It's Still The Environment, Stupid, Part II

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Worm Has Turned

That phrase has an interesting derivation. It comes from an old proverb that says tread on a worm and it will turn. It means "even the most humble will strike back if abused enough". These days, the expression the worm has turned is often used in the broad sense "the situation has changed" - a tip of the hat to randomhouse.com’s Word Maven, a delightful source of insight into words and phrases.

So which of those definitions is most apt for this blog piece?

Here’s a news story and a snippet of video that you ought to watch. Click on the links. The first one is the print story. The second is the video report. Then come back and we’ll talk more about how the worm has turned.

http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/wfaa/latestnews/stories/wfaa070511_lj_pools.5c53d476.html

http://www.wfaa.com/video/wfaageneral-index.html?nvid=143354

WFAA, the ABC affiliate that did this news story, is a part of the Belo media empire.

http://www.belo.com/companies/

They own twenty-five news companies, their flagship being the Dallas Morning News, winner of eight Pulitzer Prizes and honored as one of the top five newspapers in the United States by the Columbia Journalism Review. WFAA Channel 8 is the broadcast companion to the Dallas Morning News. They are both considered conservative and reserved, not given to flights of fancy, not a news organization prone to sensationalism - except perhaps a little when they promo the weather... "Armageddon by nightfall? Details at 6." But they all do that. Weather, I guess, is fair game. But it is fair to say about Channel 8 WFAA that If It Bleeds, It Probably Won’t Lead.

And I think it’s fair to say that the story you just read and watched when you clicked on the links (you did click on the link and go see those pieces, didn’t you?) is a news piece done by a news organization with some pretty impeccable news credentials. And the guy who did the story, David Schechter, brings some pretty stiff credentials along with him, having won the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award and the National Headliner Grand Award, not to mention 13 regional Emmy awards as a reporter in Minneapolis.

It’s safe to say that these are not people prone to sticking microphones in people’s faces who are dashing to their car with their hands over their faces. Though I must admit, I was hoping for a bit of that. I confess, I had visions of Salt Reps wailing "no comment!" and reaching out to swat the camera away. But you can’t have everything, can you?

They interviewed a total of five people for the video segment, and four of them didn’t have anything good to say about salt. Although the one person they had who was pro salt brought some pretty hefty credentials to the table. Bob Tomlinson is the National Vice President for APSP Region Three. And as you saw, he stated unequivocally that, "I don't believe the corrosion we've heard about in the past is a valid issue. And I do greatly await the results of the test being done."

When I heard that, I couldn’t believe that such a knowledgeable and experienced pool builder could have gone these last four or five years without seeing any of the hundreds of rusted diving board stands that only seem to pop up on salt pools and then say, "I don't believe the corrosion we've heard about in the past is a valid issue". I mean, I admit, I’ve met knowledgeable people in our industry who have drunk the kool-aid on the damage to stone being a water chemistry issue and not salt, and even though I think that’s the most head-in-the-sand attitude you could take on the issue, how can anyone with even a passing knowledge of the mechanisms of corrosion deny what salt is doing to diving board stands and ladders and handrails?

But the main problem with Bob’s comments are that they fly in the face of the press release that Goldline gave to WFAA in response to their request for a comment on salt damage to pools. If you take a hard look at that two page liability dodge... I mean, press release... you come away from reading it saying to yourself, "did they just say that salt damages stone? They did just say that salt damages stone, didn’t they? I mean, they did just release a document TO THE PUBLIC, addressed to "Dear Pool Owner", that says "Natural stone can be broken down, dissolved or converted to new minerals by a variety of mechanical and chemical processes. Mechanical processes include frost action, thermal expansion, wetting, drying and salt decay." ‘ [emphasis mine].

So, Bob’s wrong. You can erase his segment. The people he was trying to stand up for just left him hanging out there, flapping in the breeze, all by himself, the Last of the Mohicans, the last member of the I Didn’t Get That Memo club.

I guess Goldine got those test results that Bob was "greatly awaiting" and forgot to tell him that they were releasing a letter to a TV news guy that says pretty much without a doubt there’s more than a grain of truth to the growing opinion that salt systems aren’t right for every pool. They go so far as to WARN THE PUBLIC THAT, "If you have purchased, or are considering purchasing, an electronic chlorine generator for installation with an existing pool or spa with a natural stone surround, you should consult with a qualified stone installation specialist or pool installation contractor in your area to determine what, if any, on-going maintenance will be advised to minimize or avoid unsatisfactory weathering of the stone around your pool or spa."

And right there, they did two things: They admitted that salt ruins certain types of stone. And they said it wasn’t their fault. The date of the letter is May 2nd, 2007. So, anybody who has salt issues that occurred before that date, call your salt system manufacturer. Anybody with issues after that date, call the person who sold you the salt system.

Because if you all can’t see it coming, then let me explain to you what phase of this catastrophe we’re in: Damage Control.

Goldline is the first to jump out with a dated document, available on line, that says, in the most innocuous way possible, that salt will damage stone. Having said that, they’re off the hook if you don’t disclose that to a customer when you sell them a salt system. So, in ten months, when that lady with all the Oklahoma flagstone waterfalls calls you up and says that her pool is full of brown dust, the financial solution to the problem will rest on your shoulders, and not the manufacturers.

And that’s really a big deal. The burden of liability just shifted from the manufacturer to the builders and installers. That is a Truly Seismic Event.

But what everybody’s going to remember about this blog piece isn’t that. What they’re going to remember is; That Rotten S.O.B. The Pool Guy just threw Old Bob under the bus.

I admit, it gives me pause. It makes me ponder whether I should go back and edit that out of this piece before I post it to the blog. But it’s not my fault that what Bob said isn’t true. And it’s not my fault that Goldline published a letter that disputed what he said even as he was saying it. And I know he's the President of a very well respected pool building firm, and that's exactly why I feel compelled to dispute what he says as vigorously as I can. Because what he says carries a lot of weight. Even when he's wrong. Like now. Because MOST BUILDERS IN TEXAS aren't as wholeheartedly behind salt as Bob is. Channel 8 had to go all the way to Houston, Texas - that's a distance of 240 miles for those of you not used to how big the Great State of Texas is - to find a pro-salt voice.

Where were the Salt Reps? A ton of them live right here in Dallas - Fort Worth. Why weren't they on camera saying that all this talk of salt damage is just a bunch of hooey. You think they weren't asked? They declined.

Here's a more typical example of Texas Pool Builder's opinion on salt. I was talking to a new pool owner last weekend who got a bid from Riverbend Sandler, the biggest pool builder in Texas, about six months ago. At that juncture, they wouldn’t even talk to him about a salt system. I’ve heard they have since resumed salt sales, but with a waiver. It's the same kind of waiver that Phil McEwan, the builder quoted in the WFAA piece, requires. Just like so many builders do these days.

If you go back to the WFAA print story and click on "Have you had a problem with your salt water pool? View Results", there’s a comment that was left by a fellow who says he’s a twenty year service and repair veteran, and he sums it up better than I ever could:

"We are now being asked by a manufacturer to put zinc balls in our pump baskets to deflect the damage away from the other metals in the equipment. We are now being approached by salesman pushing stone sealers. Heater manufacturers are changing their heat exchanger material (they need to figure a way to put thermistors in dry wells). Builders are asking homeowners to sign damage waivers before they will sell/install a salt system. What? There is not an issue with these systems?"

So, when you tell a friend to go look at this blog piece because, hey, The Pool Guy just threw Bob Tomlinson under the bus, remember to add that, oh yeah, and by the way, Goldline just dumped the liability for these salt systems in our lap.

When I heard that this news report about salt pools was coming on, I hoped that it would be the beginning of The Worm Turning in the old proverb sense that even the most humble will strike back if abused enough. But all things considered, with this letter from Goldline, it's more just that the situation has changed, and we've all been put on notice who is going to pick up the tab for all this.

We are.

Brothers and Sisters, The Worm Has Just Turned.