hate Mail. Imagine that. Hate Mail. If that’s too strong, then let’s at least call it Intense Dislike Mail. Now, don’t get me wrong. I know I’m a smart ass. And I’m a snarky S O B to boot. But if left to my own devices the only THING that I’m trashing is salt chlorine generators. Clearly, I take a dim view of the people who sell and defend that technology, as well. But, a lot of people write to me and, on their way to disagreeing with me, start in calling me names and casting aspersions on my integrity. Now, disagreement is at the heart of all healthy arguments. Name calling takes us to a different place; a place that I’m more than equipped to go. And so, when people’s rants drift into that arena, I admit I take particular delight in sniffing out their weaknesses and letting them know that I know what they are. That is usually when they stop writing to me.

But the thing that gets me is this; except for one Salt Rep - who no one has really been able to figure out why he rants around the internet like he does - everybody I’ve crossed keyboards with in that way has been someone who works in the swimming pool service industry. My own Brothers, so to speak. And every time they write to me, you’d think by their tone that I’d been talking about their mother instead of talking about making chlorine through the process of electrolyzing a saline solution. It’s as if I’m attacking some knowledge that they hold sacred by contradicting what they’ve been taught by the industry about how great and trouble free - and obviously liability free - chlorination through salt systems is supposed to be.

I can’t really explain their reaction. Even after all the evidence that’s piled up these last couple of years that proves beyond even a shadow of a doubt that Salt Systems are hard on swimming pools, they continue to hold onto these myths and outright falsehoods that they’ve been taught so they don’t have to feel guilty for having participated in screwing their customers by selling them a salt system. It’s like that circle of good old boys, sitting around the garage, drinking beer and farting and reassuring each other that, “Hey, salt’s great. Keep selling it… Here. Pull my finger again.”

I’m reminded of something Baboosa wrote in the Comments Section of one of the blog entries back in November of last year: “There are a number of … ‘technical’ people making erroneous statements because they heard something from someone. Then they give a presentation in front of a group and repeat what they heard as though it was their own verified experience or fact. Then the people that went there to learn go away and disseminate this garbage to everyone they meet. So another great myth is born. That's just my experience... not some BS someone told me.”

Which brings me to my point. In the latest installment of Hate Mail, a long time reader tells me that I strike him “as one of those guys who even though they know that they are wrong about [a] random topic, can't just say ‘got it, I made a mistake, I'll move on from it, and not do it again’”.

Further down in his rant, after displaying a fair knowledge of pool bonding, he goes on to posit that we should all “just use Potassium chloride instead. Would that please you since it isn't salt[?] You can make chlorine just the same and it is a doctor recommended alternative for people who use water softeners and also have hypertension. I use it in my pool because I have no deck[,] just artificial rock with grass planted right up to the edge. I didn't need a manufacturer's rep to tell me that salt is no good for the grass when water splashes out. Jeez, I figured that out from Sunday school when I was a kid. It's been a while but aren't there references to salting the soil.[sic] Maybe not, who cares, it's common sense anyway.”

Since I published his comments, it ends up making me feel responsible for someone who might read them and run off and pour potassium chloride in their pool. So I went off and looked up why we don’t use potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride.

First, I turned to the folks who manufacture salt systems. I called their tech lines and said, “Hi. This is The Pool Guy and I was wondering… Hello?... Hello?...”. After that, I turned to their owner’s manuals. I have them all as PDF files, so I just searched for Potassium Chloride and Sodium Chloride, and this is what I found:

The Ecomatic User’s Guide, page 16 says, “be sure to use sodium chloride and not potassium chloride”.

The Jandy AquaPure manual, on page 18, paragraph 4.7.1 says, “Use sodium chloride only”.

The Pentair IntelliChlor manual, page 13 says, “Use salt that is at least 99.8% pure NaCl”. Later in that paragraph, it also states, “Use sodium chloride only”.

The Zodiac Clearwater LM2, LM3 & Duo Clear manuals all says, “Only 99.5% pure refined salt (sodium chloride) should be used with a [Clearwater or Duo Clear] chlorinator”.

Even the Chlorine Factory R40B manual says, “Use clean, kiln dried 99.6% (or purer) coarse rock salt”.

So, there’s that.

It’s that spacing thing again. See? But anyway, that really didn’t explain why we shouldn’t use potassium instead of sodium chloride. So, I kept looking. I went to ScienceLab.com and read their Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for both. Under potential chronic health effects, it says of potassium chloride that the “substance may be toxic to blood, cardiovascular system. Repeated or prolonged exposure to the substance can produce target organs damage.” The same spot on the sodium chloride MSDS says, “Repeated or prolonged exposure is not known to aggravate medical condition”.

So, there’s that, too.

Then, there was the implication of his statement that somehow switching to potassium chloride, KCl, would alleviate all of our problems with masonry damage from salt, which is NaCl. Hmmm… Gee, golly… Gosh, how to explain here, er, uh… Salt is just a shorthand way of referring to NaCl, the most common of the “salts”, Potassium chloride is still “a salt”. And as far as lessening the damage to masonry, you can go HERE and look at Table 7.1, whose title is “Salts that have been known to damage stone masonry and their sources”. Potassium chloride is the seventh one listed there. Potassium carbonate, potassium sulphate and potassium nitrate also made the list, as well as four different sodium compounds.

Now this reference here is the greatest thing since sliced bread. And the reason why is because it comes from Google Books. Google Books is putting everything it can, while respecting copyright laws, on line for us to read. Isn’t that great? Because now anyone with even a modicum of curiosity about something can look it up in authoritative texts like "Conservation of Building and Decorative Stone", by John Ashurst and Francis G. Dimes, instead of just eavesdropping on the finger pulling contest of “people making erroneous statements because they heard something from someone”, and then go “away and disseminate this garbage to everyone they meet”. That way, you won’t end up with a pool full of potassium chloride, a warranty voided by the manufacturer, and that God-I-am-so-Dumb look on your face.

Now, I still don’t know specifically why the manufacturers don’t want you to use potassium chloride in your Salt Pool. Maybe because it would be harder to sell the idea of a Potassium Pool, seeing as how potassium chloride is also one of the key ingredients in the Lethal Injection cocktail that’s about to get banned by the Supreme Court. It just doesn’t have that soothing ring to it. Know what I mean?

It MAY have something to do with its conductivity. PERHAPS it’s less conductive, which would make the cells work harder and wear out faster. I don’t know so I don’t want to state that as fact.

I do know this; potassium chloride is $11.38 for a 40 lbs. bag at Lowe’s. Salt pellets and salt crystals range from $4.73 to $4.99, which is about a one hundred and forty percent upcharge to possibly void your warranty.

And I know this, too: I’m sure the guy who wrote in recommending the use of potassium chloride will write to me and say, “got it, I made a mistake, I'll move on from it, and not do it again”.

Now, just as important as making this guy feel small and stupid, I want to emphasize that reference book that I got from Google Books. Go back and read the text that follows that table we were looking at. It says pretty much everything I’ve ever said in this blog about how and why salts damage different stones. It talks about the wetting and drying cycle. It talks about the porosity of the different stones. It talks about the hygroscopic nature of salts, how they can go through the wetting and drying cycle and the subsequent re-crystallization cycle that does all the damage just from changes in humidity of the air around the stone. So, you see, that’s why we get the pattern of excessive and rapid deterioration in the splash zones, fading to more subtle but still present damage as we move away from those splash areas. In fact, I posted a picture a while back of some limestone coping directly ABOVE a sheer descent, and you could see an apron of wear on that stone that displays this phenomenon exactly, where the humidity of the air directly above the sheer descent is higher due to the ever-so-slight aeration of the water by the sheer descent. Here’s that photo again. You can click on it to enlarge it.

So, keep them cards and letters coming, folks. I promise I’ll answer them all.

2007-12-03T11:42:00.000-08:00

Boom Goes The Dynamite, Part Trois

It’s good to have this blog. It helps me stay centered. You see, I subscribe to the usual industry magazines, and every time I read one, I set it down feeling like I haven’t lived up to all I could have done to be successful in the pool business.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not crying. I’m very happy with all that I have. It’s exactly what I always wanted; enough pools to keep me busy but not too busy and just enough money to let me and my wife enjoy our lives without pinching pennies. But we’ll never be rich - unless our investment portfolio in lottery tickets finally pays off.

But when I read those magazines and see all those young, fresh scrubbed faces just tearing it up out there and getting promoted to this CEO position, or showcased as that Builder with Something Extra, I tend to kick at what I have and ask myself why my phone doesn’t ring with those kinds of offers.

And then in a blinding flash it comes to me: It’s because you’re such an ass, Pool Guy. Hell, even your wife says so. I mean, let’s face it, with a blog like this and the attitude of belligerence and irreverence from which it was born, what did you expect?

And then I grin and toss that industry magazine in the recycle bin and go back to being Critical Bill, in all the ways that Bill was Critical. (hint: Things to do in Denver when you’re Dead. Great movie. Dark and Brooding, yes, but Great, especially Bill.)

Because the truth is, in twenty-five years of doing pools, there’s nothing I have enjoyed more than tweaking the nose of the Powers That Be by pointing out that the Emperor of Salt Has No Clothes.

At first, I was nervous about it. I knew what I was seeing – ruined coping and decks, rusted diving boards and handrails, disintegrating heaters, odd discolorations in plaster – and everything I read and researched said it was salt and electrolysis and stray current corrosion and galvanic corrosion that was doing it. But every time I asked someone in the industry - some of those self same folks who get their pictures and bio’s in the industry magazines - they’d tell me I was crazy, or that I was seeing things, and they’d remind me of all that acid I did in the sixties, and… anyway. But I went ahead and posted everything I was seeing to this blog.

And, boy, did I hit a chord. Turns out the Good Guys in this industry – and there are some. Not as many as I had hoped, but some pretty Heavy Hitters, whose hearts, it turns out, are in the right place, even if they are muzzled somewhat by their success – these Good Guys started writing to me and encouraging me to keep it up, to keep the bastard’s Feet to the Fire. So I did.

I suppose that, after a fashion, it did get me into the trade magazines. Quoted as “an anonymous blogger”, the dust I kicked up and the pictures I sent in made grist for a few articles and got everybody talking a little more openly and honestly about the destruction of pools and decks and equipment by salt systems. But only after a fashion. Because for everybody who reached inside their jeans and rummaged around and found that they still had a pair and admitted that they were seeing the same problems I was seeing, there were legions of naysayers who called me a liar and a troublemaker and worse. Those were pretty much the salt manufacturers and their reps.

Imagine that.

And then there was that great, vast middle who said nothing. If you find yourself getting a little red in the face as you read that last line, then, yeah, I’m talking to you.

You sat there and you said nothing. You watched pools fall apart. You watched people get hyped and pressured into buying those hunk of junk salt systems. You listened to those people rant and rave about how soft their water felt when you knew that their pools were going to fall apart in a year or two.

And you said nothing.

Now, I’m not talking to those of you who were actually selling these systems to your customers after the truth started coming out. You guys are just crooks. You’re what gives our business its well earned Rep. The sooner you all find a new hustle and move on and out of the Pool Biz, the better. But, of course you won’t. I mean, you all obfuscated for all this time about salt systems, hid the truth and kept selling and selling and made piles of money doing it, and then pretty much walked away from all the liability. As easy as that was, you’ll probably all sign up to sell ionizers next. And get away with that, too, I suspect.

No, I’m talking to that vast middle right now. There’s an e-mail I got the other day that I want you to read:

“Pool Guy:

Just got finished reading your blog postings concerning SWG’s and wow, you the man! We switched to a salt system two years ago and have noticed corrosion of our Texas flagstone over the last year. I keep seeing light pink dust/sandy particles and blamed my sons for NOT cleaning the pool good enough. The tile line is also flagstone, and it is gritty/dusty. Our pool is ten years old, and am getting estimates to resurface. Wanna know something interesting, more pathetic now that I have read your blogs, only one acknowledge a problem w/SWG and flagstone and suggested I seal it before replastering. Can’t guarantee the sealer though and I wonder why!
Others are clueless. I still have the normal chlorinator intact, so will make a switch FAST.

So, Pool Guy, before I invest more $$ into this, can you advise me please on this remodel? I did not read anything on your blog about ‘what to do if you have corrosion’. Know any reputable pool renovators and pool service companies in the Houston area? Needless to say, I am frustrated with this whole issue and want to start from scratch. So for a $1500 salt water system, I am estimating am now going to have shell out close to $10,000 to renovate this 25,000 gallon pool! Maybe less if can get the flagstone back to normal. You are right, one born everyday; two years ago was my day, and don’t plan to have another one any time in the near future!

Thanks for your input and being so forthcoming. It was refreshing to read your articles.”

And this is exactly what I’ve been talking about for the last fourteen months. Here’s a pool owner who bought into THE INDUSTRY HYPE just two short years ago and went with salt. Now, she’s seeing her stone deteriorate and when she asks The Remodel Contractors Who Are Supposed To Know About These Things, Especially Since We As An Industry Have Been Talking About It In Earnest For The Last Year, all but one of them say they haven’t heard anything about it.

But it’s really not that they haven’t heard about it. The truth is that everybody’s still afraid to say, “Yeah, whoever sold you that salt system ought to be on the hook for all this salt damaged stone. And hey, didn’t the Owner’s Manual or the Installation Instructions have any warnings about salt maybe not being compatible with certain types of stone? Well, maybe you should talk to your salt system manufacturer about their liability in all of this. Of course, you’ll want to take a shower after you get off the phone…”

Now, if you turn about six pages into your most recent issue of Pool & Spa News, you’ll see that Deck O Seal, the name we’ve all known and trusted since we first started driving around with a pole sticking out of the back of our truck now has a product called Deck O Shield, and their ad asks, “Is your deck too salty for your taste?” Further down, they say, “protects against salt and stains by limiting salt penetration.”

Then, on page 140, there’s a big ad from SR Smith introducing their salt friendly rails and slides and diving boards, with a really cool “Salt Pool Approved” logo. Go to www.saltfriendly.com for more information.

So, if a guy who’s Remodeling Pools For A Living – you know, Feeding His Family With The Proceeds Of His Work In The Pool Industry – if he took, say, thirty minutes a month to thumb through a magazine, then he would know what we’re talking about… Wouldn’t You Say?

Otherwise, you’d just have to assume he knows about it and is such a gutless turd that he doesn’t want to “throw the other guy under the bus”, which as I’ve said before is the same as holding the door open for the bank robbers so that they’ll like you later.

And this customer in Houston is stuck with thousands of dollars of stone damage because we, as an industry, didn’t know enough about what we were selling to warn her that this would happen, and since we’ve all admitted that, hell, yes, this is happening, nobody-I-mean-nobody is stepping up and doing the John Wayne thing and saying, “Hu-yeah, that’s our fault. We’ll make good on that for ya, little lady.”

Multiply her damages times every pool with a salt system and any of the myriad items that it’s incompatible with and tell me how many million dollars this Industry Wide Black Eye is going to cost our customers.

Just ask yourself, how many thousand copper heaters are failing in silence?

So, how did we make the leap from rumblings out in the field about salt issues to a few articles about how bad salt was with certain types of stone to a shift in the industry where we openly sell products to prevent damage from salt and products guaranteed to be salt resistant? What happened to the Go Back And Clean Up The Mess We Made And Are Still Making On All Those Pools That Are Falling Apart Around Their Salt System?

I mean, how do you advertise cupro nickel heat exchangers as being the answer to the problem of salt eating up copper heat exchangers and not at least send a one paragraph letter to folks with copper heaters and salt systems and warn them that their heaters are at risk?

How do you talk about the benefits of cupro nickel, which implies the unsuitability of copper, and not at least put a note in your installation instructions not to install a salt system on copper plumbed pools?

Seriously, I want to know. How does a guy who’s rep’ing for one of the larger full line companies stand at a showbooth and talk about salt resistant materials in his heater and then deny that those same materials are necessary when he turns around and tries to talk someone into backfitting all of his service pools with salt?

Or, how, when more and more of The Entire World is concerned with the viability of our drinking water do you use the words “all natural and environmentally friendly” when you’re talking about adding a pollutant to water?

The EPA’s Drinking Water Candidate Contaminant List.

Or, has anybody read the recent articles that now have a second federal agency, the FDA, gunning for salt?

Business Week's Take On It

The NY Times Take On It

Or, how about the fact that salt systems still explode. Like this:

This is from a recent explosion in France. It’s documented on a POOL FORUM HERE

Unless you speak French, you’ll need to cut and paste the text HERE (Google Translate) to get an approximate translation. What I find just hilarious in this whole thread about the exploding chlorinator is that everybody in the thread seems quite content because the E Bay seller stood good on the warranty for a new salt cell. Think about it. These folks probably had a hydrogen gas explosion in their back yard, scattering shards of plastic everywhere, like shrapnel from a grenade, and everybody’s happy because they have a new salt cell for free that, hopefully, won’t blow up like the last one.

Huh?

But the funniest part of these last fourteen months to me, and what should be the most instructive to you, is that nobody’s ever done anything to try to make me Cease and Desist. And while I blog anonymously as The Pool Guy, it’s pretty much an open secret who I am to those who took the time to find out. And yet, nothing earth shattering has happened to me. And believe it or not, none of my customers have held it against me for telling them the truth. Which is exactly why no one’s done anything to stop me; because I’m not lying

So, the next time you’re faced with some new bullshit gadget that Our Industry wants you to ram down the throats of your customers, Just Say No.

Then go blog about it.

2007-10-28T09:36:00.000-07:00

The Tower Of Google

I got this Site Meter. It tells me how many people come to the blog each day. It tells me how long they stay. It tells me how many pages they view, and how long they view those pages. It’s a neat little gadget, and if I was a really savvy internet whiz, I’d figure some way to crunch all those numbers and squeeze some bucks out of it. Or, if I worked for the government, I’d figure out how to use the info to better surveil you.

Pretty much, all I use it for is to see how many people read the blog this week and to see where they’re from. Where they’re from in broad, general terms, mind you. It doesn’t tell me much beyond what city someone is from. And actually, not even that. It tells me what city their internet provider is from. But that’s usually pretty close to home, so I get a good idea of where most of the hits are coming from.

Like I said, it’s a neat gadget, and I like fiddling with it. One thing I really hate about it, though, is that if a visitor never clicks off the main page to any other pages in my blog, it records their visit length as 0:00. In other words, it doesn’t start counting the time of your visit until you look at something besides the main page. So, I never know if a 0:00 visit was someone who just opened and closed the page, or someone who sat and read all the way down to the bottom of the displayed blog, which right now goes all the way back to the first part of August. That part is frustrating.

The one thing I love about the Site Meter is that same Visit Length column. Especially when I open up the Recent Visits by Visit Details and see that of the twenty most recent visits, four or five people spent anywhere from ten to thirty minutes reading my blog. I gotta confess, that feels good. That makes it all worthwhile. That makes every Sunday morning with my wife standing over my shoulder stamping her foot and waiting for me to take her to brunch while I polish just one more sentence before clicking Publish New Entry worth the risk of enduring the Wrath of Khan over omelets and coffee. I do, of curse, smell the coffee before drinking it. Arsenic smells like garlic, right?

I tend to dwell on those Visit Details where someone spent so much time reading my blog. Like, I want to know, did they really spend all that time reading my blog, or did they just open the window and then get distracted and end up mowing the lawn or something. And I can tell by the Visitor Path whether they did or not. Like if they spent 32 minutes & 33 seconds at the blog (1,953 seconds) and they spent all 1,953 of them on one of the pictures they clicked on, then I pretty much know they got distracted and didn’t really read much. Maybe his wife was stamping her foot, too.

But if the Visitor Path shows that they spent 1224 seconds on one page and 535 on another and 194 on another and then exited to one of the links on the Honor Roll, then I know that they really did read my stuff.

And that makes it all worthwhile.

For example, of the last twenty visits, 6 people made it off the main page, and those six people spent a total of 75 minutes and 45 seconds reading the blog. That’s like 12 and a half minutes each. You know, I have subscriptions to pool industry magazines that I read in less than 12 and a half minutes each month.

In the last 40 visits, one visitor spent an hour and 14 minutes and 14 seconds and viewed 33 pages of my blog. Seeing things like that make what I do here worth every minute that I spend doing it.

So, where do all these people come from, anyway? What surprises me is that 76% of you don’t come from search engines. You got here through word of mouth or you’re a regular. And even of the 24% of you who got here from a search engine, the biggest chunk of you Googlers were Googling The Pool Guy, or The Pool Biz, or The Pool Guy Blog, or something like that. So, still, word of mouth.

Of the 20% of you who were looking for something else – most probably information about salt systems – the next most frequent search term was Lectronator. So, I’m glad I could help you there. After that, it’s Swimpure, then Intex, then Goldline, Aquarite, Zodiac, in that order. Then the search terms start being more specific to problems, like; Stone Coping Salt Damage, or Travertine Coping Salt, or Stray Current In Salt Pool. Then there’s my absolute favorite: Why Does My Salt Swimming Pool Shock Me When I Touch the Handrail? I think it’s neat that people ask Google questions in complete sentences, like it was some kind of Oracle or something.

The things that you folks are searching for has been the biggest indicator that what I’m doing here has value. I mean, when I see that there’s lots of folks looking for information about why their limestone or travertine coping and deck is dissolving under their feet, then I know I’m on the right track by shining a light on a pretty sleazy corner of our industry. Even still, when you go to any of the manufacturer’s websites, you won’t find a single word about the problems that people are encountering with salt systems. It’s left up to people like me to try to get the information out there. Because if you take a hard look at it, the pool industry has been horribly lax in self governing the problems with salt systems out of existence. Everybody’s afraid of stepping on the other guy’s toes. Afraid of making an enemy. To me, it’s sort of like holding the door for the bank robbers when they’re fleeing the scene because you want them to like you later.

But hey, I’m a Pessimist, right? And all of my rants are just a bunch of Hyperbole. Isn’t that what a lot of you say? And the Glass is really Half Full and Not Half Empty like I always say. Right? Sure, there’s some truth to what The Pool Guy says, but it’s really not as bad as all that. Right? I mean, these Salt Guys, they didn’t screw the Pool Owning Public on purpose. If Only They Had Known… Right?

Okay, fine. Then Get a Load of This:

http://bodyfatindex.org/2007/10/25/straight-talk-about-safe-swimming-pools/

“Straight Talk About Safe Swimming Pools

As a fund diligence expert of some existence I am constantly amazed at the misinformation and outright fraud perpetrated by inventors, manufacturers and cheat artists on fund owners. tidy fund water is an absolute requisite for any fund and promoting pseudo-smurder under the outfit of shelter or ecological concerns is no pretext for bad and potentially damaging information.”

That came off a Google Blog Alert for “Chlorine Generator”

You see, the term chlorine generator is buried further down in this gobble-de-goop of text, so that it pops up on a Google Blog Alert Search, thereby diluting the effectiveness of being able to set an Alert and keeping your finger on the pulse of what’s being said about Chlorine Generators, whether you’re a Hyperbolist like me, or a Consumer looking for the opinion of other’s before making a purchasing decision, or a Salt Pool Owner looking for help with any of the myriad problems that come along with owning one of these Albatrosses.

Oh? You think this is just more hyperbole?

Then Go Here to this Google Blog Search Results for Chlorine Generator:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&tab=wb&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=chlorine+generator&btnG=Search+Blogs

Look at all of those pages and pages of bogus returns. Read the excerpted text:

“... generator briggs and stratton stand by generator gnerator spa king ozone generator baldor generators stepped-tone generator salt chlorine generator swimming pool list old wartsila generator sets d&d name generator military generator …”

“…Aqua Rite® Chlorine Generator - Cheap Pool Products chlorine generator,pool chlorine generator,electronic chlorine generator,swimming pool chlorinator,aquarite chlorine … Also check out the Aqua Logic ® … Click for Installation Manual. ...”

“…There it breathes a lot of knowledge on Haywards Aquarite Electronic Pool Chlorine Generator in the large resource. This is a homepage with synthetic link on raw exposure gas. If you next change from Haywards Aquarite Electronic Pool ...”

“... parts intex chlorinator intex chlorine intex chlorine generator intex chlorine generator and filter pump combo intex chlorine generator chlorinator intex chlorine generator information intex chlorine generator stltwaterpool system ...”

When you click on any of those blogs, you find that Google has locked them up for violations of the Terms of Service, as well they should. But the Search Engine is still affected. They still show up in the Search Results and dilute your effort to get at The Truth.

But then, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? This, ladies and gentlemen, is The Other Side of The Argument. They couldn’t dispute what people like me were saying, so they just started throwing crap on the walls, seeing what the Search Engines will let stick.

They’ve even found a way to get around the blogs being locked up for the violation of the Terms of Service. If you scroll to page 7 of those Blog Search Results, you’ll see this:

By: atlantis chlorine generator
Nice site. Thanks. Chlorine generator handbook.
Patrick.net comments – http://patrick.net/wp

What they did there was to go out and find blogs with unrestricted Comments Sections and place a little “chlorine generator” flag. You see, that way the WordBots will still tag this entry as applicable to any searches for chlorine generators, even though Patrick.net is a guy’s blog, a guy who rails against many of the injustices of the world, one of which is that most advertising is spam.

It makes you wonder who pays for all that. Doesn’t it? I mean, the flow of all this garbage into the Blogosphere has to be coming from someone, or some group of someone’s, for some reason. There must be a buck in it somehow. It would be interesting to know whose buck it was in the beginning.

Could it have been yours? You know, from the bank robbery… I mean, from the purchase of your salt system.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that salt manufacturers are the only people scummy enough to have sunk this low as to flood the internet with false information to hide their misdeeds. This is probably just the Tip of the Iceberg. Which reminds me. I have to get another expression for that because soon enough people will respond by asking, “What’s an Iceberg?” But the Good News is that when all the Icebergs are Gone, the Glass won’t be Half Empty anymore. It will be Overfilled.

It sure would be nice, though, to know who’s destroying your ability to find The Truth and replacing Google with another Tower of Babble.

2007-10-06T12:20:00.000-07:00

There Is No Free Lunch

I received an e-mail this week. I thought I would share it and my response with you. I changed his name for reasons of privacy.

You seem extremely knowledgeable and have extensive experience with pools. I’m building a pool here in Austin (bad soils – I’m nuts!) and I’d like to talk to you for 5 minutes if you could please make the time. I’ve narrowed my selection to two bids. One with Salt Water and one with Ozone (Delzone) and chlorine. I’d like to discuss your experience with salt water and get some feedback on Sand Versus Cartridge filters. I have a lot of trees in my yard and I’ll be hammered with leaves and debris. I love the idea of cartridge but everyone says I need DE or sand. Thoughts…

FYI: I’ve owned a pool before, I hate DE, I love the salt water concept but I keep hearing the horror stories, the salt water guy has installed 30+ salt water pools and swears that by selecting the right materials (no limestone) and properly sealing those materials I should be fine (His customers love him – hard to argue) and I have no idea which filter I should choose. I think I love Jandy but I’m not sure. I’ve owned a Polaris but this Hayward Phantom looks interesting. Is it any good? Trying to decide the Jandy PDA is worth the expense…

Sorry to ramble but I’ve spent the past 6 hours researching pool stuff and I’m about to have a brain freeze. I found it interesting that your blog had more data than any of the previous 50+ sites I visited before I reached yours. NICE! At the end of the day, NO ONE knows more about stuff than the people who service and maintain that stuff.

Lastly I’d like to get some feedback on what you think about the expansive soils in Dallas. I’m building in the same crappy Del Rio clay that you guys suffer in North and Central Dallas. Do you have any advice? Pray…

Would you be open to a quick phone call?

Thanks in advance for ANY and ALL help!!!!!!!! Your website alone is a great service!!!!

John from Austin!

John,

Thanks for the Kudos. I like you already. Your e-mail touched on so many of my favorite subjects, I couldn’t wait to sit down and write back to you.

First and foremost, I’d like to point out that a guy who’s installed “30+” salt pools isn’t a guy who’s installed A LOT of salt pools. Granted, one is too many, but with the average custom builder building anywhere from 30 to 150 pools a year and still being able to work out of his home – if he prefers – and given that salt’s been selling like hotcakes for the last five or so years, then this guy’s only selling about six salt pools a year, or he’s only been building pools for a couple of years. Neither situation is a rousing endorsement for salt. Either he’s not really seeing enough salt pools (six a year) for his phone to be ringing off the hook with disgruntled customers complaining about their pool deterioration issues in the harsh salt environment, or if it’s the latter and he’s only been out there on his own for a few years, then it hasn’t been long enough for his customers to be calling with the salt related complaints that start about midway through year two. You see, he’s avoiding the use of limestone and he probably learned not to sell diving boards with his salt pools, so the complaints typical of the first six months to a year aren’t happening to him. You need to factor in, too, that those customers he’s introduced you to who “just love him” may not represent 100% of his customer base. I know of builders who pay people to call their customers, pretending to be a prospective client, to hear what kind of referrals his customers give. The Good Ones go on the Referral List. The Not So Good Ones never see the light of day. It is, after all, Sales & Marketing.

But the point about the salt is that it will eventually damage all stone and concrete. Sooner or later. It’s just science. Higher chloride levels in the water result in supersaturation of the stone or cementious material and eventually the re-crystallization of the salt inside the stone will cause accelerated deterioration. People who argue that that’s not true are just Fast Buck Artists who want to ignore science so they can screw you out of the money you’re going to spend on their salt system. You can get into the loop of sealing and resealing your stone and concrete to try to prevent this from occurring, but why spend that money?

You also have all the metals to think about. Every metal in your pool that touches the electrolyte that you’ve turned your pool water into will deteriorate faster than it would if the salt weren’t present. Once again, it’s just science. To argue otherwise is just to argue for the sake of making a sale. Your heater, the metal parts of your auto cleaner – which should be a Polaris, by the way. The only thing intriguing about the Phantom is that there are still people who buy it - are all going to deteriorate on a much faster track than if your water had much, much lower choride levels (i.e., no salt). Period. It’s not a topic that needs further discussion. It Is Simply The Way Things Are.

You see, what you have to do is take a step back from the whole situation and take another perspective. And here is that perspective that’s vitally important that you see. About five or so years ago, the Manufacturer Reps came to the builders and told them, “I’ve got a New Gadget for your Sales Wheel. It’s going to put anywhere from $500 to an extra $1,000 in your pocket – that’s net, mind you, on the $1,500 to $2,000 Salt System sale – on every pool you build. And that’s going to boost your annual sales with us and you’re going to get even more money back at the end of the year because you spent an extra $1,000 with us on each pool you built. You’re going to love it.”

And they did, until the complaints started rolling in. So, now, they’re backing away from salt because they’re tired of paying for all that stone and concrete work. But they got used to that extra spot on the Sales Wheel, and without Salt, it’s empty. So, up jumps Ozone to fill the void. Why? Because the builders got used to the extra $1,000 a pool. If a guy’s doing a hundred pools a year, that’s a lot of profit to just walk away from.

So now, everybody’s selling Ozone. One little problem. In the Friday, September 28th issue of the Los Angeles Times, Section B, page B1, there was this little headline that read, “State bans home Ozone air purifiers”. The first paragraph of the article says, “The California Air Resources Board on Thursday banned popular in-home ozone air-purifiers, saying studies have found that they can worsen conditions such as asthma that marketers claim they help to prevent.”

Now, when I read that, it occurred to me how many times I’ve had my breath taken away when I popped the lid off a portable spa that was on and filtering and had an ozone generator – usually a UV ozonator. I had always attributed it to the chlorine or bromine. But California’s action here in dealing a blow to the Air Purifier industry makes me wonder if Ozonators for pools and especially for spas isn’t going to be next. I bring this up to point out that if you’re building a pool/spa combo, you’re going to be sitting in your spa with the ozonator running at max output, breathing the ozone (O3) that bubbles to the surface of the water. Don’t get me wrong; ozone is a great sanitizer. It is also an air pollutant. With the in-home air purifiers that California is banning, there “are reports of ozone being generated in someone’s living room… at levels equivalent to having a stage one smog alert right in your own house” (from the LA Times article) How is the ozone that bubbles up and is concentrated at the surface of your spa any different?

Google ozone and asthma and see how many and what quality of hits you get.

Like this:

http://www.epa.gov/03healthtraining/effects.html

Or this: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/asthma/AN00443

Now, those links represent the EPA and the Mayo Clinic, who both say that ozone exacerbates asthma, but I’m sure your pool builder will tell you “don’t worry, I’m sure they’re wrong”. That’s what they said about salt.

The bottom line is they were just looking for something to plug into the sales wheel where salt used to be, and ozone was standing there looking harmless and without any of the damaging structural side effects of salt, and so they’ve started selling it. They would no more take five minutes to Google any potential health risks associated with ozone exposure than they would fly to the moon.

So, once you’ve ungadgetized their bids, what you have left is running your pool on chlorine. Which will be just fine. We’ve been doing it for centuries. And granted, even chlorine comes with baggage. Google trihalomethanes and read up on their now proven link to cancer.

Like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trihalomethane

Read the definition and then click on “3 Water Pollutants” in the Contents box.

Moving On… You should love DE. It’s the best filter media. But if you’re not willing to give DE another shot, then go with the cartridge filter. Get a big one, over 500 square feet. You’ll be cleaning it less often. And the cartridges are probably down around 20 microns, although they claim that they’ll filter down to 10 microns. For comparison, a DE is as low as 5 microns when properly coated. A sand filter is a waste of money. A properly laid sand bed is about a 30 to 50 micron filter. Algae particles can be a lot smaller than that and blow right through a sand filter.

Another problem with sand; to keep up with summer water temps and debris here in Texas, you pretty much have to run a sand filter 24 hours a day. Cartridges and DE, about half that much time or even less. That's at least a 50% energy savings on running that filter pump, which if it's a single speed, high horsepower pump to filter the water AND run those spa jets, is probably costing you about $120.00 a month with DE or cartridge filters. Double that for sand. Every month. Forever. If you bring this up with your builder, he'll take that opportunity to sell you on the new variable speed pumps that are out. They're brand new. The only thing I know after twenty-five years in the Pool Biz is; Never Be The Guinea Pig. You buy it, you own it, whether it works out or not.

All of the current crop of cartridge filters have their drawbacks. Jandy is famous for cracked manifolds and flaky, special order – read expensive - air relief assemblies. Lots of Haywards blow through the little equalization screen attached to the manifold and blow debris back into the pool. And you need to wear long sleeves when dealing with a Pentair tank after the first couple of years. It seems to decompose a bit and flake off fiberglass – or whatever it is – all over you. And their drain plugs tend to crack and weep, too.

I don’t know a lot about the Jandy PDA’s. I like wireless better than wired, but I don’t see the installation savings in not having to wire all the way from the equipment pad to the house and to the spa side being passed on to the homeowner. They just tend to charge more for the wireless systems, which honestly cost more, but they make even more with the reduced installation costs.

As far as the soil… Just try to keep the ground around your pool irrigated so that it doesn’t have a chance to dry out and contract away from the structure. Water more often during droughts and less often when it rains, and choose a builder who guarantees his structure against leaking for as long as you own the pool. That’s pretty standard stuff.

As far as the Horns, most of my friends are Horns fans, so I’m happy to see them happy when the Horns win. But me, I'm an NFL guy. A Raider Fan lost in Cowboy Country. It's a vile habit I picked up when I lived Out West, harder to kick than black tar heroin, but RIGHT NOW and until the end of the day Sunday, the Raiders are in first place in their Division, which is so NOT what all the experts predicted just a few short weeks ago, now is it? If you remember, it was supposed to be the Chargers. Objectively speaking, the Chargers had a good team and they had Marty Schottenheimer, who has very few shortcomings and was getting them closer and closer. But they fired him and hired Norv Turner, who is 59 and 85 as a head coach. He's had four winning seasons in his 9 going on 10 years of coaching, and 3 of those 4 were nothing more than one or two games above .500 ball. His worst seasons have been split equally among the Redskins and the Raiders, posting records like 3 & 13 and 4 & 12. And the guy the Chargers fired, Marty, was 14 & 2 last year with a 200 & 126 lifetime coaching record. Hell, even Art Shell has a better record than Norv Turner (56 & 52).God-That-Was-Such-A-Stupid-Move-I-Cant-Believe-It...

But what’s that got to do with pools, huh? Last but not least, if after all my heartfelt advise to STAY AWAY FROM SALT, you choose it anyway, make sure you bank every penny you’re supposedly saving on chlorine, because three years of running your pump like you’re going to run it to keep up with all those leaves and debris, you’re going to be popping for a new Salt Cell, which can cost as much as $600.

Because no matter what They say, There Is No Free Lunch.

Good Luck With Your Pool.

2007-09-09T08:10:00.000-07:00

The Tide Has Turned

I was in two backyards these last few weeks, bidding weekly cleaning service for brand new pools, and in both instances the owners asked me whatever happened to salt systems? Said they were surprised when they found out that the builders they got bids from weren’t offering it any more, and when they asked around the office, they were surprised to find that they had tapped into a real vein of anger from folks they knew who had salt systems and last year were talking about how great they were and this year were beginning to suffer the consequences that are normal with a salt pool a couple of years down the road. They felt lucky they had dodged the bullet and wanted to know what I thought of salt.

Try to guess what I told them.

Then, I ran into another relatively new pool owner – her pool is four months old. I was there to bid weekly cleaning service because she was ready to fire her present pool service company. The reason she was upset is that she’d watched her beautiful dark green plaster turn to chalky white all across the bottom of her pool in the four months since startup. The pool service company owner is telling her that’s “normal mottling”. I call it scaling. She showed me one of the cards they left after the last cleaning service. It detailed what they’d done to clean the pool, the water conditions they’d observed and the chemicals they’d used to balance the pool. Right there on the card, it said that the pH was 7.8, and that they’d added 3 lbs. of cal hypo to shock her pool. They added no acid to balance the pH or counteract the effect of 3 lbs. of 11.8 pH cal hypo. Do that every other week for four months on a salt pool with new plaster and tell me what you get.

There was a symmetry to her initial selection of the pool service company that she was about to fire. They came recommended by the pool builder. Now, this builder sold her about 110 feet of beautiful travertine coping, a diving board with a metal stand, and a salt system to go with all that. And, before you ask; no, he’s not retarded. The proof is he didn’t sell her a stainless steel filter tank. But that’s the only proof I could find.

The oddest thing is this builder recently went out on his own after many years as a project manager for a very large area builder. That very large area builder had even stopped selling salt for awhile, and only went back to selling it on those jobs where they couldn’t talk the customer out of it and only after the customer signed a damage waiver. So, it’s not like this guys could have missed the memo.

The diving board stand has been replaced once already. The second one is already beginning to rust. The travertine coping around the spa is already starting to pit from the bubbler water feature in the center of the spa creating the standard circular splash zone around the edges.

What’s happened to that pool is a travesty. I gave her the number of a pool inspector I know and told her she needs to get a written report with photos of the damage thus far. I hate to rat out fellow Pool Guys, but when their answer to the problem of rapid scaling is that its “normal mottling”, and the diving board issue will go away once the one year warranty expires (the workman they sent to replace the stand actually said that to the customer), and the travertine will get through the same warranty period before it really starts to resemble the surface of the moon… well, they need to be ratted out. And maybe when they’ve had to pay for new coping and at least an acid wash on a few pools, they’ll stop listening to the sales hype and start considering what even the salt system manufacturers are reluctantly admitting; that you need to THINK before you install a salt system about the environment you’re placing it in. All materials are NOT compatible with salt. Further, you need to QUESTION whether you’re going to have personnel sufficiently trained in water chemistry to maintain these pools without turning the pools into basket cases in four months.

Oh, and last but not least, they put a DE filter on this pool, which made it nearly as environmentally unfriendly as possible, since they’ll be backwashing 3500 ppm brackish water into the sewer system, as required by code. The only way it could have been any more environmentally unfriendly is if they’d put a sand filter on it. Then, you’d be backwashing nearly every week instead of every six to eight weeks.

But the moral of this story is that The Tide Has Turned. Two years ago, chances are all three of those brand new pools would have been salt pools. Last year, probably two of them would have been. Now, we’re down to one in three, and four months in, the one is already crying Uncle on salt.

And the underlying moral of this story is that the Salt Manufacturers and the Salt Reps have done this to themselves. Their irresponsible introduction of these systems without any guidelines or restrictions, their lack of support for their dealers and their builders when the problems started to surface, their now transparent efforts to delay and obfuscate when it all started going south, and their lack of accountability for the damages their ill-introduced gadget has caused is YET ANOTHER Black Eye for an industry sorely in need of a moral compass to begin with. I mean, it’s hard enough to lace up my flip flops and go into backyards and say, “Yes, I know there’s better than a 90% chance that you’ve had a bad experience with somebody in the pool business… but trust me.”

It’s like the old joke, “I’m from the Government. I’m here to help.” That’s it. That’s the joke.

Of course, the Salt Guy’s Spinmeisters will blame the demise of salt on Guys Like Me. They’ll accuse us of being the Nattering Nabobs of Negatism that destroyed a Great, Yet Sadly Misunderstood Product. You know, Spiro Agnew was the first to use the Nattering Nabobs line, and he repeated it often, until we trundled him out of Washington and banished him to some nameless golf course in Maryland for taking cash bribes across his desk in the office of The Vice President of the United States.

But the truth is that it’s hardly Guys Like Me who did it. Salt did it. The damage finally arrived. The Bill finally came and it was marked Past Due. I mean, it is such a stretch to think that this blog did anything more than report a phenomena as it grew and then collapsed. To date, I’ve had a total of 13,000 visitors in nearly a year. And about 12,000 of those were probably PoolSean. So, let’s face it; real world experiences and word of mouth are what killed the Goose that Laid those Golden – albeit Salty – Eggs.

And That’s That.

2007-08-26T07:53:00.000-07:00

This Is Your Polaris Pool Cleaner On Salt

I got an e-mail another Pool Guy the other day. He said, “Hey Pool Guy. What’s the story? You haven’t bashed salt in over two weeks. But my salt pools are still falling apart at warp speed. Case in point:” and he attached a zip file with these photos in it.

This first one shows the remains of the brass inserts that are pressed into the plastic frame of the Polaris 280 so that you can mount your axles onto the frame via stainless steel screws.

The next one shows the Polaris cleaner frame that these brass inserts pulled out of.

This next one shows what one of the axle frame mounts that hadn’t corroded away yet looks like for contrast.

You can see on the first picture that there are remnants of the brass inserts remaining in the holes, and it’s depth matches right up with what you’re seeing on what’s left of those brass inserts in the first picture.

This photo here shows what I think is most interesting. It’s the picture of the two screws and the frame to axle reinforcement plate.

Take a close look at the screw on the left. See how the threads appear to have a brass colored look to them? That’s because they’re coated with brass. Not in that cross-thread, softer metal looses sort of way. In that four years of Galvanic Corrosion sucking off brass electrons and plating the stainless steel with them sort of way. Because this is The Textbook Example of Galvanic Corrosion.

Here’s what Dr. Stephen C. Dexter, Professor of Applied Science and Marine Biology said in an article from the University Delaware Sea Grant Marine Advisory Service MAS NOTES:

“Galvanic corrosion, often misnamed ‘electrolysis,’ is one common form of corrosion in marine environments. It occurs when two (or more) dissimilar metals are brought into electrical contact under water. When a galvanic couple forms, one of the metals in the couple becomes the anode and corrodes faster than it would all by itself, while the other becomes the cathode and corrodes slower than it would alone. Either (or both) metal in the couple may or may not corrode by itself (themselves) in seawater. When contact with a dissimilar metal is made, however, the self-corrosion rates will change: corrosion of the anode will accelerate; corrosion of the cathode will decelerate or even stop."

MAS Notes is a Marine Advisory Service program sponsored by the University of Delaware and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency of the United States Government.

So, you have a tough decisions to make. Who you gonna believe? The scientists, funded by our government to spend their whole lives studying these types of corrosion mechanisms? Or, your Local Salt Sales Rep?

If you chose B, well, thank you for playing. On your way out, please sign up for our next reality based program called “If I Only Had a Brain”.

And believe me, if it hadn’t coated that stainless screw like that, then when that Whacky Salt Rep who likes to call me names writes in, he’d be able to give me the old, “very interesting, Pool Guy, we’ll need to see the water chemistry records for that pool and for every pool everywhere for the last thirty-five years to make sure that blah, blah, blah, blah….” [read, “so we don’t have to admit any liability for our ever more failing technology.”]

And speaking of Failing Technology, that reminds me to say that I was contacted by the Canadian Broadcasting Company this week. Seems they’re working on a story about why the Wave Pool in Calgary is closed until February and wanted to know what I thought were the reasons. I told them what I thought was going on behind those closed doors with Canadian taxpayer’s dollars, and made sure they knew whose salt system it was that’s installed there so they could get a comment from the manufacturer on why their salt system had done two million six hundred thousand dollars – Yes. That’s right. $2,600,000.00 – worth of damage to the Wave Pool in 2 years and 8 months – Yes. That’s right. Thirty-two months.

But I’m getting off the subject. What afflicts the Wave Pool is just plain old fashioned salt spray corrosion. The kind that’s not supposed to happen in 3,500 parts per million (ppm) salt water because it’s “less than the salinity of a tear” and “ten times lower than the level of salt in seawater”, and a whole bunch of other nonsensical things I could say if I were trying to sell these things instead of reveal the truth about them.

What we’re talking about today is Galvanic Corrosion. Now, don’t confuse that with Stray Current Corrosion. That’s another whole different kind of corrosion that salt water brings to your pool and that kind afflicts those metal things that are tied to the pool’s bonding grid – which is pretty much everything except these automatic cleaners and stainless steel filter tanks and the stainless through rods that hold your DE filters together. Pay close attention the next time you’re cleaning a salt pool’s DE filter that uses those knurled brass screws on the stainless through rods. I bet the screws will be Missing In Action, or on their way to being gone. But on the up side, as Dr. Dexter pointed out, the stainless steel is now actually stronger. Here’s a table that shows how that works:

The Anodic end is the end that deteriorates. Look down the list and find brass. Then look further down the list, toward the Cathodic or Noble end and look for stainless steel. See? First, it lists 300 series and then way down, it lists 400 series stainless steel. In fact, all stainless steels are more Cathodic, or more Noble than brass.

The only comfort in the whole situation is that the Polaris frame has something like a 5 year warranty. So, if you’re lucky, your wheels will fall off before the five years is up. This customer’s did.

But, you know how it is. You start taking a Polaris apart to ship the frame back for exchange, and this is true for any of the Return Side Cleaners, and unless the wheel bearings are pretty new, they’re going to disintegrate in your hands. Then, when you get into the guts of it, you’re probably going to notice that the salt has eaten up the teeth of the driveshaft, like I showed you HERE, and that the driveshaft bearings are welded by corrosion to the driveshaft splines. And, of course, you might as well put on new tires and wheels while you’re into it…

What’s a Mother to do?

Stay away from salt. That’s my advise.

2007-08-19T10:16:00.000-07:00

Who You Gonna Call?

Last week I talked about the pool store hustle of dressing Baking Soda up with a smidgen of something else, or by calling it a less familiar name, then selling it as Total Alkalinity (TA) Control so that they could charge usurious prices for it. It was really just a lead-in so I could point out that while charging three or four times the supermarket price for Baking Soda is one thing, the idea of selling plain old salt and a little borate and acids and charging as much as ten times more than the going price is just obscene.

Evan, a frequent contributor to the comments section here at The Pool Biz, wrote to say, “Yes, I have to agree that everything you said is true”. Evan works in a pool store.

The Chem Geek, another frequent contributor to the blog, wrote to say, “If your point is that the pool and spa industry is not fully disclosing and that there are myths and falsehoods spread and that the training is poor, I think that's a given. If you look up the antonym of integrity, you'll probably find this industry.” [emphasis mine… wasn’t that a great line?]

But they both also pointed out, in their own ways, that not everyone in the industry is a Big Fat Liar.

Chem Geek said it directly; “That doesn’t mean, however, that everything an industry person says is wrong.”

Evan took a more circuitous route, by pointing out that everything I said in that blog piece was Been There, Talked About That kinda stuff in his beloved forums, and then launched into a rant about high cyanuric acid (CYA) levels and how the pool chemical manufacturers, particularly Chemtura, are lying about how destructive high CYA levels can be to plaster. And, too, if you have read some of Evan the Waterbear’s posts you’ll see that he’s one of the Good Guy. He’s looked behind the curtain and I believe that he sees the same thing I do; that there’s a bunch of salesmen flipping the levers and spinning the wheels on nearly everything in this industry, and that a technical person with the Correct Answer doesn’t hardly have a chance.

Now, that’s a lot of words to be putting in his mouth, so I encourage you to check back and click on the Comments Section Monday night. I’m sure I’ll have a rebuttal from him by then.

The most pointed and direct rebuttal I got was from a man who runs a large pool construction, service and sales company. His business includes a pool store. Via e-mail he said, “On the TA with higher pH, that is actually required around here (and in many other places) where tablets are the primary sanitizer. In those pools (probably 80% in this part of the world), the tablets constantly cause the TA to decrease and likewise the pH. The boosting with a higher pH TA solves two issues with one dose. As for the price of balancing chemicals: There are clearly some that charge usury fees for common items, but I believe it a little jaded to condemn a reasonable profit in the face of the services provided by our ‘boutique’. When a customer comes in, we greet them (usually by name), talk to them, test their water, help them select just the right product, help them to their car with their stuff, and basically establish a relationship. Those are not things you can find at Loews or Home Depot. Many places sell chemicals to get the water right. The only problem is that they don't have your smarts to select them. In those cases (and it happens all day everyday) the customer comes in from Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Loews, or wherever, and ask us to ‘help them’ get their pool ‘fixed’.”

After reading what he said, I had to admit that he was right. There is a purpose for a Pool Store beyond just being a place for pool cleaners to load up their chemicals and for pool repairmen to drink their morning coffee before heading out on their service calls. What he’s saying is the guys on staff at the pool companies who meet and greet the do-it-yourself customers actually have a purpose in life, and as long as they’re well trained and not driven by the owner to Sell, Sell, Sell, then they can be an asset to the pool owner with the Green Pool who’s out there, wandering from Mass Marketer to Franchise Pool Store to Independent Pool Store seeking the Truth.

Truth is, until I read this guy’s e-mail, I never really had much use for the Retail Guys. First off, they always look so neat and clean. I hate that. And when you listen to them with a customer, they always seem to be talking so knowledgeably about pools without ever having seen anything more than the display model in the back of the store. We called them Shop Pussies in my day. I mean, they didn’t even have a decent tan. How can you take advice from a Pool Guy who doesn’t at least have a good Farmer’s Tan working?

But I get his point that listening to a Shop Pussy who’s at least read the water chemistry books is better than navigating the aisles at the Mass Marketers and asking a Homer to point you in the general direction of the pool supplies. You really do have to know what you’re buying when you go to the Mass Marketers. Let me give you a real life example.

I walked into a backyard this past spring. The owners are in that segment of the pool market who only remember they have a 20,000 gallon pool in their backyard in the spring when the kids start asking, “When can we go swimming?” As usual, they were in desperate need of getting someone to come in and get rid of the algae and debris that a winter’s worth of neglect had allowed to accumulate. I looked over their pool and one of the first things I noticed was a very light copper green patina on the plaster and especially on the soft white rubber tires of their automatic pool cleaner. I turned and asked them, “Do you buy your chlorine tablets at Home Depot?”

The answer was yes.

I’ve seen that same staining on half a dozen do-it-yourselfer’s pools, and every time I nose around the equipment area or garage, I find a bucket of HTH Pace Dual Action 3” stabilized chlorine tablets. HTH Pace is owned by Arch Chemicals. The Dual Action tabs are 93.5% Trichloro-s-triazenetrione, 1.5% Copper Sulfate Pentahydrate and 5.0% Inert Ingredients.

They work really well. Trichlor is a great sanitizer and oxidizer, and everybody in the pool business knows that copper is a terrific sanitizer and algaecide. There are tons of copper based algaecides on the market, and most ionizers work by introducing copper ions into the water.

And too, high enough levels of copper in your pool water will cause staining, like I see in the pools of those people who just go to the Mass Marketer and buy the same bucket of tabs over and over again, without giving a lot of thought to what all their putting into their pool. I mean, every time they dissolve 100 pounds of these tablets into their pool, they’re also dissolving 1.5 pounds of copper into the water.

A few years ago, when I first saw that Home Depot was selling chlorine tablets with 1.5% Copper Sulfate, I knew that this was going to happen.

Now, the folks at Arch Chemicals are the same folks who are leading the charge about high stabilizer being bad for your pool. They’ve released a study showing degradation of plaster coupons when exposed to higher and higher levels of CYA. And so they’ve got this pool care program whose bedrock is that overstabilization is bad for your pool, that not only is it bad for your plaster, but that high levels affect your sanitizer’s ability to act as a sanitizer. There’s a lot of talk in the forums about this, too. Here are some links from the HTH consumer website about overstabilization.

http://www.archchemicals.com/Fed/HTH/Poolcare/overstabalization.htm

http://www.archchemicals.com/Fed/HTH/Docs/Overstabilization_Layout.pdf

That first link says it all. It sort of denudes their intentions: “HTH® and calcium hypochlorite (cal hypo) offer the only complete solution to overstabilization. Cal hypo products do not contain cyanuric acid and will not cause overstabilization.”

You see, for most folks who’ve been around this industry a long time, HTH Pace has always been synonymous with calcium based products. I remember going to a Raypak heater training seminar in southern California back about 1984 or 85 and the Raypak Rep holding up a section of 1 ½ inch copper pipe – there was still a lot of it out there back then – that was so scaled with calcium that you couldn’t get a pencil down the middle of it. He asked, “What causes this, fellas?” and we answered back in unison, “Cal Hypo”, because back in those days they used to sell this neat little gadget that you loaded up with those HTH cal hypo pellets and then you put it in the skimmer basket to let erosion dissolve the pellets at the rate determined by the dial-a-setting opening in the lid.

Of course, if you’re in a part of the country with hard water, then a daily diet of calcium for your pool is bad juju. You’re adding more calcium to water that’s already near the tipping point for calcium to start with. Sort of like throwing gas on a fire. The result is always the same; calcium scaling. I’ve seen pools in southern California that were so scaled with calcium that they had to be sanded after they were acid washed. Now, that’s not all HTH’s fault. Once calcium gets much over four or five hundred parts per million (ppm), it gets harder and harder to keep the calcium in solution.

And if you’re in a part of the country with really soft water, so soft out of the tap that you have to actually add calcium to get it up to 200 ppm, then that dial-a-lid thingie would be just fine… sort of.

Because you really need to consider that the pH of calcium hypochlorite is 11.8 and so it’s going to create a higher pH, calcium rich water stream from the skimmer through the equipment. Does that calcium rich, high pH water cause any of the calcium to fall out of solution and plate out on the interiors on your pumps and filters and heaters and plumbing?

Confusing, huh? If you’re in the business, then even as sketchy as it was, you followed everything I just said. If you’re not in the business, then you probably already closed this window.

Now the point I’m trying to make is to those of you still reading, those of you in the business. We are all of us manipulated by people in our industry who are manipulating the facts, and the best manipulator that we run into ends up getting us in their camp. Our own local water conditions come into play somewhat, but I believe that more than water, its The Argument that they present. But, when you look behind the curtain, it turns out that The Argument is 90% Sales Pitch.

Is Arch doing anything wrong by saying that high stabilizer is bad? Probably not. But I know it helps to sell a product that I dismissed a long time ago as inappropriate for day to day chlorination of my customer’s pools.

Is Chemtura doing something wrong by sticking with the story that there’s nothing wrong with stabilizer levels as high as 200 ppm? I don’t know. But it sure helps them sell a lot more trichlor tabs.

Is there reason to question research done on trichlor tabs by a company who tells you it’s a good idea to put calcium based chlorine tablets in your skimmer? You tell me.

Is there a problem with a company putting 1.5% copper into trichlor tabs and then telling people to shock their pool every week with an 11.8 pH oxidizer and never once bring up the issue of copper staining, and on top of that, sell this product in an environment – a Big Box store – where thorough water testing is impossible?

Now, I’m not picking on Arch. That’s the whole point. I could just as easily have taken the other side of the argument and made them look like Heroes. These are the kinds of holes that you and I know exist in every one of these guy’s arguments, in every article we read, in every opinion we see put forth. Everybody’s selling something, and doing and saying what they need to say to get it sold. If they can get you talking about the other guy’s shortcomings, then theirs will slip right under the radar.

The damnable thing to me is that we have to keep learning this crap over and over and over again.

It goes back to what the Chem Geek said; “That doesn't mean, however, that everything an industry person says is wrong. It just means you need to trust, but verify". And I think that’s the same thing the man was saying about his Pool Store when he talked about helping “them select just the right product”.

But who do you believe? Who do you trust? Even if you go to the internet and find a link and click it open and read a report that confirms your suspicions, only to find that the report was commissioned by the competition…

Good luck with all that.

2007-08-12T09:18:00.000-07:00

Soylent Green Is… Baking Soda

I admit it. I’m a Glass Half Empty kinda guy. The few rules I live by run in the vein that There’s No Free Lunch, Everything’s a Hustle, and that, like P T Barnum said, There’s One Born Every Minute. I’m the guy peering at the horizon searching for the Thunderhead behind the Silver Lining.

I didn’t start out this way. It’s just that I’ve been paying attention as I grow older. If you have even a moderately curious mind, and scratch even the surface of most things, you don’t have to dig very far to find out things like the Fajitas sizzle is just water and oil they spritz on the cast iron “sizzle platter” – yes, that’s what it’s called – before they bring it to your table.

Too, being a Pool Guy, I’m exposed to those kinds of hustles every day in my industry. Like the Soylent Green thing… I mean, the Total Alkalinity Control thing. About ten years ago, I was in a pool store and saw where their chemical supplier was boxing up sodium sesquicarbonate and telling their customers that they MUST USE this to adjust their Total Alkalinity. And the reason they did that was so they didn’t have to admit that you could go to the grocery store and buy boxes of Baking Soda off the shelf, and even in one pound boxes, the most expensive way to buy the stuff, you were going to save at least half over what they were asking.

Now, the real hustle part of that example is that Baking Soda is not only cheaper at the grocery store, but it’s more appropriate for raising just your Total Alkalinity. You see, Sodium Bicarbonate has a pH of 8.3, and sodium sesquicarbonate has a pH of 10.5. So, if you use the sesqui stuff, you’ll have to add some acid to bring your pH back down to normal, which will burn off some of that Total Alkalinity you just raised, so then you’ll have to add more sesqui stuff… hey, wait a minute. Maybe they’re on to something, huh? It’s an endless loop of making money off of misinformation.

The funniest part of that story is that the same pool store, which was part of a nationwide franchise for a particular chemical line, used to sell 50 pound bags of industrial grade Baking Soda to customers who knew enough to ask for it. They sold it for about $25 for the 50 pound bag. They sold a 12 pound box of the sesqui stuff for $18.99.

Here’s a couple of examples of the price differences between what a pool store will charge you and what you can get if you’re an informed consumer.

Leslie’s sells a 5 pound bucket of Baking Soda for $9.99. They’ll sell you a fifty pound bucket for $52.99. That’s as much as $2.00 a pound. It says right in the product description that Alkalinity Up is 100% granular Sodium Bicarbonate.

I’ve found one pound boxes of food grade Baking Soda in the grocery aisle for as little as sixty-eight cents a box.

But the price thing’s not the big issue here. Leslie’s is marking up Baking Soda nearly four times what you’d pay for even smaller quantities at the grocery store. But they’re not a nationwide supermarket chain. They’re a boutique. You knew they weren’t going to be cheap going through the door.

And, truth is, they’re at least admitting that they’re selling you Baking Soda.

Let’s look at another pool store chain. BioGuard sells their Total Alkalinity Control as a product called Balance Pak 100. Click Here for a link to their MSDS page. That’s Material Safety Data Sheets, in case you didn’t know. These are the government required ingredients sheets. They are outside the arena of sales and marketing and so explain what you’re really buying. Sort of like fajitas without the sizzle spritzed on. If you want to know what’s in something, ask them to see the MSDS at the point of sale.

But it seems they’re not selling Sodium Bicarbonate for Total Alkalinity Control. They’re selling Sodium Hydrogen Carbonate instead. Hmmm… if you scroll down to page 2, you’ll see it has a pH of 8.2, nearly identical to Sodium Bicarbonate and all the other information seems to be a mirror image of… Wait a minute. Look down there on page 3, under Transportation Information. Its proper shipping name is Sodium Bicarbonate. Baking Soda.

Do tell…

Sodium Hydrogen Carbonate is another name for NaHCO3; Sodium Bicarbonate, or Baking Soda. Did you know that?

Let’s look at another BioGuard program; Mineral Springs. Click Here. This is the Mineral Springs program description page. The way it works is they sell you an Aqua Rite chlorine generator that’s been private labeled for BioGuard as a machine that converts “essential elements” – read salt – into a sanitizer – read chlorine. The key to this program is that you buy bags that are 75% to 90% salt and 5 to 15% boron salts (probably sodium tetraborate pentahydrate since they own that patent) and then other inorganic acids to make the thing equal 100%, all for about $40.00 a 30 lbs. bag. I didn’t learn the true ingredients on the Mineral Springs page. I learned it by going to, once again, the MSDS.

Anyway, you need 1 thirty pound bag for every thousand gallons of water in your pool to get started on the program. If you have a 20,000 gallon pool, that’s $800.00 plus tax, just for the “essential elements”. Not to mention another $15.00 a week forever to add Mineral Springs Renewal. That's an additional $60.00 a month; $780.00 a year.

OR, you could go to Home Depot and buy 13 bags of salt pellets for about $4.90 a 40 pound bag, and about fifteen boxes of 20 Mule Team Borax (sodium tetraborate decahydrate) for about $2.90 a box, and a couple two gallon cases of acid for about $8.00 a case – you’ll need the acid to neutralize the 9.25 pH of the Borax. With tax, you’re out the door for about $135.00.

In California, due to the restrictions of selling borate products for use in swimming pools, BioGuard just sells you salt, 95 - 98%, with 1 - 2% Cyanuric Acid (commonly called Stabilizer) thrown in and still calls it Mineral Springs. That way, they can still call it "essential minerals”. The guy in the pool store pitching it to you knows all this, and he's able to stand there with a straight face and sell you about $3.75 worth of salt, with 0.3 to 0.6 lbs. stabilizer in it for significantly more than that. Here’s the MSDS for Mineral Springs in California.

If you think I exaggerate, if you think I paint too bleak a picture here, go back to the Mineral Springs program description page and use your browser’s Search function to search for the word Salt, or Saline, or Salinity, or Sodium Chloride, anything that might disclose that people are buying a regular old salt system.

No? No hits? Now go here, to the Mineral Springs Frequently Asked Questions and do the same thing. Same results, you say?

Do tell…

This whole program has done so much to prove that PT Barnum was just a Piker, that now Leslie’s has gotten into the act, teaming with Hayward/Goldline to private label their Aqua Rite and call it the Hayward Swim Pure Salt System. And guess what? They have companion products to go along with it. But you probably guessed that.

First, there’s Salt Water Magic Foundation. You need one, five pound container for every 5,000 gallons of pool water, and it only costs $34.99 per container. So, for that same 20,000 gallon pool, you’ll need $139.96 plus tax. You’ll still need salt, though. So, after your Home Depot run, you’ll be out another $63.70. Then, every time you add a make up bag of salt during the year, you’re supposed to add a container of Salt Water Magic Support, for $24.99.

That works out to be about $30 every time you add a bag of salt. And Leslie's is by far the less expensive salt water based program.

Hmmm… I thought these Salt Systems were supposed to eliminate all these extra costs. Instead, the manufacturers who got you to buy these Trojan Horses on the premise of saving you money have now teamed with the retailers to find ways to make this just another way of separating you from even more of your money.

You have to admit that if you listen to the Industry Experts, and follow their advice on what you ought to buy, you're going to be out a lot more money than if you'd stuck to your old chlrorine tab feeder and a bucket of shock.

Well, at least Leslie’s calls theirs a Salt System.

These are the kinds of Staring You Right In The Face If You Know Where To Look observations that make me that Glass Half Empty kind of guy.

The saddest part is, everything I've said is true.

2007-08-05T09:25:00.000-07:00

It’s The Environment, Stupid… And The Taxes

I learned something from a Salt Rep a while back. To set Google Alerts for things like Chlorine Generator and Salt System and Salt Ban and Electrolysis and Southland Leisure Centre, and that way I can track any information that pops up on the web on any of these topics.

It has been a gold mine of information. Take, for example, this headline that came to me by way of the Salt Ban Alert:

Hard choice on water softeners
Dixon City Council is studying the possible ban on salt-based systems.

It turns out that the voters in Dixon, California overturned an effort to raise their taxes to fund an expansion at the wastewater plant. The expansion was to handle the ever increasing salinity level of their treated wastewater discharge. When they refused to pony up more taxes, that put the city out of compliance with state guidelines for salinity levels in treated waste discharge, and that got the state of California breathing down the necks of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, who, in turn, started breathing down the necks of the City of Dixon to come up with a solution. You know how it is, poorly treated waste rolls downhill.

So it continued to roll downhill until it plopped into the laps of the Dixon Wastewater Project Committee. They were tasked with coming up with ways that don’t cost the taxpayers any money but will still reduce the salinity level of their wastewater. And it occurred to them, “What if we stopped putting salt in the water? Do you think that might help?”

At that point, someone pointed out that it seems to have done the trick over in Santa Clarita, and so the committee came back to the city council with three proposals that pretty much read:

1. Get rid of salt based water softeners.
2. Teach people how to get rid of salt based water softeners.
3. Study the long term effects of getting rid of salt based water softeners.

And we all know what happens next, right? If Santa Clarita is any indicator, in about two and a half years, they’ll come back and say;

1. Get rid of swimming pool salt pool chlorine generators.
2. Teach people how to get rid of salt pool chlorine generators.
3. Study the long term effects of getting rid of salt pool chlorine generators.

But it might be sooner, because since I have Google Alerts, I was able to see that story the day it published and send a blizzard of links to everybody in Dixon who’s e-mail I could find to tell them that they ought to just go ahead and throw salt pools in there while they’re thinking about banning salty stuff.

Isn’t networking Neat?

And I know, I know. I can already hear the Salt Is Great Amen Choir reciting the California building code that backwash lines for pools aren’t hooked to the sewer so they’re not technically increasing the salinity of the waste stream, because it just spews onto the ground, and anybody who keeps up with the Breaking News at some of the more popular internet pool forums knows that “unless your soil already has very high salt concentrations or you are growing the very most tempermental [sic] plants in the world SWG pool water will be just fine for watering plants for years and years…”, to which another Living Online Instead of In the Real World forum regular adds, “Our deck-o-drain drains out to the side of our [pool] directly into a small flower bed. Out of all our new plants, it is probably doing the best, so you'd be hard pressed to convince me that a little low salinity water is bad for plants - let alone 'toxic waste' ".

And that, my friends, is the state of the Salt Pool Biz on the Internet. The consumer is faced with either going to the manufacturer’s website, where the lies are so thick you can cut them with a knife, or going to these forums, which so much resemble a bunch of guys sitting around the garage, drinking beer, pulling each other’s fingers and convincing each other that salt's okay. One of them recommends that everybody water their plants "for years and years" with salt water, and another thinks that the salty water is helping his plants. If anybody with any real knowledge of agriculture were walking by when they said it, they would laugh themselves silly and tell them that is such a load of... poorly treated waste. But then, they wouldn’t be invited to the next finger pulling contest.

And really, what do I know? I just read facts that are printed in silly old newspapers and dumb old research journals and b-o-r-i-n-g professional waste water management publications. It’s not like I KNOW anything, like these guys at the forums who got solid C’s in chemistry and earth science in school, or the Salt Reps, who are really your friends and would never tell you a lie for something as base as a wad of greasy cash.

What the heck, though. Here’s some more of those dumb old facts about salt ruining drinking water:

Too much salt in New Jersey's water?

“United Water company has been sending notices out to its customers in Bergen and Hudson counties warning that the sodium level in the water supply is higher than it should be.

The company blames the winter task of salting the roads to keep them clear of ice.

The salt and snow melt from the roads spilled into reservoirs, taking the concentration of sodium higher than state guidelines -- and the water processing can't flush it out.

But the company is required to put out the warning for people with high blood pressure or other high sodium sensitive health concerns. It advises them to talk to their doctors.”

So now you’re advised to talk to your doctor before you drink the water in Jersey because of salt. Of all the things I thought you’d have to worry about drinking Jersey water, salt was pretty far down on the list. But there it is.

And on the off chance that you’re brain damaged and you don’t readily see the connection between salt on the roads and salt pools… It’s all salt. Salt pools are elective. They’re not mandatory. Why would you be part of the problem when you can be part of the solution?

This also dovetails nicely into why it’s not okay to blow your salty backwash onto the ground as if you needed to be told fer-Chrissakes…

Deep breaths…. Counting to ten… Okay... Better now.

But my favorite little tidbit to come my way via my Google Alerts is this one. It’s a thread on the Water Technology Bulletin Board. Click it and read through it a couple of times to get the drift of what they’re talking about. I’ll give you the synopsis, but don’t trust me. Go read it for yourself.

This guy named Dirkson is asking a bunch of Real Water Experts to respond with their approach to solving a water quality issue. Now, these are people who make a living working with the technologies that make your water drinkable. They are not like your local Salt Reps who make a living by making your water undrinkable, or people who post on pool forums who, for the most part, just own a pool and do something else besides know anything about water for a day job. The water quality issue was providing about 1,000 gallons per week with a source water that had a hardness of about 3800 ppm and a salinity of about 2100 ppm. Your salt pool water has nearly double that salinty.

The thread quickly becomes defined as RE: Brackish Water Treatment by the responders, and, as we all know, brackish is defined as salty tasting. So they’re all keying on the high salinity, which like I said, is only a little more than half what your salt pool water is.

The first responder says, “There is NO EASY ANSWER. That is why no one is responding to your post”, and he goes on to recommend solar stills because the energy costs to reclaim that water would be too high.

The next responder says, sure, it can be treated. System cost for 500 gallons per day would be about $10,000. That would just about cover Mom and Dad and the three kids, each averaging about 100 gallons of water a day (that’s the US average).

The next couple responders point out that even at the $10,000 mark, there’s a problem with all that salinity. Using RO and water softeners to reclaim the water creates a brine discharge problem.

“Even worse where do you get rid of all the brine from the regenerations? I would never want to allow it to be dispersed on the land. Especially, if the land is above a water table. “

But, gosh, the Pool Gurus on the pool forums said that it was good for plants and stuff. Said I could blow it all over the ground for years and years. You mean to tell me that they were wrong? You mean to tell me that… their opinion was just… an opinion? I am crushed.

Of course, the folks who make a living creating polluted pool water – that is, after all, what 3,500 ppm salt water is; polluted water that needs treatment according to EVERYBODY IN WASTEWATER MANAGEMENT – the same folks who want to keep selling you salt systems will say that this is all just those guy’s opinions. But their opinions coincide with legislation that keeps popping up all over the country about how our excessive use of salt is causing increasing costs in waste water reclamation.

So, if you’re one of those Red State Republicans who hates new taxes, the way all good Republicans are supposed to, and you just happen to have a salt system on your pool, remember that you can’t vote NO when your municipality comes hat in hand asking for more money to desalinate the waste water. Unless, of course, you want them to legislate your salt pool out of existence. Because that would logically be next. Like in Santa Clarita, and perhaps soon to come in Dixon, and perhaps coming to a municipality near you soon.

There’s just one more little factoid I want to pass along that I found out there in cyberspace this week. It’s kind of a good fit to put the lie to the Other Guy’s baloney that they’re big companies and they know what’s best for you, and that, at the very least, they certainly know better than some dumb old pool cleaner in Dallas, Texas.

In 1957, the Ford Motor Company (pretty big company, wouldn’t you say?) unveiled a concept car, called the Nucleon. Then, again in 1962, they came to the Seattle World’s Fair with another concept car they called the Ford Seattle-ite XXI. The Nucleon and especially the Seatlle-ite XXI were cars designed for the 21st century, when everybody would own several small nuclear reactors to fuel their energy needs. Both cars were envisioned to be powered by a slightly larger version of the reactor that powers your lawnmower and your kid’s jet bike.

What? You say you don’t have a nuclear fueled lawnmower and your kid is still pedaling around the neighborhood?

But you have salt in your pool water? Who have you been listening to?

2007-07-22T09:44:00.000-07:00

The Summer Lull

It happens every year. Most of us in the Pool Biz are used to it, and ready for it. There’s a flurry of service and repair calls as everybody gets their pools ready for the swimming season, and then there’s a slow down, where everybody’s all set and the phone calls slow down. That’s when we settle into our normal workaday level of activity. That’s what you try to dial your business to handle; that summer lull. The busy time right before the lull makes you feel like you’re going to pull your hair out, and then again in the fall, when there’s so much junk falling into the pools and overstressing the pumps and clogging the lines that the phone rings off the hook all over again. But that’s how the game is played.

At least here in Texas. I know a bit about other markets because I’ve worked in a few. Like I know that southern California isn’t as much like that. They really don’t have a high debris season, like our spring and fall, and their swimming season is longer than here. I cleaned the pool of a college professor in southern California that swam laps for an hour a day in his pool year ‘round, using a wet suit for a few months in the winter. You really couldn’t do that here in Texas. When the water gets to forty-five degrees, it’s going to be cold even with a wet suit.

But that’s really the trick in business, isn’t it? Knowing your market? Like a couple of weeks ago, I posted a blog piece about all the rain we’re having here and how, because our pools here in Texas are built with modern conveniences like tile line drains so that pool owners don’t have to go out and pump water off the pool every time it rains, the result on salt pools is that you end up losing a lot of salty water out the tile line drain. And so, for guys like me, that means humping more and more salt to the pools every time it rains. Kind of a hard position to challenge, wouldn’t you think?

Well, there’s this one Salt Peddler, and he just went off over what I said, blathering on and on about how if I was carrying something called Jerry Jugs, that he says hold two and a half gallons and weigh in at twenty pounds apiece, and if I had a hundred customers and if they were using one Jerry Jug a week, I’d be humping eight thousand six hundred pounds of chlorine a month, so why was I bitching about the salt?

What the hell’s a Jerry Jug? No, really, I know what a Jerry Jug is. It’s those little containers we use to fill up our lawnmowers and stuff. This guy lives in Florida. And I admit, I don’t know the Florida market very well. I know a lot of their pools have screened rooms over them. I hear that they are often pool-only setups, with no attached spa. I hear that they use a lot of small pumps (1 horsepower) and small (100 square foot or so) cartridge filters. They don’t tend to use automatic cleaners because they’re in enclosures, but if they do, they use suction side cleaners, like Kreepy Krawleys or Navigators. I hear their water is hard, so it makes sense to me that they use liquid chlorine to shock their pools, and if it’s cheap enough, with the increase in trichlor prices over the last couple of years, I could see where they might decide to run their pools exclusively on liquid chlorine, even with the extra muriatic acid and stabilizer they’ll have to buy to go along with it.

And so the Jerry Jugs come in because they probably have a big reservoir of liquid chlorine on their service trucks that they use to pump the Jerry Jug full.

How am I doing? I’m guessing, you see. Because I haven’t been to Florida since I visited my Gramma in Dunedin Beach in 1968 when I was a teenager. And, you see, I don’t claim to be an expert on the Florida market because I don’t live and work there.

People that do live and work in the servicing end of this business in Florida have come to appreciate salt a lot more than we have here it Texas, because it gets them out of a closed loop that they’re stuck in: 1 horsepower pumps, 100 square foot cartridge filters, in-line tablet feeders, a lot less tile line drains and constantly rising stabilizer levels. Just go back and read Evan’s comments on Rain, Rain Go Away to see what I’m talking about. Evan works in a pool & spa supply center in Florida and I would imagine tests a lot of water and knows the typical equipment profile for his customers.

He says that the problems we see with salt really haven’t presented themselves like they have here in Texas and in Arizona. And I take what he says at face value. After all, it’s his market, and he knows his market, and he doesn’t claim to know mine. It sounds like he’s in south Florida, but, again, I’m guessing.

Not like the Salt Peddler, who, by the way, is the National Sales something-or-other for his company, and goes around the entire country to all the pool expos holding his Bum Dope Seminars, and while you may think that’s mean for me to call them that, consider that the guy doesn’t even know that you can’t buy liquid chlorine at the pool suppliers here in Dallas, Texas. I mean, he doesn’t have the first idea about the typical chemicals that the average pool serviceman carries on his truck to do his job each day here in Texas. And that’s because he hasn’t considered for a minute the differences in our water over the water in Florida. And that’s because he’s busier coming up with excuses why guys like me are all wrong than he is investigating the claims that salt may not be appropriate for all pools. Like that one in Canada, as-a-big-effing-fer-instance… But he’s sure his Salt System is right for your pool.

And all I can say is that this guy’s not unique. His level of understanding is pretty typical of most of the Sales Reps I run into. Their knowledge of the subject is usually very regional. In fact, it’s often so regional that if they don’t see the problem on their own pool in their own back yard, then it doesn’t exist. Not to mention that the Sales Boss told them it doesn’t exist. Now, you’ll usually find a lot more technical knowledge when you talk to their Technical Reps. That’s the nature of the beast, Salesmen Sell; Tech Reps Fix – and keep their mouths shut.

The other unique flaw inherent in trying to represent salt systems, and one that’s not really been very well explored, is that for a guy to properly represent them he needs to be a technical AND chemical whiz kid. So far, I haven’t met any of those. But then, if a guy was both, he would see how deeply flawed the technology is, and he wouldn’t want to Sell It or Fix It.

A south Florida pool builder wrote to me recently. He had experience with salt systems from the last company he worked with before getting out on his own:

“I too think the salt systems are [a] joke. Before moving out on my own, I use to argue with my last boss…about what a profit drain the salt cells became. He spent more money running service reps around to adjust and repair them than he could ever hope to make on the sale of the unit.”

Later, he and I were discussing the regional aspects of salt damage and he wrote:

“I do agree that maybe some of the damage is centralized to The Great State of Texas (I grew up in Irving) and Arizona but only because y'all (felt good to the dust of that vocabulary word) use more natural stones than other parts of the country. With the freeze/thaw cycle up north the natural stones fall apart. Down here in Florida…wages are paid in sunshine and beaches… and [people] very seldom go for the exotic materials. Although the trend is expanding as people are getting tired of cracked concrete decks. Acrylic topped decks have been the rage for the last 10 years. Now pavers seem to be all anyone wants anymore. I will be curious to see what impact salt has [on] these materials.”

He doesn’t sell salt systems. Doesn’t want to be part of the problem.

Then, there’s another Gulf Coast builder who will only sell a salt system to those “few customers that absolutely insist on having salt systems and… sign the extensive waiver that pretty much absolves me of any warranty on the pool whatsoever.” It’s only after his best effort to dissuade them and only when he’s starting to get that belligerent attitude and the customer is starting to accuse him of just trying to make money "off the stuff we are pushing" in his store, and that the customer has lots of friends who have the system and "just love it", or the best accusation so far, that he should get on the internet and investigate these new systems and "get out of the stone age".

So much for consumer protection.

So, while I respect Evan’s comments that salt has been a good fit in Florida, some of the builders in that general region of the country - the ones who have to stand warranty on the pool structure after the sale - are telling a different story. Granted, it doesn’t get your stabilizer levels down if you go back to tabs, and so I see where you might want to see salt as the answer, or at least as less of a problem. But ask yourself this:

How many builders are making people sign a damage waiver before they’ll install a tab feeder on a swimming pool?

I want to make one more point and then I’m going to take advantage of the Summer Lull and go on Vacation for two weeks – which means I’ll post again on August 5th. There’s an interesting Letter to the Editor here

Robert A. Carson, the Environmental Programs Administrator for the City of Thousand Oaks, California, quite objectively states that “these systems are brackish…filter backwash….rainwater overflow… pool draining… are going to be significant issues. Salt and chloride are pass through pollutants for a wastewater treatment plant. …regulation of chloride-rich waste streams will be forthcoming in many areas. I wouldn’t want to be the vendor or contractor trying to explain to customers why this state-of-the-art system is obsolete, that draining his pool is illegal, that a parade of tanker trucks will be needed to haul away his…pool water.”

Now, before you say, “yeah, another whacky Californian tree hugger”, let me tell you a bit about Thousand Oaks. These are people who voted for W and Arnold. I mean, this is Limbaugh Country. There are probably more defense contractors per square mile than anywhere outside the Washington Beltway. They are fiscally conservative Republicans, for the most part, and it just makes fiscal sense not to put salt in water if you’re going to have to pay to take it out later. Where have I heard that before?

Oh, yes! It was me! But as good as this letter is, it’s not what I want to talk about. It’s the article that this letter is about. You have to do a little digging to find that. I’ve done that for you. Click here.

It’s the Water Conditioning and Purification International Online November 2006 issue. It’s an article called Solving Public Pool Water Quality Problems Forever! by Bill Kent. The first paragraph of the article points out that the recent outbreak of Recreational Water Illnesses (RWI) are disturbing and bring to light the need for facility managers to “investigate regenerative chlorination systems”. That’s it. That’s the last time RWI is mentioned. The rest of the article is a straight sales job on salt chlorine generation. I really encourage you to read it and see if you don’t agree. Whether you’re pro or anti salt, just read it and you’ll see. Especially if you read the heavily footnoted and referenced Swimming Pool Disinfection: Techniques and Pitfalls by David M. Bonnick, the other feature article in the November 2006 issue.

There is a sharp contrast. One is a research paper, the other a marketing brochure.

But that makes sense. Bill Kent is the President of Team Horner. They probably have the lion’s share of the commercial application of salt systems in the US through their AutoPilot commercial chlorine systems. Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of this. This is America, and Bill’s got every right to submit articles about the technology he believes in. And he has a right, in the future, to point to the article he wrote and have folks Google it for more information. And now, when they do, they’ll also get this blog, and a link to Bob Carson’s warning about chloride-rich waste streams and parades of tanker trucks and a link to the YouTube clip of the WFAA report on Why Salt Sucks.

I bring this all up as nothing more than a counter balance to this kind of thing. This is an old article, written in 1984, and dug up by the same Bill Kent in 1993. He slapped a cover letter on the article and called it a "Research Report". Now, it's not just my opinion that this thing is just an article. The last page of the article says, "This article is based on a technical report prepared by Mr. D. S. Novak of ELTECH Systems Corporation titled 'Review of Factors Influencing Corrosion in Swimming Pools,' June 20, 1984." But the technical report is nowhere to be found.

Eltech owned the salt system Lectranator back then, which was blowing through stainless steel filter tanks like they were butter. So, they bought some "research" that said, "it's not the salt, it's the unstabilized chlorine". Then, Eltech sold Lectranator to Olin and Olin sold it to Team Horner, and they got the research along with the machines. They renamed Lectranator AutoPilot in 1995, which makes a casual reader not put the two and two together and see that this article is just Eltech saying way back in the early eighties that salt wasn't eating up stainless steel filter tanks. Since then, we've all learned, even the biggest pro-salties, that you don't put salt systems on pools with stainless steel filter tanks.

But this flawed little piece of "research" keeps coming up in forums, being presented as "proof" of a mitigating circumstance for why salt is okay today, and why if you're seeing problems with your salt pool, it's probably the unstabilized chlorine and not the salt that's doing the damage. The whole idea that this article is presented without making the underlying research available makes even hosting it a dubious decision, if you ask me. Especially in light of the fact that it was recently re-introduced to the forums by a representative of AutoPilot.

And you can read on countless threads on these forums about "the well documented research of how lower stabilizer levels will result in much higher corrosivity from chlorine", and if you ever bother to ask about the source of this well documented research, they just point back to that little three page article.

And I just don't want the same thing to happen with this most recent article about RWI's. I don't want, ten years from now, to see that article referenced as "the research done in 2006 that proves SCG's effectiveness in fighting RWI's".

And now, after I post this and the search engine wordbots have crawled through this piece and indexed all of these words and all of these links, no one will ever be able to talk about those things again without this blog piece being part of the discussion, too.

God! I love the Internet!

You should all try it. It's just about the only democracy we have left.

2007-07-15T05:47:00.000-07:00

Call It Hubris

One of my favorite authors is Mark Twain. He was truly a great American and a great American writer. And just as much as he is probably our greatest writer, he was one of our greatest social commentators and satirists. It is probably that vein of irreverence for convention, shot through everything he wrote, that makes me love his writing so much. He, like most great Americans, was very critical of the America that he saw, because in his heart, he envisioned the America that could be.

It is easy to understand why he was so critical of his world. He grew up in the age of slavery. He ran away out West to avoid fighting in the Civil War. He lived through the assassination of the President, and the awful Reconstruction period that followed. He watched the Gilded Age flourish, where a few families – like JP Morgan and the Rockefellers – amassed the greatest fortunes ever seen on the planet through the devices of sweat shop labor and overpowering financial manipulations. So, it is no small wonder that, in his later years, when he began to tour and lecture, he joked incessantly about the smallness of great men and the crookedness of their most forthright pronouncements.

He had no great love for politicians and big business. The love he had left was for humanity and for his country and for the unachieved potential that he saw for it to do more than make the rich richer.

He died poor. That is usually the way of it, though. There’s hardly ever a buck in telling the Truth, or even pointing people in the general direction of the Truth. Because the Truth is kind of like taking medicine. It’s not always pleasant. It’s not always something you’re going to want to do, or see, or hear. You see, people will build a million constructs in their mind for denying the Truth if it even looks like medicine, or if it means that they have to surrender even one of their guilty pleasures.

Like people who smoke. Those of us who don’t smoke know that they’re not only killing themselves but they’re killing us too with their second hand smoke. I can hear the collective mouse click as 21% of you – the smokers out there – close this window. Some of you – those of you who still smoke in your homes – are killing your children, too.

But they still smoke. They don’t want to swallow the medicine of Truth that says that smoking causes cancer and a boatload of other diseases for them and for the people around them.

With smokers, at least they have an excuse, They’re addicted to a drug, and so when they defend their Right To Smoke it’s not really them talking. It’s the Drug. It’s like that Crackhead begging change in traffic with the Will Work For Food sign and all those good reasons why he can’t give up The Rock today. The next time you’re stuck at the light listening to his jibberish, nodding your head and trying to roll up your window, think about the arguments your friends give you for why they still smoke.

Except for the shabby clothes and that you smelled him coming, there’s really not a lot of difference, is there? Wait a minute. Not a good comparison. I can smell cigarette smokers coming, too. That’s something else I don’t think smokers are aware of; how much they positively reek when they’ve just stubbed out a cigarette. Cigarette smokers always stink. But, man, right after they’ve put one out. Whew!

Or like people who drive V-8 powered, third and fourth row seating SUV’s. Yes. I know. Another huge mouse click just occurred. But seriously, unless you’re an unreformed Mormon (another, albeit smaller, mouse click), with three wives and 12 kids, I don’t get mega-row seating. I don’t get the need to be that environmentally unconscious just so you can take your 2.3 kids to McDonalds.

I don’t think it would bother me so much if those of you who do it would just say, “I do it because I want to and because I don’t care about the US being a nation dependent on oil from regions that are often hostile to the US, and I don’t care about the ever increasing gasoline prices, and I don’t care that all the legislation from the 1970’s that put safety bumpers on autos is for naught because every one of those cars fits UNDER my SUV come crash time and I know that I’m gypping everybody by taking the Heavy Equipment tax deduction on my luxury laden, $75,000 pimped out SUV. I just don’t care. I want my SUV”, instead of saying, “I feel safer and I think that global warming is a myth”.

Because then you’re starting to sound like the Crackhead with 35 Very Good Reasons Why I Can’t Quit Today.

And those of you who see The Truth in what I’m saying know that you can’t reason with them. Not with any of them. It doesn’t matter what proofs you show them. It doesn’t matter how much evidence you amass. It doesn’t matter how many people are saying the same thing you are.

Because you’re screwing with their Comfort Zone. Once someone’s adopted a toy or a gadget and likes the way it looks, feels, smells, tastes, works, etc., you might as well hang up having a rational conversation with them about The Side Effects.

Like with SUV’s. One side effect is we may have to send some of our children, as they’re just leaving their teen years and before we invest any real money or effort in educating or training them, to fight and possibly die in some far away country that just happens to be strategically located over one of the world’s largest remaining oil reserves. You may not like the way that sounds, but it’s a pretty fair summation of how our society fights it’s wars, and, generally speaking, who fights them, and why they’re fought. You can jump down my throat with all kinds of arguments about the security of our nation and defending freedom and democracy and such, but before you know it, you’re sounding a lot like our friends who smoke cigarettes.

Getting back to cigarettes for a minute. We’ve all seen the movies with Russell Crow and Al Pacino and that new one with Aaron Eckhert, Thank You For Smoking. We all know now that the tobacco companies lied about the link from cigarette smoking to cancer for about 40 or 50 years. We just laughed our asses off at a comedy movie portraying that very fact. According to the World Health Organization, “worldwide, some 5 million persons die from tobacco related illnesses every year”. We all know that corporate America lied to us and as a result, millions and millions of people have died.

And I know that some of you out there who read this blog regularly are thinking, “Oh, God, the Pool Guy’s really flipped. He’s going to compare salt systems to the Cigarette Death Merchants.”

Not at all. But I want to point out that when it comes to your best interest, there’s no one that’s going to legislate your toys. Nobody’s watching. The government isn’t in the business of protecting you. If they were, the CEO’s of the major cigarette manufacturers would have been prosecuted as accomplices in the deaths of all of those people for all of the years that the cigarette companies sat on that data.

But nothing happened. All of their stocks are still a Good Investment. My Country Tis of Thee, huh?

So, empirically and historically, there’s more evidence to support my argument that salt systems are bad for your pool and that they’re lying to you when they say that I’m a crackpot than there is that corporate America is fully disclosing everything they know about the long term damage that salt and the electrolysis process will do to your pool.

Call me crazy. Go ahead.

It is the craziest thing to me that we venerate the Truth Tellers many years later after we can no longer deny that they were, in fact, Telling the Truth.

Like Mark Twain. In his day, lots of people thought Mark Twain was a smart-aleck who was bad for business. It turns out he was a smart-aleck who was bad for business and he was Right. Being Right, and funny, is why we admire him now.

Here’s a real polarizing example that’ll get a lot of mouses clicking:

Michael Moore. So many people hate him. But just a few years ago he made a little movie that said that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq and that our soldiers, returning from honorable duty in a dishonorable war, were being treated even more dishonorably at Walter Reed Hospital. He even showed video footage of the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

And everybody looked at that video footage, evidence of our wounded soldiers suffering in obscure silence, and said he was a crackpot…

Three years later, everybody knows that intelligence about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq was falsified, and now after three years, there’s finally been a Congressional Investigation into the horrible conditions our wounded troops have had to endure at Walter Reed Hospital.

So, everybody will keep hating him, and then, as more and more of what he documents proves to be true – re: Roger and Me, Fahrenheit 9/11, etc. – then he’ll be viewed more and more like Twain.

But history shows us that while the Truth Tellers are Telling the Truth, we listen to the Fast Buck Artists instead. We listen to the same Corporate America that’s screwed us more times than we can count, and we listen to the government that does as little as possible to regulate them.

And I think a lot of it is because they’re really just telling us what we want to hear. Corporate America sells us a Cool Gadget and tells us there’s no Down Side, and we want to believe they’re telling the truth because we just love this Gadget. The government doesn’t really have a dog in the fight as long as the consumer appears to be happy taking their screwing, and even when the evidence starts to mount up, the Glacier’s Pace of government proceedings ensures that the Corporate Guys will be able to keep the consumer bent over out behind the barn for quite a while longer. Throw in some off-election year apathy, some on-election year campaign contributions and you’ve got a near endless cycle of never quite getting around to dealing with the problem. Usually, people just stop using the Cool Gadget because it turns out to suck so much that it gets classified as Totally Uncool, and by then, Corporate America has moved on to the next indispensable Cool Gadget.

Remember polybutylene plumbing?

Remember that spray-in foam insulator that was all the rage for older, uninsulated homes back in the seventies that later turned out to gas off CFC’s and formaldehyde fumes into your home, making it pretty much uninhabitable instead of just cold?

Remember the Radium Girls? Hundreds of women who painted the luminescence on the numbers at the US Radium Corporation clock factory in Orange, New Jersey? This wasn’t some third world barrio that could be easily ignored. This is Tony Soprano Land were talking about.

The glow-in-the-dark luminescence these women painted on the clock faces was called Undark. “They were required to paint delicate lines with fine-tipped brushes, applying the Undark to the tiny numbers and indicator hands of wristwatches. After a few strokes a brush tended to lose its shape, so the women's managers encouraged them to use their lips and tongues to keep the tips of the camel hair brushes sharp and clean. The glowing paint was completely flavorless, and the supervisors assured them that rosy cheeks would be the only physical side effect to swallowing the radium-laced pigment.”

They all died. Their children, and children’s children all had related health issues. The first woman who suspected that her problems might have been from radium exposure sought professional help. A “specialist from Columbia University named Frederick Flynn asked to examine her. Flynn declared her to be in fine health. It would be some time before anyone discovered that Flynn was not a doctor, nor was he licensed to practice medicine, rather he was a toxicologist on the US Radium payroll. A ‘colleague’ who had been present during the examination– and who had confirmed the healthy diagnosis– turned out to be one of the vice-presidents of US Radium.”

Remember when Sears – the name you trust – got busted by the state of California for systematically and routinely performing unnecessary auto repairs? The California report stated that there was every indication that the fraud extended beyond the borders of their state and was endemic in the Sears auto repair system.

Remember Enron? They were billed at the Smartest Guys In The Room wherever they went. And they were. All but a few of them kept most of the money they stole.

You don’t really need a link for Enron, do you? I mean, there’s no one who wants to dispute that those Enron cowboys should have been shot and then hanged, is there?

But we’re not talking about a major plumbing manufacturer, or the radium company that still does business with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission today after changing names and owners enough times to throw off the legal responsibility for the two toxic Superfund sites it’s created over the years.

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/commission/secys/1999/secy1999-269/1999-269scy.html Go to BACKGROUND and read the 3rd and 4th paragraphs down.

And we’re not talking about a household name like Sears, or a major Energy Company like Enron, one who routinely advised the Executive Branch of our government on our National Energy Policy.

No. We’re talking about Salt Reps selling Salt Boxes in the Swimming Pool Business.

Don’t you feel better now? Of course nothing’s wrong with your salt system. People Making Money in the Pool Biz Have Never Been Wrong Before…

I mean, come on. You’re paying as much as $2,000 for technology that you can get for $145 from Cabela’s.

And you don’t think there’s something up? You don’t think you’re being screwed like a stump-tied goat?

Okay fine…

So, my advice to all you folks who already own one of those two thousand dollar salt system and are bothered by what I say; stop reading my blog. Why aggravate yourself? If you like the way the water feels and you think your salt rep is just a swell guy, then drink up. Enjoy the Kool Aid. If it doesn’t work out and you start to notice that things are beginning to fall apart, then you can come back and read through the archives. Whatever problem you’re having I’ve probably talked about it, or will talk about as salt problems continue to present themselves.

And to all you Salties out there, all you folks whose job it is to try to keep your foot on the throat of guys like me; I admit to the failing of hubris in thinking that I could come onto your turf and talk sense in a place that allows the posting of nonsense in response, or that I could find a level playing field in a place that touts a discount on salt systems as a “member benefit”. I realized I was in the wrong place when I found myself stooping to answer the question; if salt systems are destroying swimming pools, then as a pool serviceman, why am I not happy with that?

Because I don’t work at Sears. That’s why.

2007-07-08T09:38:00.000-07:00

Rain, Rain, Go Away…

You probably heard that we’re getting a bit of rain here in Dallas. Thirty-six inches so far this year, most of it in the past couple of months. Our average is thirty-four for the whole year. So, we’re pretty tired of seeing the five day forecast of rain, followed by rain, then some rain, and more rain, and then even more on top of that. For me, it’s not so much the getting wet that bugs me.

It’s buying all that salt and stabilizer for my pools.

Let me give you an example. Let’s take a 16,000 gallon lap pool / play pool. You know, the kind that are about five and a half, maybe six feet at the main drains at the center of the pool, sloping up to three feet at either end. Lots of folks call them Volleyball Pools. I call them easy to clean and less water to sanitize. They’re my favorite. So, let’s take that type as our example. It’s got an average depth of between four and four and a quarter feet.

Now, put thirty-six inches of rain on top of it, and add a tile line drain, a pretty common feature these days on newer pools, to keep that water level right smack at the middle of the tile.

If you have a salt system that needs around 3200 ppm to operate, you’ve added an extra 300 lbs. of salt and an extra 6 lbs of stabilizer to your pool so far this year here in Dallas.

If you have a salt system that needs 4000 ppm, you’ve added an extra 375 lbs. of salt and 8 lbs. of stabilizer to your pool.

That may not sound like a huge burden to you, but I have about 50 of these puppies on service. We’ve humped an extra 17,500 lbs of salt from our trucks to our pools so far this year. At wholesale prices, that’s an extra $2,187.50 I’ve spent on salt and an extra $400 I’ve spent on stabilizer. And like I said, that’s rock bottom wholesale pricing.

Why not just wait until the rains are all over with and then top off the pools? Well, the Zodiac LM-2 manual on pdf page 14 says it best; “Note: Operating the LM-2 at reduced salt levels may shorten the life of the cell”, and then again on pdf page 17; “The salt concentration should normally be around 4000 ppm, but should never be allowed to fall below 3000 ppm, as this can reduce the life of the cell electrodes.”

And too, it says; “Adding fresh water or rainfall to the pool dilutes the salt concentration.” [emphasis mine]

But wait! What about these reports all over the internet, all these guys posting in all these forums, swearing up and down that they never, ever add salt to their pools? They swear that once they load that first 15 or so bags to get to optimum salt level, that they maybe add one or two bags a year, tops. And what about all those sales brochures that talk about how the salt “never goes away”?

Perhaps their being less than forthcoming, shall we say. Or perhaps those forums are overrun with Salt Reps parading as happy salt pool owners. Because it just ain't true. Take it from the guy who humps the salt.

Unless, of course, these people making these claims all live in Los Angeles. They’ve only had three inches of rain there in the last twelve months. That would make these fantastic claims of never adding salt nearly true.

So, that’s a good rule of thumb. Salt systems are cheaper and should be encouraged for use in drought stricken regions of the world. That’s exactly what you need in drought stricken countries; 16,000 gallon reservoirs of undrinkable water.

But for contrast, let’s take the wettest place in the world; Mawslynram, in Meghalaya State, India. It gets 467 ½ inches per annum. To run a Zodiac at optimum levels, you’d need to add an extra 4,977 lbs of salt and an extra 98.1 lbs of stabilizer each year. If they’re buying the salt at Home Depot and the stabilizer at Leslie’s, that’s an extra $622 in salt and $441.50 in stabilizer.

I wonder if they have Home Depot and Leslie’s in Mawslynram? Well, they must have Wal Marts. Knock 20% off and we’ll call it even.

Here in the US, Wynooches, Oxbow, Washington once got 184.56 inches of rain in 1931. If they’d had salt systems back then, it would have meant an extra 1,964 lbs. of salt and an extra 39 lbs. of stabilizer.

But let’s get real. Let’s talk about present day average rainfalls in present day average American cities.

Mobile, Alabama, at 67 inches average annual rainfall would mean an extra 713 lbs. of salt and an extra 14 lbs. of stabilizer just to keep up with the runoff.

Pensacola, Florida, at 65 inches average annual rainfall would need 692 lbs. of salt and 13.6 lbs. of stabilizer.

West Palm Beach, Florida, at 63 inches average annual rainfall would need 670 lbs. of salt.

Port Arthur, Texas, at 61 inches average annual rainfall, would need 650 lbs of salt, just to keep up with the rain.

Even Tuscon, Arizona – pretty much the holder of the title of Driest State in the US for More Centuries than We’ve Been Here – is going to need an extra 128 lbs. each year to stay ahead of their skimpy 12 inches of annual rainfall.

And these totals don’t include splash-out or backwash. Remember, too, that they’re all based on that little old 16,000 volleyball pool. If you’re feeding a 30,000 gallon deep diver, your mileage may vary.

But let’s get wild here. Let’s say you’ve got that volleyball pool right here in Dallas, Texas, with our paltry thirty-four inches a year, and your builder sold you on that Mineral Springs system. You know, the Aqua Rite private labeled for Bio Guard? And let’s say you drink the marketing Kool-Aid and never ask a single question and always buy your salt – I mean, your proprietary blend of minerals – from your local Bio Guard dealer to keep the salt – I mean the mineral level – up to snuff. At $34.99 for a thirty pound bag, and one bag required per 1,000 gallons of water, and 10,660 gallons of runoff from the rain, you’re going to spend an extra $373.00 on “minerals” for your pool. Move that pool to Mobile, Alabama, and the price, like the annual rainfall, nearly doubles.

But, so what? Everybody still likes the way the water feels and they’re going to keep using them darn salt boxes no matter how much it rains. Right?

And therein lies the moral of this story: If the average modern pool, equipped with a tile line drain to help maintain proper water level in the pool, is getting 10,000 gallons a year of runoff, and if there are 7.5 million residential pools in the US, and if what they say is true and 4 out of 10 pools being built these days are salt pools, then when the salt market zeniths, we’ll have 3 million salt pools dumping 30 billion gallons of 3,200 ppm water into our ground water, our storm drains, our sewer systems, our creeks, our rivers and our reservoirs. Diluting 30 billion gallons of salt water to below the level of taste (250 ppm) will create 384 billion gallons of water right at the level of taste, before any other salt contamination is taken into account. Salt contamination like water softeners, road salt, manufacturing processes, etc.

The average person ought to drink 8, 8 ounce glasses of water a day. That’s a half a gallon of water. That’s 182.5 gallons a year. 30 billion gallons of water represents enough to provide drinking water for 164,438,356 people a year. But if it’s salty, they can’t drink it.

Now all those numbers are only if the number of salt pools keeps growing at the rate of 4 out of 10. If the Salt Guys have their way, and more success, it’ll be higher, and all these numbers will go up.

There’s tons of studies that show ground water chloride contamination from the use of road salts in Canada and the northern US. Just Google it and you’ll see that what I’m saying is true.

When you read those reports you’ll come across this term that the pointy head guv guys who write these environmental studies use when referring very matter-of-factly to the area for several hundred yards on either side of the road bed on those salted roads. They call it the “Salt Kill Zone”.

That’s because it often kills the native plants and they have to be replaced by “salt resistant” species. But even then, you can see that we need to use the salt in that application. Even though it’s creating these dead zones and destroying the road beds and infrastructure – road salt causes about $3,940,000,000 a year in road and infrastructure damage here in the US – if we don’t use it we won’t be able to get around. Commerce will come to a screeching halt every time there’s ice on the road. But salt pools…

Oh, yeah, I remember. It’s so your kids won’t get red eyes.

What truly blows me away is how virulently opposed to this idea of salt contamination of the ground and groundwater is to otherwise normal, intelligent people. I ran into one comment at a forum that read, “Our deck-o-drain drains out to the side of our [sic] directly into a small flower bed. Out of all our new plants, it is probably doing the best, so you'd be hard pressed to convince me that a little low salinity water is bad for plants - let alone ‘toxic waste’”. This comment is from a very bright, able guy and even though everything ever published in the history of mankind says that salt’s not good for plants, he goes by the anecdotal evidence in his back yard.

How does that old wive's tail go about how do you kill a tree? Drill holes in the roots and pack the holes with salt. Right?

Or another comment; “Can't drain it out to the perfectly landscaped property, killed trees, TOXIC WASTE???? All from Salt?? Come on… Someone should probably delete [this] post as to not cloud a newbie's judgment with this load.....”

People want their toys and they don’t want to hear anything that might have to make them feel bad about enjoying them.

You guys go ahead. Enjoy those salt pools. And don’t worry about The Bill.

Like most things these days, your kids can pay for it later.

2007-07-01T06:16:00.000-07:00

The 2.6 Million Dollar Salt System

Someone sent me an interesting news clip last week. I’d tell you where I got it, but it came from a source pitching another alternate sanitation technology. And if I cited them, then all you guys who think I’m just a shill for some other pool gadget or the chlorine tablet manufacturers would point to that and say, “See? See? The Pool Guy’s a whore just like us.”

And my only response to that is to say; I know you are, but what am I?

The news clip was just a couple line item. When I first read it, I thought I’d post it in the next blog piece and be done with it. But then, I started Googling, and that’s a lot like falling down a rabbit hole. One thing leads to another and to another and another and pretty soon a picture begins to emerge. And so it becomes a whole story that doesn’t start with the couple line news clip. The news clip comes about three quarters of the way through the story, as it turns out.

It starts like this: On October 29th, 2004, the City of Calgary, Alberta, Canada posted a news release titled “Southland Leisure Centre Pool Switches to Salt Generated Chlorine”. Here’s a link to the press release.

Now, pay attention to that date, okay? That’s less than three years ago.

And here’s how the press release started:

“CALGARY - A safer alternative for Pool Water Sanitization.

Did you know that according to the Salt Institute, there are more than 14,000 uses for salt - from flavouring pheasant to mummifying Egyptian Pharos [sic]?

Did you also know that salt offers a cleaner, safer alternative to using chlorine gas to sanitize public swimming pool water?

As part of its annual maintenance the Southland Leisure Centre is offering patrons a positive replacement to chlorine gas, by installing a new chlorine generating system, via the use of salt.”

Geez, doesn’t that sound like something a Salt Rep would write? I can just hear the phone conversation that led up to that opener. “Hey there, Salt Guy. I’m writing this darn press release for the new pool salt system and I need a snazzy opening. Howzabout you fax me something spiffy, eh?”… I’m not sure they say snazzy and spiffy up in Calgary, but I do know they say, eh. A lot. Anyway, you get the drift.

The press release goes on to tout all the normal BS that we’ve come to expect from Salt Reps when they lie about their systems. Like:

“The conversion will be much safer for staff, and save money over time through fewer chemical costs”.

Which is just so not true. While chlorine gas isn’t something most of us even want to fool with, we all know it is by far the cheapest conventional method of chlorinating a pool. If you want to argue that, argue it with Bob Lowry, who has actually written The Book on chlorine. He also wrote a booklet, Guide to Chlorine, about the different types of chlorine for Service Industry News many, many years ago. It’s on the Required Reading List for IPSSA membership and it’s the source of many of the questions on the IPSSA Water Chemistry Certification Test. In fact, that three book set that he wrote are where ALL of the questions for that test come from. So, if you want to say I’m wrong, then I’m wrong in some pretty good company. Wouldn’t you say?

Hence, it’s a foregone conclusion, ergo an accepted industry standard, that it doesn’t get any cheaper than using chlorine gas. And while the Pro-Salties will clamor that all you need for a salt system is a little salt when you fill it up and a little acid every once in a while, they always leave out that part about buying new salt cells every 2 to 4 years. Imagine how many thousands of dollars it would take to replace all of the salt cells on all of the pools at the Southland Leisure Centre every couple or so years. But that, as we shall see later, is the least of their worries.

The press release goes on to say “The reduction of hazardous materials is also better for the environment, and completely removes the chance of a dangerous chlorine leak.”

They didn’t mention how installing the salt system is really just a hazard trade-off. Salt systems introduce the chance of dangerous hydrogen gas explosions, like the one that occurred at the Fremantle Leisure Centre in January 1997, when there was a buildup of hydrogen gas and an explosion, an accident so significant that a 1997 accident report published by the Australian government cited it thus; “The most significant incident for the year occurred at the Fremantle Leisure Centre where a hydrogen gas explosion forced the evacuation of approximately 600 people from the premises during the busy summer holiday period.”

Here’s a link to the whole report.

and here’s a link to a follow-up safety announcement where they were still talking about it five years later.

Of course, the Pro-Salties will be clashing spears on shields again here, saying that I exaggerate the accidents that occur with exploding salt systems, although the internet is littered with reports and anecdotes of Salt Water Chlorine Generator explosions. But it’s alright for them to rave about “dangerous chlorine leaks” when it comes to chlorine gas.

Sure, that’s fair.

The other part of the statement that’s so bogus is about the reduction of hazardous materials being better for the environment. They made a big deal about this same thing in Calgary Transit System’s annual Envirosystem Report, where they touted the Leisure Center’s conversion to salt as this huge step forward in improving the air quality in all of Calgary. As if they were having chlorine gas leaks a mile a minute – or I guess it would be a kilometer a minute in Canada, eh? Here’s the report.

Click on Envirosystem Report 2004 and scroll down to pdf page 9, report page 7, and read, “Recreation eliminated chlorine gas for pool sanitation at the Southland Leisure Centre. The new disinfection system generates chlorine from salt. The salt eliminates the potential for a chlorine gas release on site and the hazards associated with exposure.”

Then scroll down to pdf page 13, report page 11 and see where they enumerate it again as one of their positive steps forward in eliminating the deadly hazards of chlorine gas emissions.

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My…

Then they turn right around, in the section of the report titled “Managing Our Impact – Water”, and talk about the potentially disastrous effects of road salt and how “ROADS partnered with Parks and Wastewater to build the 194th Avenue Roads Maintenance Depot to address Environment Canada’s requirement to reduce concentrations of chloride from road salt that could affect plants, aquifers and watersheds. The Depot uses facilities and practices to minimize wind erosion, run-off and leaching of road salt products. The site includes two large tent structures on an impermeable base, for storing road salt materials. A lined containment pond was constructed adjacent to the storage area to provide emergency containment in the event of a release. Ongoing environmental monitoring is conducted at the site. Parks reviewed the Biophysical Impact Assessment for the site and assisted with planting appropriate trees, shrubs and site vegetation. Wastewater assisted in the design and regulatory approvals of the runoff catchment features.”

You see, this salt stuff is so bad for the environment that they had to build a lined containment pond to protect against an accidental release of… Hey, wait a minute… They used those same words back in Air Quality to talk about the deadly threat of an accidental chlorine gas release. And they fixed the chlorine gas thing by replacing it with salt… Hmmm… It must just be something that only Canadian Civil Servants can understand. It must be so deep that I’m just not able to grasp it. Let me review all this stuff again…

Oh, here it is. I found it. Go back to the press release. This explains everything.

“Although the centre will use salt to sanitize the pool, the water itself will not technically be salt water.”

Well, that’s A Horse of a Different Color. Because then, when they need to dump their pools for routine maintenance, they won’t have to worry about dumping that water into a containment tank or anything. Since it’s not salt water, they’ll be able to dump it right on the ground.

Okay. So let’s give ‘em kudos. They're not as think as we dumb they are. A little smoke and mirrors and viola, they get environmental credit both ways. And after all, what’s more important? Saving the Environment? Or The Appearance of Saving the Environment?

Now. let’s fast forward two years and seven months, and this headline appears in the Calgary Herald; “City left with pool’s $2.6M tab”. Here’s the link.

The story starts off, “Council is being asked to approve $2.6 million in emergency funds to fix the wave pool at Southland Leisure Centre, after recreation officials discovered a switch to salt water has corroded the filtration systems.”

There’s one thing to correct here. It’s not the filtration systems that got screwed up by the salt. That’s just an indicator of the depth of knowledge that most reporters have about swimming pools. Whatever goes wrong, it’s the filter. Ask them to point out the filter on an equipment pad and 99 out of a 100 won’t get it right. More correctly, it’s the whole damn building that houses the indoor wave pool that’s corroding. You see, they foolishly made everything out of metal. They thought that it would be okay, though, because even though they were pouring salt into the pool, they weren’t actually using salt water. The 2004 press release said so. Because anybody with an ounce of sense would have known that the wave pool was going to agitate the water and aerate it and create a salt spray – hmmm… there’s a funny expression; Salt Spray. Where have I heard that used before? Oh, yes, I remember now; as in ocean waves crashing against the shore and creating a Salt Spray.

But since they weren’t using real salt water, they didn’t think about it. “ ‘What's happening is, in a wave pool situation -- which no one could have really anticipated -- the salt is going airborne as a result of the wave action,’ said Ron Krell, manager of Southland Leisure Centre. ‘We're getting a coating of salt in the leisure centre equipment.’”

“Which no one could have really anticipated…” That’s Civil Servant for, “It didn’t occur to us and the salesman never brought it up, so we spent your money to buy this overpriced albatross and now we want more of your money to fix the damage it has wrought.”

Because, pardon me for pointing it out, but anyone who’s walked on an ocean beach where there’s even the slightest wave action can tell you that when they finished their walk their lips tasted like salt, from – once again – the Salt Spray.

And that’s the part about journalism that blows me away, and I think it’s more than half the reason we perceive that journalists are in bed – in the figurative sense, of course – with the politicians and the bureaucrats they interview. Here’s this woman, Colette Derworiz, interviewing this guy, Ron Krell, and he makes this CYA statement “a wave pool situation -- which no one could have really anticipated -- the salt is going airborne as a result of the wave action,” and she just dutifully writes it in her notebook, without asking the obvious follow up, “Well, have you never been to the beach, Ron? Come on, fella. That’s a pretty lame defense against 2.6 million dollars in damages. Surely you’ve got something better for us than that.”

Or, she could have asked, “Didn’t your Salt Reps warn you about this? Didn’t they bring up the point about the salt spray? Had they never been to the beach, either?”

Or, she could have asked, “Is the Southland Leisure Centre’s wave pool the only one that’s been affected this way? Are there any other wave pools around the country or in the US suffering the same sort of damage?”

Or, she could have asked, “What is the Salt System manufacturers position on this? What do they have to say about their system causing 2.6 million dollars worth of damage in 2 years and seven months?”

But she didn’t.

So, Ron dodged all those bullets. But still, he had to go, hat in hand, to the City Council and ask for the 2.6 million beans to fix up the damage that the wholly unanticipated salt spray had caused in a little over two and a half years. Say it slow so you get the full effect; two million six hundred thousand dollars. Even in Canadian dollars, that’s a buttload of money. In fact, that’s $2,760.00 Canadian every day since they converted to salt.

Well, poop. There goes the all the money they saved converting to salt.

Back to Colette Derworiz’ report in the Calgary Herald:

“But the committee members refused to approve the expenditure, saying there wasn't enough information to make a decision. ‘This is a lot of money,’ Ald. Diane Colley-Urquhart told the committee.

Another alderman, Gord Lowe, said he wouldn't support the spending until council receives a detailed cost analysis, a full history of the conversion to salt water, a legal opinion on the issue and a report on whether the salt has damaged any other parts of the pool, including the cement.

‘I think there's a disease, and we're looking at a very big symptom here,’ he said…. According to Wednesday's report, the wave pool's system started corroding after the installation of a salt filtration system in November 2004.”

I bet you can guess my favorite part. It’s the “I think there’s a disease, and we’re looking at a very big symptom here”. Gee, that sounds like what I’ve been saying for a long time. And I’ve been called the vilest things by some of the biggest greedheads in our business for saying it.

But, it turns out that I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT I WAS RIGHT.

Did I mention that I was right?

So, there’s that.

Anyway, it turns out that the Calgary Council did finally agree to shell out the money to repair the salt damage to the wave pool and it’s enclosure. Here’s the link to that story.

Here’s how it went: “Council approved the repair Monday after receiving a detailed cost breakdown, a full history of the conversion and a closed-door update from the law department on any recourse for council to consider.”

Once again, I bet you can spot my favorite part. It was the “closed-door update from the law department on any recourse for council to consider”.

So, to recap, this is how it looks like it all went down, and let me say up front that this is speculation on my part. I’m filling in the blanks here. I tried to get a hold of Ron Krell, the Southland Leisure Centre manager, and find out how it all really went down, but, as they say in the newspapers, my “call was not immediately returned”. So, here goes.

A Salt Rep came along and told the folks in Calgary how great salt would be for their indoor pools. The Salt Rep said his company had tons of experience converting Leisure Centres just like theirs to salt all over the world. He probably didn’t mention the one in Fremantle that exploded. But like I said, I’m guessing.

They told them that it was going to be expensive up front because they needed lots and lots of commercial grade Salt Water Chlorine Generators to chlorinate that much water – the Wave Pool weighs in at one million liters, which is 264,000 gallons in the Lower Forty-Eight - but it would be worth it when the big bucks started rolling in from all the money they were going to save by not buying chlorine gas. I know it’s hard not to laugh at that part, but we must do our best.

Then, when corrosion started showing up, the Salt Reps probably tried to blame it on low stabilizer levels in the water, because that’s what they do every place else. But then, the janitor probably told them that when he wipes down the railings and such, he ends up with a salty residue on his rag and the light went off in everybody’s head at the same time. At least in the heads of all of those who had ever been to the beach and seen a real wave.

“It’s the salt!” they cried, and started casting about, searching for the Salt Rep, hoping to catch him and maybe drag him behind their trucks for a while. But he was nowhere to be found, since he was paid in full. And so they had a meeting to decide who was going to tell the Calgary City Council that they were going to have to spend an extra 2.6 million dollars on the Wave Pool this year, and Ron got the short straw.

Now, the City Fathers, seeing how badly Ron and his crew got screwed by this Salt Rep, are looking at their options to sue the crap out of him – or her, in that PC gender-neutral sort of way. I mean, it’s a cinch that the Salt Rep isn’t going to write them a check for the damages. And neither is the Salt System manufacturer. Because that would set a precedent, wouldn’t it?

Incidentally, there’s a picture of the Wave Pool at the Southland Leisure Centre. You can find it here.

Warning: It’s nearly a 10 meg pdf file and takes a while to load.

It’s the SP&S swimming pool supply catalog. The picture of the Wave Pool is on pdf page 48. You can see there’s lots of surfaces to corrode. It was provided to SP&S courtesy of the Southland Leisure Centre. I don’t know why the Wave Pool’s picture is in this catalog. Maybe Southland is one of SP&S’s customers… Do you think? No… Could it be?

Gosh, I don’t know. And it wouldn’t be fair to speculate on something that important.

Because whoever sold this salt system without thinking about the wave action and the salt spray is in for the skinning of a lifetime. $2.6 million dollars worth of a skinning. Not to mention the skinning still to come from all the other indoor wave pools they’ve probably put it on since they did this one.

I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I have to say it.

I TOLD YOU SO.

Another thing that would make this whole situation laughable if it weren’t so sad; Go here.

It’s on the same City of Calgary website that the Enviro report is on. It’s their Water Hardness FAQ’s. I’m going to cut and paste the second FAQ on the page:

“What are the health issues surrounding water hardness?

Health Canada has not established drinking water guidelines for hardness because there are no known health effects associated with calcium and magnesium minerals in drinking water. However, conventional softening systems (those which use salts) may not be suitable for people on sodium-restricted diets. It is recommended that consumers thoroughly research the various water softener systems available prior to deciding whether or not to soften their water. Water Softeners should be connected so that the water you are drinking is not softened.”

So, salt can be bad for your health. And salt is definitely bad for the environment, as evidenced by all the hoops they have to jump through just to keep a couple of piles of salt laying around for road de-icing. But it’s great for swimming pools!

Huh?

The real shocker is that even after the salt water in the Wave Pool has caused 2.6 million dollars of damage, as far as I can tell by the reports, they’re only going to take the salt system off the Wave Pool and leave it on all the rest of the City’s indoor and outdoor pools.

What’s that old saying? Screw me once, shame on the President… or something like that.

And then, just because I can’t say enough bad things about salt, here’s a delightful little gem of investigative/editorial news reporting:

The Ancaster News, in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada, reported this past Friday, June 29th, 2007 the following news item:

“It is likely that the city's Dundas indoor swimming pool (following the very questionable decision to convert the well established disinfection system installed in 1971, to a salt chlorine gnerator which requires a minimum sodium chloride level of 3,000 parts per million) is one of major polluters of the sanitary waste water plant.

Each backwash and water dumping of 20 litres per bather per day as required by provincial codes, not only wastes volumes of clean, filtered, heated, and chemically balanced water; this 'new' system also adds salts far in excess of the maximum levels for chlorides as set out in the City of Hamilton sewage discharge bylaws.
Guess who pays the by-law infraction charges if any are applied?

We are also advised that each of the four cells installed at the Dundas pool cost about $10,000 yearly to replace as well as the electricity to run them.

Backyard pool owners might also become suspects should they install one of the smaller chlorine generators. If it sounds too good to be true....”

This is a follow up to a story that ran the week before, titled “City cracking down on polluter: sewer boss”.

You can read about it here.

The city of Dundas has hired a dozen extra enforcement officers in the last year and a half to enforce the new bylaw limits for harmful volatile organic compounds enacted last August. In the June 22nd article, they talk about their efforts to get companies into compliance without shutting them down, how to work with them to achieve the goal of compliance while still allowing them to operate. It also points out that this approach doesn’t always work:

“In the past, compliance agreements have not always led to quick action. The city's lone such existing agreement, for instance, is for Stoney Creek's Taro dumps and has been in place since 1993.

When it was struck, then-owner Philip Services Corp. promised to build a pretreatment plant within 18 months -- predominantly to deal with high chloride levels…

The plant never materialized, Philip went bankrupt, and its successor negotiated a new deal in 2001 that prompted a review of the city's sewer bylaw.”

Then, the June 29th story points out that the municipal pool is designed to be out of compliance every time it backwashes it’s filters to be in compliance with public health ordinances.

And just like with the Southland wave pool damage, you have to go back and lay the blame at the feet of the company who sold these Salt System to these municipalities. They are ultimately responsible for the damages done and for the environmental laws violated. For them to say, “we didn’t know” is a sorry, sad, worn out excuse, and hardly of any consequence when computing damage claims.

Every week there's yet another story of how salt destroys everything it touches. And every week, the Salt Reps say, "Well, yeah, but that's it. But it's not our fault. We didn't know. Everything else is okay." Until the next story comes out and they say, "Well, yeah, but that's it. We didn't..."

When will we all stop letting them get away with saying, “We didn’t know”?

2007-06-24T08:35:00.000-07:00

Trying To Tighten The Hinges

I’ve added a link to the Honor Roll. It’s to the Trouble Free Pool forum. I don’t know too much about it yet, but a lot of the people who post, or posted, at the old Pool Forum post there, so that’s a good sign. And it’s open for new members, unlike the Pool Forum.

I came upon it while I was reviewing my site meter, to see how folks were getting to the blog. I saw a spike of referrals from a thread at TFP’s forum and followed it back to here

They were talking about my blog, and then my old nemesis, Lex Luthor – I mean, Sean Assam – started going on again, talking out of both sides of his mouth about how I’m just wrong about salt damage, but the good thing to come out of my blog “is better maintenance of your pool patio due to the ‘potential’ of damage from the salt.”

To be honest, I’m not shocked to see a salt rep holding two opposing thoughts in his head at the same time – the first being that I’m all wrong about salt damage to the pools in my care & the second being that there’s a definite risk to decks and coping from salt damage – but it is a bit unhinged to see those warring opinions advanced in the same paragraph.

He became even more animated and unhinged when I took the time to join the forum and introduce myself right here

It’s a neat thing that Sean B – the Site administrator and not to be confused with Pool Sean, the Salt Peddler – has provided for the Newbies to get over their first post jitters and give the Old Hands a chance to post a welcoming response. Which everybody did. Seven people responded to my post. Six of them cordially. And then there was Pool Sean…

“There is no logic to your blog entries, other than hatred to salt systems. I think it's because you have no one else to blame for these problems because everyone else you can blame (deck companies, plasters, stainless steel ladders and handrail manufacturerers [sic] ) have all denied responsibility?”

This guy is his own worst enemy, isn’t he? I mean, would you buy a salt system from a guy like this?

To take his rant one point at a time – the parenthetical part about me having no one to blame for the damage to pools – let’s start with decks. AutoPilot’s own Owner’s Manual finally admits that salt concentration due to evaporation can cause deck damage. Here’s the excerpt from page 11 of the Pool Pilot DIG-220 Owner’s Manual:

“CAUTION: Splash out water can leave a high salt concentration as the water evaporates. To prevent any potential salt damage, periodically hose off the deck, rails, and fixtures to dilute the salt concentration.”

And how did that little ditty wend it’s way into their literature? On 1/29/07 Sean Assam, in an e-mail to me about THIS blog post said, “Deck damage due to salt? I agree with Delzone in that simple maintenance of hosing down your patio weekly will prevent these types of issues and should be mentioned to the homeowners and pool dealers. As a result, I will be including such statements in our owner's manuals.”

And right there is where I get crazy with these guys. This is THEIR TECHNOLOGY. THEY INTRODUCED IT. Determining and describing incompatibilities and limitations and the maintenance procedures to mitigate them was their job from Day One.

But it took a pool cleaner from Dallas, Texas, who finally figured out after a few years of watching his customer’s pools disintegrate because of salt, to come along and badger and cajole and insult them into including what turns out to be some pretty goddamned important information into their Owner’s Manuals. What about all the years that they didn’t say anything to anybody? What about all the years they were selling these salt boxes and telling everybody that there was no down side; just soft water that was easy on the eyes. How do they get a free pass on all the damage that they now admit to having caused in the past?

Let’s take a for instance. Let’s say you bought a salt system for your pool before these guys began to admit that you might ought to hose down your hardscape just about every time you use the pool. And let’s say that you had a contemporary design with about $30,000 worth of perfectly milled limestone decks and coping. So, you missed that memo and didn’t know about the hosing down the decks part. And two years later, you’re stuck pulling off the salt system and redoing all that deck and coping.

Now, that nearly happened. I have a customer in Hghland Park, Texas who put tons of Leuter’s limestone decks and coping on his contemporary negative edge pool. I showed up two weeks after start up and the first thing I did was point out to him how the salt was already starting to eat away at the area where his kids normally get in and out of the pool. We pulled the salt system and drained and refilled and dodged that bullet.

So, that’s how a salt system that cost a couple hundred dollars to put together can cost you $30,000. And I’m the Bad Guy? And where do I get off with the idea that these things only cost a few hundred bucks to put together? Well, first, Intex sells a salt system that produces the same amount of chlorine as most of the salt systems out there designed for pools up to 25,000 gallons, and they sell it for $149.00 online at Cabela’s. And second, Sean Assam wrote to me later that same day, 1/29/07, and in response to this statement from me, “You guys have had it all your way for too long. You've all made a fortune off the misfortune of pool owners by not disclosing the whole story about salt and not giving them all the facts before they made their buying decision.” Sean said, “Damn them for being profitable! How dare they buy cheap Chinese products and sell them for a gazillion % margins! …Sorry for the sarcasm, but it's true.”

But getting back to Sean’s rant. Plasters. I don’t think I’ve ever said one word about plaster being adversely affected by salt. Have I? I could be wrong. But I don’t think I’ve published a single word calling out salt systems as causing plaster issues. If I have, somebody write to me and tell me and I’ll go back and amend that part of my blog. Really, I will.

There is of course, that one thing: The reason you wait 30 days, if you’re smart, to pour salt on new plaster. It’s because when you pour salt on new plaster, it does the same thing that a salt based water softener does; it exchanges calcium – a pretty important part of the plaster mix – with salt. A couple years later, you’ll be able to see where you poured that salt. And that’s why you wait thirty days until the plaster cures. By the way, this is something else that would have been GOOD TO KNOW WAY BACK WHEN THEY FIRST STARTED SELLING SALT SYSTEMS and is something else that I don’t see in any of the Owner’s Manuals.

Then there’s Sean’s snarky comment about ladder and rail manufacturers. Geez. Is there any segment of our industry that’s been more hard hit by this salt fiasco than the poor ladder and rail manufacturers? They’re usually the same ones who sell the diving boards and diving board stands. And they have taken a huge hit trying to stand warranty for all the damage that salt splash out has done to their equipment.

And all because the Salt Reps didn’t tell their builders and their retailers that they ought to caution their customers to upgrade to marine grade stainless steel ladders and rails and avoid diving boards in their design in places where they sell a salt system.

And they didn’t for one of two reasons. Either they didn’t know any better, and if that’s the case then shame on them, or they knew and didn’t want to admit it and narrow their market.

So, as always, I caution you: Don’t buy a salt system until you’ve looked at every issue that comes along with salt and you’re convinced that it won’t happen to your pool. AND Caveat Emptor on who you buy from, if-ya-know-what-I-mean…

Now, moving on to what I really wanted to talk about this week…

I found a pool with limestone coping and Pennsylvania blue decking that has significant deterioration, just like salt pools do, and it has never had a salt system. And so in the interest of fair play, I thought I ought to post the pics of that pool, too. You can click on any pic to enlarge.

Now, this first one shows the coping at the skimmer. You can see where, over time, the chloride level of the water, splashing and lapping up and saturating the stone, has caused crystallization expansion pressure to pop layers of the stone off, creating a flaking effect. And that’s just from the chloride build up that occurs from melting trichlor tabs and shocking the pool with cal hypo.

This next one shows a badly delaminated section of the flagstone deck close to the splash zone of the pool. Same story here. The pool water, heavily saturated with chloride, migrated to the seams in the flagstone and caused the roofjacking effect you see here.

This one shows a close up of the failed mastic joint. I wanted to show that so that folks out there who know pools will know that this pool is old. Really old. It takes more than a decade for mastic to dry out like that.

In fact, this pool’s coping and deck is over twenty years old. This pool is awaiting remodeling after the home is rebuilt.

So, this is your pool on tabs after twenty-plus years:

This is your pool on salt after two years:

And that’s always been my point about salt damage. Yes, it’s true that, given sufficient time, all chlorinated water will cause damage to stone. It’s just that in salt pools it happens in about two years. In non-salt pools, it takes just forever for it to start showing up. The reason? On salt pools, you start with 3500 ppm sodium chloride. On tab pools, you start with something below the 250 ppm mandated by the EPA as below the level of taste - because you normally fill your pool with drinking water - and build from there, draining and refilling as calcium levels and stabilizer levels dictate.

As you can see by the photos, the tab pool’s limestone coping looks better after twenty plus years than the salt pool’s does in two.

So, who’s got your back? Me? Or your friendly, neighborhood Salt Rep? Because I can promise you two things right now about tomorrow:

#1. The Sun will rise in the East and set in the West... That's right, isn't it?

B. The Salt Reps will still be selling the tired old pitch that non-salt pool’s coping and decks suffer chloride damage just like salt pools do. They will, of course, leave out the part about it taking twenty plus years instead of two.

2007-06-17T08:57:00.000-07:00

How Low Can You Go?

I thought that I had nailed it two weeks ago with the report that Wal Mart was selling chlorine generators for $186.00, and E-Bay had them for $199.00. The reason I figured I’d nailed it is because Leslie’s, pretty much the low price leader around these parts, is running a special right now. They’re selling a chlorine generator for $1,100.00 and they’re throwing in the installation for free.

Now, the difference is that this $186.00 Intex system is only for above ground pools. It has no electrical bonding and it relies on the homeowner to do everything exactly right when installing it and using it; don’t use extension cords, only plug into GFCI protected outlets, never use the pool while the unit is operating. That last one is a biggie to me and more than a little bit scary.

BUT it produces an amazing amount of chlorine. Its output, at 24 grams per hour, matches or exceeds just about anything you might be selling right now for permanent in ground pools.

I mean, this is a cost savings of 83% on the acquisition price of that Leslie’s system. The funniest thing is, Leslie's sells Intex above ground pools. They're helping the company that's cutting their throat on salt systems to be successful by shilling their pools.

Another glaring example of this price disparity; one of my customers with a Zodiac LM2-24 spent more than twice that much this week over the phone with Zodiac just to buy a replacement cell UNDER WARRANTY. Her nearly three year old cell went south and Zodiac is nicking her for “66% of the current list price”.

An Intex replacement cell is $99.00 at the Intex website.

http://www.intexcorp.com/store/ProductList.aspx?categoryID=22

Now, I’ve ranted about this closed loop warranty deal in previous blog entries:

http://thepoolbiz.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html

Read the Circle Game for the full story, but it goes something like this: You sell a salt system. If you’re stuck competing with a nationwide chain like Leslie’s, you’re selling it for $1,100.00, installed. Now, subtract your labor, parts, PVC glue, mileage, etc. and you’re lucky to clear $250.00. That’s $250.00 net on a rather sizeable investment in material. Because we all know how much WE pay for salt systems.

But, in three to five years when that salt cell fails, Cha-Ching, right? You get to sell another cell. That’s the payoff you’re waiting for, right?

Well, forget it. The folks at Zodiac will not only sell your customer a salt cell under warranty right up until the end of the third year, but the 1-800 tech told my customer that after the warranty expired HE’D SELL HER ONE FOR THE CURRENT LIST PRICE.

Now, go check your price on a replacement cell. It’s about 20% less than the current list price. And it’s most likely a special order, which means that your customer can get it from Zodiac faster than you can get it from distribution. And the reason it’s a special order is because the customer’s are buying replacement cells directly from the manufacturers.

Whatever happened to the idea of manufacturers not competing with distribution and the retail stores and the service providers? When did we all start giving them a pass on that? Why do we all keep selling their stuff when they so blatantly cut us out of the deal? Why do the major distributors sit still for being bypassed like this?

And to be honest with you, I wouldn’t mind all of this – I don’t sell salt systems anyway – if the manufacturers would step up and assume responsibility for all the damage that salt’s doing to the pools. But except for Goldline’s letter:

http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/wfaa/latestnews/stories/wfaa070511_lj_pools.5c53d476.html

where they made the startling admission that stone deterioration has been going on “since the dawn of time” - yeah, yeah. And water made the Grand Canyon, too. So what’s that got to do with salt damage to pools? – Except for that, no one on the money-making end of this deal has done anything but watch their stock go up.

To review: You find the customer. You sell them on the idea of converting their pool to salt. You install the salt system. You make $250.00. You invest that $250.00 in a high yield instrument so you’ll have the money when they call back three years later saying their coping has all dissolved into the pool and it’s your fault and you better fix it and oh, by the way, they just bought a new salt cell from the manufacturer over the phone and it was so easy they just charged it to their credit card and another oh, by the way, they told all their friends how you ruined their pool.

Oh… So that’s why your phone stopped ringing…

But it get’s worse. In the not too distant future, all these people you sold salt systems to are going to start telling all their friends how you screwed them like stump-tied sheep because, Honest-to-God, Cabella’s has that Intex salt system for $144.99…

http://www.cabelas.com/prod-1/0030731017455a.shtml

…and it produces exactly the same amount of chlorine as just nearly every salt system that you can buy right now for $1,100.00, installation included. So, why, oh , why, oh, why do salt systems for in ground pools cost 83% more than that?

Because somebody – not you – is making a ton of money. For now. And when the Gravy Train stops, it’s your reputation that’ll take the hit for all the coping and decks and heaters and ladders and rails and light niches that got ruined when you installed $1,100.00, $1,200.00, $1,500.00, $2,000.00 salt systems. Remember those prices? I do. It’s like it was just yesterday… Wait a minute. It was yesterday. And what about tomorrow? $400.00. You heard it here first. You will see $400.00 salt systems for in-ground pools within the next two years. It’s called Keeping Up With The Jones’, or The Cabela’s, as the case may be.

There is a selective quality to the screwing you’re taking, though. Think about this for a minute. A salt system pretty much has four components; power supply, control board, flow switch and salt cell. The power supply, control board and flow switch aren’t modular. They require someone who’s been to the school, or worked on pool equipment for a while, to get in and replace them without making the problem worse. And the flow switches usually require basic plumbing skills. But the cell, which is where all the profit is centered, is usually modular; union connections and an easily accessible plug that even a homeowner can handle.

So, here’s the scenario. The homeowner calls the 1-800 tech and says, “I don’t think my salt system is making chlorine”. The tech has the homeowner push a few buttons, check a few indicators and then tells them, “you have a bad cell”, and then sells them a new one, bypassing you and distribution.

Try that with a Lo NOX heater. “Oh, yeah, it sounds like you have a failed flame sensor and a faulty keypad. I’ll overnight the parts to you.”

You see, they still need you for that, and so they make sure distribution has those parts available and they tour the country teaching you how to fix that stuff and they even sell the parts with room left for you to mark them up so that you can do all that crazy rich guy stuff like feed your family and pay your mortgage.

But when it comes to that Plug And Play salt cell, all that profit is for them.

So, tell me again. How is salt such a good deal for you and me and the consumer? In the final analysis, the only winner is the manufacturer, as long as they can continue to dodge the liability of salt damage to swimming pools, and as long as you keep letting them screw you on the salt systems while you fix their heaters and pumps and filters.

I know. I know. What can you do about it?

Well, for starters, you can quit shilling for these guys and start holding their feet to the fire. Next time you’re at one of your association meetings, ask the manufacturer’s rep in the room – after all, they’re always there – why you’re good enough to fix their heaters but not good enough to profit on their salt cell replacements.

Or, the next time you read a three page advertising spread dressed up as an “information article” in one of your trade magazines, go to the computer and fire off a Letter to the Editor about how they missed pointing out The Down Sides of Salt Pools.

A perfect example is the May 31st edition of Service Industry News. Most of that edition is dedicated to a review of alternatives to traditional chlorine. On page 7, they say that the “articles will look at each of the alternative systems’ advantages and disadvantages from a service professional’s perspective”. Then, the first, and longest, and most prominent article is about - you guessed it - salt chlorine generators. And the article reads like a marketing brochure. They talk about how 2,700 to 3,400 ppm salt is “a mild saline solution so low that it is almost impossible to taste”.

Then, to make that sound like it’s even less than it is they use the big scary sea water salinity number – normally quoted as 35,000 but amplified to 40,000 ppm for this article – even though the EPA level of taste has been established at 250 ppm.

Listen, whenever someone compares salt pool water to sea water, or to the salinity of a tear, you’re being marketed. You’re no longer having a technical discussion about salt systems. You’re listening to a sales pitch.

The article goes on for two pages and doesn’t address a single one of the down sides that we see on a daily basis with salt pools. There’s not a word of caution about any of the issues that have been emerging with salt pools across the country. And the strangest thing; nobody wrote this article. There’s not a byline anywhere in sight.

And this is the Service Industry News!

But if you go to page 20 of the very same issue, in the Show & Tell section, you’ll see the article introducing “Two new anti-electrolysis zinc anodes by Pool Tool”.

They go on to say that service “professionals experiencing problems with plaster discoloration or metal erosion in salt water pools should look into two new devices from Pool Tool of Ventura, Calif.”

I mentioned those zinc anodes and linked to the Pooltoolco website here:

http://thepoolbiz.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html

in the blog entry titled “Stray Currents Are Still Dissolving Your Salt Water Swimming Pool, Part 3”.

So, which is it? Either staining of plaster and metal erosion is a disadvantage and should have been included in the “information article” on salt systems, or it really isn’t an issue and so why would they print info about anti-electrolysis zinc anodes?

And all these guys will continue to get away with this stuff as long as you sit there quietly and read this blog and then go back to business as usual Monday morning. The only people who can make our industry and our manufacturers more accountable for straight information are us.

Which reminds me; weren’t the Group of Seven salt system manufacturers supposed to be releasing their research about the down sides of salt systems this year? The year’s more than half over and not a hint of info has been forthcoming.

Hmmm… I guess they’re not done making money yet.

And you thought I was talking about prices when I asked, How Low Can You Go?

2007-06-04T15:48:00.000-07:00

The Wal-Mart Effect

According to Word Spy - a web site devoted to lexpionage, the sleuthing of new words and phrases - the term Wal-Mart effect is defined as follows;

Wal-Mart effect n. The economic effects attributable to the Wal-Mart retail chain, including local effects such as forcing smaller competitors out of business and driving down wages, and broader effects such as helping to keep inflation low and productivity high. Also: WalMart effect.

I’ve always felt rather immune to it, myself. That, and those other things in this day and age that seem to go hand in hand with it. Like the time that AOL sent someone to my house to troubleshoot a DSL download speed problem. We got to talking and it turned out he had a degree in software engineering and his job had been offshored - once again, back to Word Spy:

offshorable (awf.SHOR.uh.bul) adj. Capable of being moved to another country, especially to reduce costs; capable of being performed by a person in another country, especially at a lower wage or salary.—offshore v.—offshoring pp.

- and he had been reduced to $20 service calls, using his own vehicle and gas, to fix people’s AOL problems.

Being a Pool Guy has always made me feel immune to all of that. I still sympathize with folks who get stuck in those crunches - like losing your job to an Indian guy who makes $3,500 a year for doing what you were charging $100,000 - but I don’t see them figuring out a way to offshore pool cleaning. Yet. And until filters and pumps and heaters are plug and play devices, I’m safe.

I hear guys all the time complaining about the Mass Marketers hurting their business, about Home Depot cutting into their chemical sales, about Sam’s Club having tablets cheaper than their wholesale distributors, about The Internet selling stuff cheaper than they can buy it. Their argument is that people want bargains, and that they can’t compete with that.

My answer has always been not to compete. If a customer says to me, "I can get that filter for five hundred dollars less at the IMA POOLWHORE Internet Pool Store", I say, "Be my guest!" and move on.

They are obviously not in my market. Because if they were in my market, they would be My Customer, and they would trust that the price I was quoting them was fair, based on a fair mark up and a fair price for installation labor, and the fact that I’ll be there - probably the same day - if anything goes wrong. They wouldn’t be looking at some low ball price on the internet and wondering if they could beat me up with it.

You see, I’m their Service Provider, and that’s really what I’m selling and that’s really what they’re buying. And the smart ones know that. And the not-so-smart ones find themselves looking for a new Pool Guy.

So, how does all of this relate to the Wal Mar effect? Like this:

I’ll still be here when salt systems are nothing more than a bad memory. Because I’m the constant in this business. Me and the guys like me; the Service Providers. And the reason I’ll still be here is because I provide the service to the End User; the Pool Owner. And currently, part of that service includes a stiff warning to my customers not to waste their money on a salt system, for all the reasons I’ve spent the last nine months writing about.

Because you knew that some day this had to happen, when there was enough money in that salt system market, Wal Mart would throw their hat into that big, fat, profit bloated ring, like this:

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=5601479

Introducing the new Intex Heavy Duty Saltwater Pool Filter System for $186.00. It includes the electronics, the salt cell and a flow switch. Here’s what they say in the product description:

"This saltwater system easily connects to most above ground pool filters and sets up in five minutes or less. Just add an undetectable amount of pure, natural salt to your pool water and set the automatic timer to get fresh, clean water using no packaged chemicals. Since this pool filter doesn't use chlorine, it is an attractive and environmentally responsible product."

How many lies did you count? I counted four. As you can see, they are hewing close to the marketing path blazed by their salt system predecessors.

My favorite lie is "since this pool filter doesn’t use chlorine..." That’s how little Wal Mart knows about a device whose byproducts include explosive hydrogen gas. It’s a pool filter that doesn’t use chlorine. The salt business has become even more dangerous.

You know, there’s a warning in the owner’s manual on page two that reads, "Do not operate this product when pool is occupied". I assume the reason is because the system isn’t bonded and it doesn’t even have a GFCI built into the plug, like my wife’s hair dryer does - which we bought at Target, by the way. It bridges a couple of amps (2.5, to be exact) through the water with only a glancing nod to electrical safety, by warning not to use extension cords and only plugging it into a GFCI receptacle.

Yeah, that’ll happen. A guy will spend $186.00 for a salt system and then how many hundred more for an electrician to come out and install a code compliant GFCI outlet within reach of the unit’s power cord so he doesn’t have to use an extension. Sure. And I’m sure they’ll always remember to turn the system off every time the kids want to jump into the pool.

But it’s okay because in bold print they’ve added, "FAILURE TO FOLLOW THESE WARNINGS MAY RESULT IN PROPERTY DAMAGE, ELECTRICAL SHOCK, ENTANGLEMENT, OR OTHER SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH." So, you see, if anything happens, it’s okay, because they put in on page two of the owner’s manual, and everybody reads page two of the owner’s manual.

I mean, what do you want? Low prices or safety? Give a Wal-Mart High Five! Slap, Slap!

BUT, when you compare this thing’s performance side by side to say, the Jandy AquaPure 1400, it produces the exact same amount of chlorine. The Intex owner’s manual claims 24 grams per hour maximum chlorine output, and the Jandy AquaPure 1400 tech manual claims 567 grams in 24 hours, or 23.63 grams per hour. Zodiac’s LM2-24 is the same. Their LM2-40 is higher, up to 40 grams per hour, but it’s Duo Clear is lower, only 15 grams per hour. The Intellichlor IC 20 is lowest, at 13.2 grams per hour, and their IC 40 is highest at 26.45 grams per hour. I couldn’t find Goldline’s output in their tech manual, and all the rest of the in-line salt systems have such a small segment of the market that I could really care less.

Of course, all these fat rich guys selling these brand name salt systems will crow about how Intex is producing that higher level at the cost of burning out their cells all that much faster. Intex has an answer for that, too:

http://www.intexcorp.com/store/ProductList.aspx?categoryID=22

Replacement electrolytic cells for $119.00, as opposed to somewhere around $450 at one of the rock bottom pool whore websites, and as much as $800 retail - which, if you’re paying attention, is enough to buy four Intex systems and have enough left over to take the kids to Chuck E. Cheese.

So, hey! All you Salt Peddlers. Time to get a new gadget. Maybe you can dust off ionizers, or buy the rights to the old Laars corona discharge ozonator. Or maybe you could start pouring liquid copper in the pools again, and call it an alternative-sanitizer-never-mind-the-stains.

But you really ought to listen to me on this one. At this point, the only people left selling salt to their customers are in it for the money, and once that "money" gets under fifty bucks a unit, even they won’t stick around.

It doesn’t matter much to me what you do. I’ll still be here, watching over my pools, keeping you guys and your next gadget out of my backyards.

Oh, and one more thing... Bu-bye.