It’s been an interesting couple of weeks. I have talked to a lot of people who are very knowledgeable about pools and pool water chemistry and salt systems in particular, and I have learned a lot. And I have come to a conclusion.
I was right. Salt sucks. It is an environmental hazard if used on a grand scale and it has no place in a swimming pool. To tinker with an old saying, “a man needs a salt pool like a fish needs a bicycle”.
I have had a tiny nagging worry, since I started this blog, that perhaps it was just me. Me and a handful of other pool guys I know who were just not doing something right with our pools. Maybe we were somehow not up to the task of this new salt technology. Even with all the evidence I was seeing on my pools, on other guys’s pools, on pools that I would go to that were being maintained by the owner, even with all that, maybe it was just us and something we were doing wrong.
And then I found that my worst fear was true. It was something we were doing wrong. We were putting salt into our pools.
We were pouring a known corrosive into our pools and then standing there, scratching our heads like a bunch of great, fat idiots, wondering why everything was corroding.
Duh.
Kudos this week to Pool & Spa News. There’s a great article in the latest issue titled “Questions Arise About Salt Chlorine Generators” by Rebecca Robledo. Turns out it’s not just Texas that’s having the problem. She quotes Buzz Ghiz, president of Paddock Pools in Scottsdale, Arizona. He says that over the last three to five years they’ve been having problems with damage to coping, decking, rock waterfalls and some of their equipment. After researching it, they found the common thread was salt chlorinators.
Gosh. I’m stunned. What a coincidence. That sounds exactly like what’s happening here, where the water is vastly different. Their water is hard. Ours is soft. Oh, and so much for all those guys out there who blame it on “that cheap sandstone you use in Texas”.
As much as I’m glad that Pool & Spa News is shining a light on this issue, there was one thing I didn’t like about Rebecca’s article. It was objective.
That’s the problem with journalism. You have to air both sides of the issue. And that’s what I love about blogging. I don’t have to accurately report both camp’s positions. I don’t have to be objective.
You see, it’s the built in blind spot of objectivity that helps these guys get away with this crap. Objectivity provides safe harbor to those who feign surprise or outrage when one of us points out that the Emperor Has No Clothes, and allows them to pretend to be unjustly accused and if we’ll just give them a little time, but don’t stop buying their products, they’ll “get to the bottom of things”.
The article points out that Paddock had to pay out of profit to repair the problems. Just like the Big Texas Builder I talked about a while ago. And the common thread in the path of this damage was always salt systems. And there’s a ton of references all over the place confirming the fact that when salt water seeps into stone, the water evaporates, the salt residue stays behind, begins to crystalize, exerts crystallization expansion pressure on the stone and explodes it from within. Period. That’s what the science guys say happens. They did it in labs. Over and over and over again. In studies going all the way back to the 1960's.
But when objectively reporting this phenomena, the article has to say, “Some builders theorize...”.
It’s not a theory. It’s a fact. But the idea that it’s a theory provides a gateway to the manufacturers side of the story, which I realize that Pool & Spa News has to present, no matter how thin the manufacturer’s charade is.
And, you see, that’s what journalists do. They present both sides. It’s their job, and they wouldn’t be doing a good job if they didn’t present both sides. Like I said, that’s why I love blogging.
The manufacturer’s side of all this is; Gosh, this “is just as new for us as it is for the [builders]”. That isn’t true. I’m sure Paddock Pools wasn’t holding back their findings over the last 3 to 5 years as some big trade secret. Wouldn’t you think that they might have brought it up to their salt Rep when they first began to make the connection? The simple truth is, most of the folks who have been seeing these problems have been hammering the Reps for years to explain why this stuff is happening. And they have been stonewalling.
They also say that “it’s a complex issue” with “geographical, environmental conditions, source water, certainly the salt from chlorine generators as well as other pool chemicals, then regional differences in the materials being used in coping...” Which is also a load of manure because you can’t get much different than the water in Scottsdale AZ and Dallas, TX. Not to mention that we didn’t have these issues until we added salt to our pools. It’s not at all complex. Don’t add salt to your pool and one hundred thousand year old limestone won’t dissolve in two years. They didn’t just make that limestone yesterday, you know. It isn’t some new substance we discovered about the same time we started pouring salt into pools.
They conclude by saying - and this is my personal favorite pass the buck, see no evil, hear no evil, the emperor really isn’t naked quote - “it’s way too early to start making determinations on what the issue is yet.”
Which is Sales & Marketing for “Oh, please don’t interrupt our gravy train. We’re not near done making money off this dog of a product yet, and God forbid we should say anything that might admit a shred of liability here, so let’s not all jump to the same wild-ass conclusion that all those scientists have been for the last fifty years”.
The issue is; salt damages stone and concrete and it’s been verified, common knowledge for half a century. But it’s way too early to make that determination? Well, I guess if the chance of being expected to pay for the damages was beginning to loom large, I could see where it would be way too early for them to determine much of anything.
The final piece of the smoke screen is that a group of seven salt system manufacturers are going to “spend the next few months compiling information from existing studies. They will also seek data from the pool industry in Australia”. Now this is where I really respect the objectivity of the folks at Pool & Spa News, for not being seized by uncontrollable fits of laughter and dropping the phone when the industry guy told them that. It is hilarious because one of the biggest salt system manufacturers in this country, and I’m sure must have been one of the seven, comes from Australia. They got their money to launch their system over here by selling a buttload of them over there first. So, what? Did they lose their notes?
Well, seeing as how they’re having so much trouble getting an open phone line Down Under, I decided to reach out and see what I could find.
http://www.urbanstone.com.au/technical/saltattack.cfm
That’s a link to a concrete paving company in Australia. As paving companies go, they’re no small change. They did $27.5 million (US) in 2004. So, they probably know a bit about paving. They have a whole page on their website devoted to the subject they refer to as salt attack, where they say; “When concrete is repeatedly wetted by a salt water solution, with alternate periods of drying during which pure water evaporates, some of the salts dissolved in the salt water solution are left behind in the form of crystals, (mainly sulfates) in the concrete pores and surface of the concrete unit. These crystals re-hydrate and grow upon subsequent wetting, and thereby exert an expansive force on the surrounding hardened cement paste within the concrete unit when this growth occurs. This expansive force is greatly amplified by the ability of the salt crystal to grow rapidly to many many times its original crystal dimension upon wetting. This rapid growth causes the concrete paste surrounding the crystal to "burst", exposing the aggregate in the concrete masonry unit. Such progressive surface weathering, commonly known as salt attack, occurs in particular when the ambient temperature is high and insolation is strong so that drying occurs rapidly in the pores of the concrete over some depth from the concrete paving surface. Thus, intermittently wetted surfaces are vulnerable, as are areas of paving around a salt water swimming pool particularly in the splash zone.” (Italics mine)
Sound familiar? Didn’t I just say something exactly like... ah, never mind.
The one thing that surprised me about what they have to say is that salt attack occurs in particular when the ambient temperature is high. So, we have the unique and destructive freeze/thaw characteristics of salt water in the winter, and the unique and destructive characteristics associated with rapid evaporation in the summer.
Can somebody please say something good about salt in a pool? I mean, it can’t be all bad, can it?
Oh, yeah. I forgot. You can open your eyes under water in a salt pool. Oh, well, that makes all the difference in the world. Forget everything I said. Never Mind!
I got that link to Urban Stone from David at the Pool Industry Secrets Forum. The link to his forum is in my Christmas post. We’ve been e-mailing a lot these last two weeks. He’s taught me a lot about the Australian market.
For example: He said you’d have to be daft to put a salt system on a copper plumbed pool. His exact words were, “...metallic pipe after the chlorinator is not suited. All [salt] chlorinators produce some stray currents and this stray current is most likely the issue. It can lase through the pipe in no time flat.” Lase through. Thats one of those cool Australian expressions, I bet. Like G’Day.
That Stray Currents thing, too. He calls it Stray Currents. I call it Galvanic Corrosion. I say toe-may-toe, he says toe-mah-toe.
In another conversation he said, “As for metallic pipe. Simple answer is I have never and would never ever consider fitting a salt chlorinator where any metal pipe is used. The reps are being very slack on this point and they should be canned for this.”
I explained to him that reps don’t get canned for that. They get promoted for not bringing up pesky details like this that might narrow the market. I explained to him that I work in the only industry I can think of where we don't expect any type of technical expertise from the salesmen who sell to the builders and service companies. If a high school kid at Best Buy showed half as much inability to help us with a problem with an inkjet printer as our sales reps have shown about the issues we’re having with salt systems, we'd walk out the door and over to Circuit City.
But let’s just go to the installation guidelines for EVERY SALT SYSTEM SOLD IN THE UNITED STATES and look for that warning about metal pipes. Hmmm... I don’t seem to be able to find that any where. Do you think that on that long plane ride from Australia, that sheet fell out of the salt system manufacturers installation instructions? That must be it. But I’m sure that when our very own G7 get that trunk call through to Australia, they’ll find it and put it back where it belongs. Better late than never, eh?
I found out, too that the majority of residential pools in Australia don’t have gas fired heaters. The majority use solar heat and a few use heat pumps with cupro nickel coils. Why cupro nickel? Because it’s more corrosion resistant than copper. Which kind of means that all those pools out there with copper heat exchangers are at risk. No? Don’t believe me? Would you believe it if you heard it from a major salt system manufacturer?
I have a Hayward H-Series Pool & Spa Heaters brochure that I picked up at the supplier just two weeks ago. And I quote; “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.”
Oops. Did they just infer that copper wasn’t up to the job of handling the corrosion dished out by salt? Doesn’t Hayward own Goldline? Hmm... Think there’s a connection in why they used to use copper and now use cupro nickel?
Could that be why salt’s been such a smashing success in Australia? Because they don’t have too much copper to worry about?
Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention. Salt’s not allowed on commercial pools in Australia. Period.
So, the next time your salt system Rep says “It can’t be salt that’s doing the damage. If it was salt, then why is 90% of the market in Australia salt?” I swear I’ve been handed that horse... I mean baloney, when I’ve posed questions about salt’s down sides. Now, when they say that, you can point out that:
1. They use as little metal as possible on salt pools in Australia. The few metal things remaining, like the ladder, are made of Marine Grade stainless steel. That’s SS 316L, and it costs more.
2. According to Urban Stone, all coping and hardscape requires thorough and frequent sealing, and according to the article in Pool & Spa News, that’s as frequently as every three months.
3. Whatever the percentage of salt pools in Australia is, it’s only residential pools. It is not allowed in commercial applications. So, it’s just a lie to say that 90% of the market is salt pools.
4. If Australian pools aren’t heated with gas fired heaters, and all the stone and concrete are sealed, and they use marine grade metals when they have to use metals at all, then it’s not the same market. It’s not a fair comparison. Unless, of course, we as an industry want to go back to the days of kidney shaped pools with no heaters and concrete bullnose coping and concrete decks.
Number four there really is the driver. Don’t you think? Think about all the beautiful, award winning pools you’ve seen these last five years. Think of all the tropical garden oasis pools with all that rock and all those water features and waterfalls. Imagine sealing them every three months. Or worse yet, imagine them with 60's era bullnose coping and Kool Deck.
You want to speed up the research into the problems we’re having with salt pools? Stop selling salt systems until the issues are resolved. As long as these guys are making money and salt system sales are still growing exponentially, they’re only going to pay lip service to your problems. They’re going to say, “we’re looking into it, and we promise, as soon as we know something, we’ll call.”
Like Al Pacino said in Dog Day Afternoon, “Kiss, kiss. I like to get kissed when I’m getting...”, well, you know...
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Sunday, December 24, 2006
WE WISH YOU A MERRY CHIRSTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR
I hope that everyone is home with family and friends this weekend and the only professional phone calls you get are from customers telling you where they stashed your Christmas bonus.
I'm taking the weekend off from the blog to celebrate. But I have been busy this week. I found a new forum, called the Garden Web. I posted a few comments there and the Salt System Cheerleading Squad called me names and threw sticks at me and told me my mother dresses me funny. In my usual polite and affable way, I wished them all the best with their pool degenerators.
But I did meet two very interesting folks while there. The first is a fellow from Australia named David. He has a pool forum that he's just getting off the ground. I hope everybody will take some time out and go visit his forum and take some time to post your questions and comments there. I have been chatting with him via e-mail about the differences between the US and Australian salt system markets and my next post to the blog will be a very illuminating explanation of why it works so well there and not so well here. I couldn't have done this without David's help and I hope all of you who read this blog on any kind of regular basis will return his courtesy to us and visit his forum and help him make it a success.
Find his forum at: http://poolindustrysecrets.aceboard.com/
If you don't visit it now, I know you will after you read the next blog piece about what he has to say about his market and about ours. This is a fellow you are going to want to know. Especially when the Reps start feeding you their BS about how "this is exactly the way they do it in Australia". You'll be able to call BS. Not to mention the phenomena's related to salt that he's talking to me about that we're struggling with every day and they just take for granted and work around Down Under because they've been doing it for so long.
The other fellow I met goes by the screen name Chem Geek. He's made several comments on the piece I did back in October, titled Why Salt Sucks. Read his comments and my answers by going here:
http://thepoolbiz.blogspot.com/2006/10/why-salt-sucks-so-do-i-have-your.html
He mainly posts at the Pool Forum. He has even started a thread about our little blog here. You can access it by going here:
http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=6352
Even though he's just a pool owner, and even though he had the nerve to refer to me as "just a pool cleanup guy who doesn't know science", I like him, and if I get the chance to meet him some day, I probably won't kick his ass. You know, being a knuckle dragging pool cleanup guy, that's the first thing that crossed my mind. But I'm trying to be big about it and let the Christmas spirit fill my heart with forgiveness. Besides, he's wicked smart and I think he's going to be able to answer a lot of our questions about the problems we're seeing with salt systems. And if you have any questions about just how wicked smart this guy is, I'm going to reprint his explanation of why we ought to run lower TA's on salt pools and why we see a rise in pH with salt systems instead of the pH neutral horse manure story the Reps give us. Here is his explanation in italics.
Good luck.
I just wanted to correct what you said technically because what you said was not exactly true and I don't want the main point of running with lower TA helping to reduce the pH rise get lost because of technical inaccuracies. The salt cell has the following two primary reactions:
2Cl- --> Cl2(g) + 2e-
2H+ + 2e- --> H2(g)
---------------------
2H+ + 2Cl- --> Cl2(g) + H2(g)
The chlorine gas almost immediately dissolves in the water with the following reaction to have a net reaction as shown:
Cl2(g) + H2O --> HOCl + H+ + Cl-
--------------------------------
H+ + Cl- + H2O --> HOCl + H2(g)
Because water dissociates, the above reaction is normally written with a net reaction as follows:
H2O --> H+ + OH-
----------------------------------------------
2H2O + Cl- --> HOCl + OH- + H2(g)
So the bottom line net reaction with the generation of chlorine in a salt cell (ignoring side reactions) is that water and chloride ion (from salt) combine to form hypochlorous acid (HOCl) plus hydroxyl ion (which is basic or alkaline) and hydrogen gas. Since hypochlorous acid is a weak acid, this net reaction is weakly basic (alkaline). This is where most SWG manufacturers (at least their salespeople) believe that the rise in pH comes from, but they are wrong (keep reading to find out why).
This is pretty much exactly the same thing that happens when you add chlorinating liquid or bleach to a pool as follows:
NaOCl --> Na+ + OCl-
OCl- + H+ --> HOCl
H2O --> H+ + OH-
--------------------
NaOCl --> Na+ + HOCl + OH-
except that you get some sodium ion as well (plus some extra salt, NaCl, that is in sodium hypochlorite solutions due to how they are made) and you don't get the hydrogen gas.
Now we need to look at what happens to chlorine (regardless of source) when it gets used up. Most chlorine in pools gets broken down by sunlight and even though Cyanuric Acid (CYA) combines with chlorine to form a chemical compound that slows down this process (and is not an effective disinfectant or oxidizer), it still happens as follows:
2HOCl --> O2(g) + 2H+ + 2Cl-
The next most common thing that happens to chlorine is that it combines with ammonia or related compounds such as urea from sweat as follows where I show the reaction going all the way to "breakpoint" assuming that shocking occurs (which it usually does if you have sufficient chlorine in your pool and especially when exposed to sunlight which helps the breakpoint process). I'm not going to show what happens when chlorine combines with organics, but the process is somewhat similar (carbon dioxide is produced if the organic is fully oxidized, but more typically intermediate compounds are produced that don't breakdown quickly).
2NH3 + 3HOCl --> N2(g) + 3H+ + 3Cl- + 3H2O
So, even though the generation of chlorine resulted in hydroxyl ions, the usage of chlorine results in hydrogen ions and these cancel out forming water:
OH- + H+ --> H2O
So the bottom line in an SWG pool is the following reactions:
4H2O + 2Cl- --> 2HOCl + 2OH- + 2H2(g)
2HOCl --> O2(g) + 2H+ + 2Cl-
---------------------------------
2H2O --> 2H2(g) + O2(g)
6H2O + 3Cl- --> 3HOCl + 3OH- + 3H2(g)
2NH3 + 3HOCl --> N2(g) + 3H+ + 3Cl- + 3H2O
------------------------------------------
2NH3 --> 3H2(g) + N2(g)
So the bottom, bottom line is that the net result in an SWG pool from the creation and usage of chlorine is that water is split to produce hydrogen gas and oxygen gas or that ammonia (urea) in the water is broken down (oxidized or "burned" in some sense) to produce hydrogen gas and nitrogen gas. These net, net reactions, as you can see, are neutral.
At this point, you can now talk about the source of rising pH being the outgassing of carbon dioxide from the pool. You should explain that pools are in essence intentionally over-carbonated, similar to a lovely tasty carbonated beverage! This is done when you initially added baking soda or sodium bicarbonate to your pool (it also happens when you add some pH Up products that have sodium carbonate). The purpose of having extra carbonate in your pool is to act as a pH buffer and to provide carbonate ion that, along with the calcium you added to your pool with calcium chloride, saturate the water with calcium carbonate so that this compound does not get dissolved out of plaster/gunite/concrete/grout. If too saturated, scaling would occur essentially precipitating calcium carbonate on to pool surfaces. Also, the calcium carbonate tends to form a thin film layer on metal surfaces that help reduce corrosion, though pH is a much more important factor for metal corrosion. Pool water chemical balance attempts to keep a balance between corrosion and scaling.
The downside of having a pool over-carbonated is that there is more carbon dioxide in the pool than in the air so there is a tendency for it to outgas. When this occurs, the pH rises while for technical reasons I won't get into here, the Total Alkalinity (TA) remains the same. If you then add acid to restore the pH, you lower both the pH and the TA with the net result of having TA get lowered -- which makes sense since TA is partly a measure of the amount of bicarbonate in your pool. The carbon dioxide outgassing, and therefore the rise in pH, is increased when the TA is higher, when the starting pH is lower, and when there is more aeration. So the easiest ways of reducing this rise in pH are to lower the TA, keep the pH higher, and reduce aeration (waterfalls, spillovers, etc.) including using a pool cover.
For an SWG pool there is another way, in addition to lowering TA, that can help reduce the pH rise. That is to add an additional buffering system to the pool that is also an algicide that will cut down chlorine consumption. Adding 50 ppm Borates (from Borax, the 50 ppm technically being Boron) to your pool will add additional pH buffering capability so that you can keep the carbonate part of the buffer lower. To compensate for water balance, you need to keep either your calcium level or your pH higher (or both). The algicidal properties of the borates lower the consumption of chlorine which will let you lower the output of your SWG which lowers hydrogen gas production so less aeration so less carbon dioxide outgassing and less pH rise. Whew!
I told ya. Ain't he wicked smart?
All joking aside, I really appreciate the Chem Geek's contributions to this blog and I appreciate his posts over at the Garden Web and especially the Pool Forum.
Meeting these two fellows has made me feel very optimistic that in the weeks to come, we'll be able to put out some truly pertinent and highly accurate information about these salt systems.
Stay tuned!
I'm taking the weekend off from the blog to celebrate. But I have been busy this week. I found a new forum, called the Garden Web. I posted a few comments there and the Salt System Cheerleading Squad called me names and threw sticks at me and told me my mother dresses me funny. In my usual polite and affable way, I wished them all the best with their pool degenerators.
But I did meet two very interesting folks while there. The first is a fellow from Australia named David. He has a pool forum that he's just getting off the ground. I hope everybody will take some time out and go visit his forum and take some time to post your questions and comments there. I have been chatting with him via e-mail about the differences between the US and Australian salt system markets and my next post to the blog will be a very illuminating explanation of why it works so well there and not so well here. I couldn't have done this without David's help and I hope all of you who read this blog on any kind of regular basis will return his courtesy to us and visit his forum and help him make it a success.
Find his forum at: http://poolindustrysecrets.aceboard.com/
If you don't visit it now, I know you will after you read the next blog piece about what he has to say about his market and about ours. This is a fellow you are going to want to know. Especially when the Reps start feeding you their BS about how "this is exactly the way they do it in Australia". You'll be able to call BS. Not to mention the phenomena's related to salt that he's talking to me about that we're struggling with every day and they just take for granted and work around Down Under because they've been doing it for so long.
The other fellow I met goes by the screen name Chem Geek. He's made several comments on the piece I did back in October, titled Why Salt Sucks. Read his comments and my answers by going here:
http://thepoolbiz.blogspot.com/2006/10/why-salt-sucks-so-do-i-have-your.html
He mainly posts at the Pool Forum. He has even started a thread about our little blog here. You can access it by going here:
http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=6352
Even though he's just a pool owner, and even though he had the nerve to refer to me as "just a pool cleanup guy who doesn't know science", I like him, and if I get the chance to meet him some day, I probably won't kick his ass. You know, being a knuckle dragging pool cleanup guy, that's the first thing that crossed my mind. But I'm trying to be big about it and let the Christmas spirit fill my heart with forgiveness. Besides, he's wicked smart and I think he's going to be able to answer a lot of our questions about the problems we're seeing with salt systems. And if you have any questions about just how wicked smart this guy is, I'm going to reprint his explanation of why we ought to run lower TA's on salt pools and why we see a rise in pH with salt systems instead of the pH neutral horse manure story the Reps give us. Here is his explanation in italics.
Good luck.
I just wanted to correct what you said technically because what you said was not exactly true and I don't want the main point of running with lower TA helping to reduce the pH rise get lost because of technical inaccuracies. The salt cell has the following two primary reactions:
2Cl- --> Cl2(g) + 2e-
2H+ + 2e- --> H2(g)
---------------------
2H+ + 2Cl- --> Cl2(g) + H2(g)
The chlorine gas almost immediately dissolves in the water with the following reaction to have a net reaction as shown:
Cl2(g) + H2O --> HOCl + H+ + Cl-
--------------------------------
H+ + Cl- + H2O --> HOCl + H2(g)
Because water dissociates, the above reaction is normally written with a net reaction as follows:
H2O --> H+ + OH-
----------------------------------------------
2H2O + Cl- --> HOCl + OH- + H2(g)
So the bottom line net reaction with the generation of chlorine in a salt cell (ignoring side reactions) is that water and chloride ion (from salt) combine to form hypochlorous acid (HOCl) plus hydroxyl ion (which is basic or alkaline) and hydrogen gas. Since hypochlorous acid is a weak acid, this net reaction is weakly basic (alkaline). This is where most SWG manufacturers (at least their salespeople) believe that the rise in pH comes from, but they are wrong (keep reading to find out why).
This is pretty much exactly the same thing that happens when you add chlorinating liquid or bleach to a pool as follows:
NaOCl --> Na+ + OCl-
OCl- + H+ --> HOCl
H2O --> H+ + OH-
--------------------
NaOCl --> Na+ + HOCl + OH-
except that you get some sodium ion as well (plus some extra salt, NaCl, that is in sodium hypochlorite solutions due to how they are made) and you don't get the hydrogen gas.
Now we need to look at what happens to chlorine (regardless of source) when it gets used up. Most chlorine in pools gets broken down by sunlight and even though Cyanuric Acid (CYA) combines with chlorine to form a chemical compound that slows down this process (and is not an effective disinfectant or oxidizer), it still happens as follows:
2HOCl --> O2(g) + 2H+ + 2Cl-
The next most common thing that happens to chlorine is that it combines with ammonia or related compounds such as urea from sweat as follows where I show the reaction going all the way to "breakpoint" assuming that shocking occurs (which it usually does if you have sufficient chlorine in your pool and especially when exposed to sunlight which helps the breakpoint process). I'm not going to show what happens when chlorine combines with organics, but the process is somewhat similar (carbon dioxide is produced if the organic is fully oxidized, but more typically intermediate compounds are produced that don't breakdown quickly).
2NH3 + 3HOCl --> N2(g) + 3H+ + 3Cl- + 3H2O
So, even though the generation of chlorine resulted in hydroxyl ions, the usage of chlorine results in hydrogen ions and these cancel out forming water:
OH- + H+ --> H2O
So the bottom line in an SWG pool is the following reactions:
4H2O + 2Cl- --> 2HOCl + 2OH- + 2H2(g)
2HOCl --> O2(g) + 2H+ + 2Cl-
---------------------------------
2H2O --> 2H2(g) + O2(g)
6H2O + 3Cl- --> 3HOCl + 3OH- + 3H2(g)
2NH3 + 3HOCl --> N2(g) + 3H+ + 3Cl- + 3H2O
------------------------------------------
2NH3 --> 3H2(g) + N2(g)
So the bottom, bottom line is that the net result in an SWG pool from the creation and usage of chlorine is that water is split to produce hydrogen gas and oxygen gas or that ammonia (urea) in the water is broken down (oxidized or "burned" in some sense) to produce hydrogen gas and nitrogen gas. These net, net reactions, as you can see, are neutral.
At this point, you can now talk about the source of rising pH being the outgassing of carbon dioxide from the pool. You should explain that pools are in essence intentionally over-carbonated, similar to a lovely tasty carbonated beverage! This is done when you initially added baking soda or sodium bicarbonate to your pool (it also happens when you add some pH Up products that have sodium carbonate). The purpose of having extra carbonate in your pool is to act as a pH buffer and to provide carbonate ion that, along with the calcium you added to your pool with calcium chloride, saturate the water with calcium carbonate so that this compound does not get dissolved out of plaster/gunite/concrete/grout. If too saturated, scaling would occur essentially precipitating calcium carbonate on to pool surfaces. Also, the calcium carbonate tends to form a thin film layer on metal surfaces that help reduce corrosion, though pH is a much more important factor for metal corrosion. Pool water chemical balance attempts to keep a balance between corrosion and scaling.
The downside of having a pool over-carbonated is that there is more carbon dioxide in the pool than in the air so there is a tendency for it to outgas. When this occurs, the pH rises while for technical reasons I won't get into here, the Total Alkalinity (TA) remains the same. If you then add acid to restore the pH, you lower both the pH and the TA with the net result of having TA get lowered -- which makes sense since TA is partly a measure of the amount of bicarbonate in your pool. The carbon dioxide outgassing, and therefore the rise in pH, is increased when the TA is higher, when the starting pH is lower, and when there is more aeration. So the easiest ways of reducing this rise in pH are to lower the TA, keep the pH higher, and reduce aeration (waterfalls, spillovers, etc.) including using a pool cover.
For an SWG pool there is another way, in addition to lowering TA, that can help reduce the pH rise. That is to add an additional buffering system to the pool that is also an algicide that will cut down chlorine consumption. Adding 50 ppm Borates (from Borax, the 50 ppm technically being Boron) to your pool will add additional pH buffering capability so that you can keep the carbonate part of the buffer lower. To compensate for water balance, you need to keep either your calcium level or your pH higher (or both). The algicidal properties of the borates lower the consumption of chlorine which will let you lower the output of your SWG which lowers hydrogen gas production so less aeration so less carbon dioxide outgassing and less pH rise. Whew!
I told ya. Ain't he wicked smart?
All joking aside, I really appreciate the Chem Geek's contributions to this blog and I appreciate his posts over at the Garden Web and especially the Pool Forum.
Meeting these two fellows has made me feel very optimistic that in the weeks to come, we'll be able to put out some truly pertinent and highly accurate information about these salt systems.
Stay tuned!
Sunday, December 17, 2006
CAVEAT VENDITOR
Did you hear the one about the sales rep who sells salt systems AND limestone sealant?
It’s not a joke. Ask around.
It strikes me as so odd that a guy can take on a product like a salt system to rep. Then, for years deny his customer’s - the builders and the service guys - complaints that it’s ruining their pools. Then, turn around and start reping a limestone sealant without admitting any liability for the damage his product did all those years he was in denial.
The very fact that he now sells a product to seal limestone from the ravages of salt - a very expensive sealant, by the way, that has to be reapplied every mumble, mumble - while still reping the salt system that caused the damage in the first place just boggles my mind.
It’s like Bizarro Pool World.
It’s like selling someone on the idea of hitting themselves in the head with a hammer, then selling them a helmet to deaden the pain.
For me, the only positive thing to come out of this salt system fiasco is to try to learn lessons by observing our industry’s true colors. Like the story above. It is not a joke. I’m not making it up. There really is a nationally recognized sales group reping both salt systems and stone sealant. Maybe some of you are reading this and still saying to yourself, “Well, yeah. So? What’s wrong with that?” So, let’s take it step by step.
1. You’re happily building pools. Then, a guy comes into your office and wants you to start selling his salt system. He tells you how great it is. Tells you how much your customers will love it.
2. You buy it and resell it. Everything’s fine for about a year. Then, customers start calling you and complaining about deteriorating coping and rusting diving board stands and a whole host of problems. You look into it and everythng seems to point to the salt system.
3. You call the rep. He denies that it’s the salt system or the salt doing any of the damage. This goes on for about three more years.
4. The same rep comes to your office and wants to sell you a sealant for limestone so that you can keep buying his salt system. When you point out that this is tacit admission of liability and so would he mind cutting you a check for all the warranty damage you’ve paid for these past four years, he says he’s not responsible.
5. You keep buying stuff from this sales rep.
Like I said; Bizarro Pool World.
But these next few years ought to be great theatre. We get to see which of the manufacturers and distribution companies and sales groups and builders and service organizations step up and say, “Yes. I sold that thing that damaged your pool and I take responsibility for it and I will make it right,” and which ones don’t.
There’s a food chain kind of aspect to all of this that will play out over time. First, there’s the builders, like the Big Texas Builder I talked about a few weeks ago, who have already stepped up and done what’s right and tried to fix the pools that got screwed up by the salt systems, and then stopped selling salt.
After them, or along side of them, are other builders, who are trying to crawfish away from salt, trying to stop selling it, but at the same time trying to deny any responsibility for the pools that got screwed up because of the salt systems they sold.
Each will suffer in their own way.
The Good Guys will lose financially, but at least they’ll have a decent reputation at the end of the day. “Yes. He sold me that dogmeat salt system. But when it dissolved my coping, he sent his mason over to repair that stone.”
The Bad Guys will keep more of their money because they’ll only take care of the problems when they’re faced with a lawsuit. And if they keep enough of it, they’ll be able to do enough advertising to make up for all the dissatisfied customers they create. Because all that crap they spout about, “A happy customer tells two or three people how great you are. But an unhappy customer tells everyone you suck,” is amended by the rule that, “one twenty second ad on prime time TV puts your name and phone number in front of more people than you can piss of if you live to be one hundred and ten.”
As P. T. Barnum said, there’s one born every minute.
At the other end of the food chain are the manufacturers. They have lawyers. Lots and lots of lawyers. And these lawyers believe that everyone deserves competent representation when they’re in the docket. Even cigarette companies. So, a product that does a mere five to thirty thousand dollars of damage to something as innocuous as a pool is a walk in the park for these guys.
Now, you watch and see. Over the next couple of years, these manufacturers will start to walk away from salt systems. At first, they’ll still sell them, but they’ll be at the back of the booth at the shows. Then, they’ll be available, but not even at the show. Then, they’ll announce that, “due to a waning consumer interest in salt systems,” they’re stopping production. They’ll still provide parts support, of course. Akin to picking the bones completely clean. Then, they’ll even stop supplying parts, and the systems will slowly disappear from the back yards.
And in the middle are the Sales Reps. That’s where they thrive. In the middle. They don’t manufacture equipment. They don’t build pools. They don’t lead research efforts. They don’t create anything. They just sell stuff.
When it’s a good product, they make sure to remind you that they’re the ones who sold it to you. When it turns out to be something like a salt system, they say, “Huh? Liability? Oh, no. I didn’t build that thing. Talk to the manufacturer about that. But, hey, while we’re chatting, have I told you about this new product I’m reping?”
A B C... Always Be Closing.
If you’re one of those Sales Reps, you’re laughing right now, because you know it’s true. But come Monday morning, you’ll wipe the smile off your face and pretend proper outrage over what I’ve said.
And if you’re not a Sales Rep, but you think that what I’m saying is out of line or just not fair to your friends, the Sales Reps, then ask yourself how many builders and remodel guys you know who have been cut checks from the sales groups and the manufacturers to cover the cost of all the damages they’ve shelled out for because of salt.
You see, that’s what this blog is about. It’s about a bunch of pool guys out there who have been doing their level best to help their buddy’s, the Sales Reps, meet their sales goals, and a lot of these pool guys have been having great success and selling lots and lots of salt systems for the past three or four years. And what they have to show for their effort is a few hundred dollars profit off each sale and several thousand dollars in potential liability for each of those sales when the customer finally wakes up and realizes that the reason his pool is always dusty is because the salt has dissolved their decks and coping into the pool. It’s one thing if you’re a Big Builder who just built a sixty thousand dollar pool and you have to go back and give it up for some coping and deck work. It hurts, but not near as much as it hurts a Service & Repair Guy who just sold them a salt system, and now, two years later owes them a hundred feet of new coping because the Rep who sold him the salt system didn’t start reping that sealer, or even admit it was necessary, until just this year.
So, to you Reps out there reading this, stop being angry about the difference between Super Chlorinate and Boost, stop arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and try to see it from our side. Whether you knew you were doing it or not, you guys have screwed us to the wall and we will be years and years recovering from it. You, on the other hand, will keep getting your paycheck without missing a beat. And to top it all off, you can look at all the damage being caused by salt and then look us in the eye and tell us to put zinc balls in the pump pots and keep selling salt.
When will it stop?
The comment section of this blog is open. The only reason I have it set for Review Before Publication is to keep the spammers out. I’ll publish any dissenting points of view about salt systems or the people who have saddled us with them. In four months and twelve posts, I’ve had about eight hundred visitors and exactly one dissenting comment.
Does that mean that everything I’m saying is true?
Somebody please prove me wrong.
And Caveat Venditor? Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:
Caveat venditor is Latin for "let the seller beware". It is a counter to caveat emptor, and suggests that sellers too can be deceived in a market transaction. This forces the seller to take responsibility for the product, and discourages sellers from selling products of unreasonable quality.
It’s not a joke. Ask around.
It strikes me as so odd that a guy can take on a product like a salt system to rep. Then, for years deny his customer’s - the builders and the service guys - complaints that it’s ruining their pools. Then, turn around and start reping a limestone sealant without admitting any liability for the damage his product did all those years he was in denial.
The very fact that he now sells a product to seal limestone from the ravages of salt - a very expensive sealant, by the way, that has to be reapplied every mumble, mumble - while still reping the salt system that caused the damage in the first place just boggles my mind.
It’s like Bizarro Pool World.
It’s like selling someone on the idea of hitting themselves in the head with a hammer, then selling them a helmet to deaden the pain.
For me, the only positive thing to come out of this salt system fiasco is to try to learn lessons by observing our industry’s true colors. Like the story above. It is not a joke. I’m not making it up. There really is a nationally recognized sales group reping both salt systems and stone sealant. Maybe some of you are reading this and still saying to yourself, “Well, yeah. So? What’s wrong with that?” So, let’s take it step by step.
1. You’re happily building pools. Then, a guy comes into your office and wants you to start selling his salt system. He tells you how great it is. Tells you how much your customers will love it.
2. You buy it and resell it. Everything’s fine for about a year. Then, customers start calling you and complaining about deteriorating coping and rusting diving board stands and a whole host of problems. You look into it and everythng seems to point to the salt system.
3. You call the rep. He denies that it’s the salt system or the salt doing any of the damage. This goes on for about three more years.
4. The same rep comes to your office and wants to sell you a sealant for limestone so that you can keep buying his salt system. When you point out that this is tacit admission of liability and so would he mind cutting you a check for all the warranty damage you’ve paid for these past four years, he says he’s not responsible.
5. You keep buying stuff from this sales rep.
Like I said; Bizarro Pool World.
But these next few years ought to be great theatre. We get to see which of the manufacturers and distribution companies and sales groups and builders and service organizations step up and say, “Yes. I sold that thing that damaged your pool and I take responsibility for it and I will make it right,” and which ones don’t.
There’s a food chain kind of aspect to all of this that will play out over time. First, there’s the builders, like the Big Texas Builder I talked about a few weeks ago, who have already stepped up and done what’s right and tried to fix the pools that got screwed up by the salt systems, and then stopped selling salt.
After them, or along side of them, are other builders, who are trying to crawfish away from salt, trying to stop selling it, but at the same time trying to deny any responsibility for the pools that got screwed up because of the salt systems they sold.
Each will suffer in their own way.
The Good Guys will lose financially, but at least they’ll have a decent reputation at the end of the day. “Yes. He sold me that dogmeat salt system. But when it dissolved my coping, he sent his mason over to repair that stone.”
The Bad Guys will keep more of their money because they’ll only take care of the problems when they’re faced with a lawsuit. And if they keep enough of it, they’ll be able to do enough advertising to make up for all the dissatisfied customers they create. Because all that crap they spout about, “A happy customer tells two or three people how great you are. But an unhappy customer tells everyone you suck,” is amended by the rule that, “one twenty second ad on prime time TV puts your name and phone number in front of more people than you can piss of if you live to be one hundred and ten.”
As P. T. Barnum said, there’s one born every minute.
At the other end of the food chain are the manufacturers. They have lawyers. Lots and lots of lawyers. And these lawyers believe that everyone deserves competent representation when they’re in the docket. Even cigarette companies. So, a product that does a mere five to thirty thousand dollars of damage to something as innocuous as a pool is a walk in the park for these guys.
Now, you watch and see. Over the next couple of years, these manufacturers will start to walk away from salt systems. At first, they’ll still sell them, but they’ll be at the back of the booth at the shows. Then, they’ll be available, but not even at the show. Then, they’ll announce that, “due to a waning consumer interest in salt systems,” they’re stopping production. They’ll still provide parts support, of course. Akin to picking the bones completely clean. Then, they’ll even stop supplying parts, and the systems will slowly disappear from the back yards.
And in the middle are the Sales Reps. That’s where they thrive. In the middle. They don’t manufacture equipment. They don’t build pools. They don’t lead research efforts. They don’t create anything. They just sell stuff.
When it’s a good product, they make sure to remind you that they’re the ones who sold it to you. When it turns out to be something like a salt system, they say, “Huh? Liability? Oh, no. I didn’t build that thing. Talk to the manufacturer about that. But, hey, while we’re chatting, have I told you about this new product I’m reping?”
A B C... Always Be Closing.
If you’re one of those Sales Reps, you’re laughing right now, because you know it’s true. But come Monday morning, you’ll wipe the smile off your face and pretend proper outrage over what I’ve said.
And if you’re not a Sales Rep, but you think that what I’m saying is out of line or just not fair to your friends, the Sales Reps, then ask yourself how many builders and remodel guys you know who have been cut checks from the sales groups and the manufacturers to cover the cost of all the damages they’ve shelled out for because of salt.
You see, that’s what this blog is about. It’s about a bunch of pool guys out there who have been doing their level best to help their buddy’s, the Sales Reps, meet their sales goals, and a lot of these pool guys have been having great success and selling lots and lots of salt systems for the past three or four years. And what they have to show for their effort is a few hundred dollars profit off each sale and several thousand dollars in potential liability for each of those sales when the customer finally wakes up and realizes that the reason his pool is always dusty is because the salt has dissolved their decks and coping into the pool. It’s one thing if you’re a Big Builder who just built a sixty thousand dollar pool and you have to go back and give it up for some coping and deck work. It hurts, but not near as much as it hurts a Service & Repair Guy who just sold them a salt system, and now, two years later owes them a hundred feet of new coping because the Rep who sold him the salt system didn’t start reping that sealer, or even admit it was necessary, until just this year.
So, to you Reps out there reading this, stop being angry about the difference between Super Chlorinate and Boost, stop arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and try to see it from our side. Whether you knew you were doing it or not, you guys have screwed us to the wall and we will be years and years recovering from it. You, on the other hand, will keep getting your paycheck without missing a beat. And to top it all off, you can look at all the damage being caused by salt and then look us in the eye and tell us to put zinc balls in the pump pots and keep selling salt.
When will it stop?
The comment section of this blog is open. The only reason I have it set for Review Before Publication is to keep the spammers out. I’ll publish any dissenting points of view about salt systems or the people who have saddled us with them. In four months and twelve posts, I’ve had about eight hundred visitors and exactly one dissenting comment.
Does that mean that everything I’m saying is true?
Somebody please prove me wrong.
And Caveat Venditor? Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:
Caveat venditor is Latin for "let the seller beware". It is a counter to caveat emptor, and suggests that sellers too can be deceived in a market transaction. This forces the seller to take responsibility for the product, and discourages sellers from selling products of unreasonable quality.
Friday, December 08, 2006
The Story Of One Pool
I did a startup in June of 2004. The owners decided to take care of the pool themselves. I remember the date because they were building a pool next door at the same time, and two months later I got that one on service. I haven't really paid much attention to the other pool since. It's not on my list each week, and so I didn't worry about it. A few weeks ago, the owner asked me if I'd clean his filter for him. He'd had enough of doing it himself. So, last week I went into his back yeard for the first time in two and a half years. Here's what I saw.
From a distance, it doesn't look too bad. But get a closer look at the diving board stand. Remember. It's two and a half years old.
Now, look back at the first photo. See in the foreground what looks like a gap in the grout between those two sections of limestone coping? Take a closer look.
The grout is gone. It's completely worn away. You see, this family has teenage boys. They spend all summer diving into the pool, then swimming over to the steps set into the pool wall right where those sections of coping are missing their grout. They climb out, track salty water onto the coping and grout and go back and dive in again. And again. And again.
Hence, the pattern of rust on the stand and the pattern of wear on the grout.
Here's another photo of the grout failing, wearing away. This shot is of that corner not quite shown in the lower right of the first photo. Those wet salty feet step right on that grout joint, too.
Now, the funny thing is, as much as that salty water corroded that diving board stand, and as quick as it wore that grout away, the limestone in these pictures doesn't look nearly as bad as some I've seen on other pools. And I have no explanation for that.
But here's a picture of the coping around the shallow end skimmer. It's off the same pallet of stone laid two and a half years ago.
I don't understand what's different about the stone at one end of the pool and the other. But one thing I did notice and wanted to point out. It was cold the day I took these photos. The white efflourescense you see is really frost. And even though those stones look dry and the relative humidity was down in the teens, there was still moisture in those stones. The frost just proves that it's there. On this pool, that frost is salty, and doing damage to the stone.
On a pool without salt, it's just frost.
From a distance, it doesn't look too bad. But get a closer look at the diving board stand. Remember. It's two and a half years old.
Now, look back at the first photo. See in the foreground what looks like a gap in the grout between those two sections of limestone coping? Take a closer look.
The grout is gone. It's completely worn away. You see, this family has teenage boys. They spend all summer diving into the pool, then swimming over to the steps set into the pool wall right where those sections of coping are missing their grout. They climb out, track salty water onto the coping and grout and go back and dive in again. And again. And again.
Hence, the pattern of rust on the stand and the pattern of wear on the grout.
Here's another photo of the grout failing, wearing away. This shot is of that corner not quite shown in the lower right of the first photo. Those wet salty feet step right on that grout joint, too.
Now, the funny thing is, as much as that salty water corroded that diving board stand, and as quick as it wore that grout away, the limestone in these pictures doesn't look nearly as bad as some I've seen on other pools. And I have no explanation for that.
But here's a picture of the coping around the shallow end skimmer. It's off the same pallet of stone laid two and a half years ago.
I don't understand what's different about the stone at one end of the pool and the other. But one thing I did notice and wanted to point out. It was cold the day I took these photos. The white efflourescense you see is really frost. And even though those stones look dry and the relative humidity was down in the teens, there was still moisture in those stones. The frost just proves that it's there. On this pool, that frost is salty, and doing damage to the stone.
On a pool without salt, it's just frost.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Salt's Greatest HitsThe tour begins with Limestone.
This stone was laid, smooth as silk, two years before this photo was taken.
This next one is one of the eight pencil jets on that spa I talked about two posts ago.
Then there's the skimmer basket from that spa.
The pictures of the ladder were sent to me. This is a pool where a salt system was added. Almost instantly, there's rusted stainless steel above the water line. The rusting is taking place where the water splashes or laps up and then evaporates, leaving the salt behind to do it's thing; corrode.
Now if people just wouldn't use that ladder, and wouldn't splash any water on it, then it never would have rusted.
Saturday, December 02, 2006
Saltaholics Anonymous
I don’t have a lot of time this week. We had a little old ice storm on Thursday here in Dallas, right in the middle of cleaning up autumn leaves. Not to mention that it’s the end of the month and my time this weekend will be better spent getting my billing in the mail than researching on the internet.
Too, there’s the fact that readership is down here at the old Pool Biz blog. Seems that the new has worn off and maybe everybody’s wondering when I’m going to stop ranting about salt.
Oh, I don’t know. Maybe when the Big Three stop selling salt systems and we can get the patient stable and stop the hemorrhaging of money it’s going to take to repair all the damage that salt has done to our pools and the years it’s going to take to rebuild any positive perception the public might have had toward our industry.
Because you know that’s next, right? We are all going to be falling on our swords big time a couple of years from now when everybody’s pool looks like a rusty version of the surface of the moon.
I have stopped selling salt systems. Duh. I know you knew that.
Have you?
Are you coming here every once in a while and reading this blog and saying to yourself, “Yep. Seen that. Yep. He’s right about that, too. Uh-huh... I figured that was happening, too...” and then going back out and selling more salt systems?
So that’s my challenge to you. Yeah. You sitting there with your coffee reading this page. Left click on comments and tell me what you’re doing about the problem. I know it’s hard. Just start like this; “My name’s Bill (or Bob or George) and I’m a salt addict. I haven’t sold a salt system in three weeks and I feel so much better about myself. I realize now how my addiction was destroying people’s lives, I mean, pools...”
You get the idea. Then, when you’re finished commenting, e-mail this blog to everybody you know that’s still selling salt systems.
Now I really have to get that billing done.
I don’t have a lot of time this week. We had a little old ice storm on Thursday here in Dallas, right in the middle of cleaning up autumn leaves. Not to mention that it’s the end of the month and my time this weekend will be better spent getting my billing in the mail than researching on the internet.
Too, there’s the fact that readership is down here at the old Pool Biz blog. Seems that the new has worn off and maybe everybody’s wondering when I’m going to stop ranting about salt.
Oh, I don’t know. Maybe when the Big Three stop selling salt systems and we can get the patient stable and stop the hemorrhaging of money it’s going to take to repair all the damage that salt has done to our pools and the years it’s going to take to rebuild any positive perception the public might have had toward our industry.
Because you know that’s next, right? We are all going to be falling on our swords big time a couple of years from now when everybody’s pool looks like a rusty version of the surface of the moon.
I have stopped selling salt systems. Duh. I know you knew that.
Have you?
Are you coming here every once in a while and reading this blog and saying to yourself, “Yep. Seen that. Yep. He’s right about that, too. Uh-huh... I figured that was happening, too...” and then going back out and selling more salt systems?
So that’s my challenge to you. Yeah. You sitting there with your coffee reading this page. Left click on comments and tell me what you’re doing about the problem. I know it’s hard. Just start like this; “My name’s Bill (or Bob or George) and I’m a salt addict. I haven’t sold a salt system in three weeks and I feel so much better about myself. I realize now how my addiction was destroying people’s lives, I mean, pools...”
You get the idea. Then, when you’re finished commenting, e-mail this blog to everybody you know that’s still selling salt systems.
Now I really have to get that billing done.
Saturday, November 25, 2006
THE CIRCLE GAME
This week we’ll talk about salt and the meters that read it; we’ll explore another sterling example of the power of galvanic corrosion; and discuss warranty policies that take sales away from you.
So, just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, huh? Just when you thought this seemingly endless screed about salt had to have run it’s course, had to be winding down, as it were, along comes our favorite celebrity contributor, Baboosa, and stirs the pot again.
If you missed his comment on last week’s post, I quote it here:
“Hey Pool Guy, I was thinking... I have this cute little meter that says it measures NaCl. My suspicions are it just measures conductivity and lots of different salts like maybe even calcium chloride. So how do it know? what the NaCl level is. Am I supposed to just believe what it says and trust them.. cause it is printed? Okay well I was just wondering if I actually had the right amount of salt in my pool degenerator.”
You know, in all of the hub-bub these last several weeks, with all of the really crappy things about salt systems that there are to talk about, I forgot to mention how that little meter on your salt system operates, or what, precisely, it measures.
It reminds me of a trouble call I had many years back. I was at a pool with a salt system and we were having trouble holding a chlorine level. So, I called the 1-800 number and got tech support on the line. The first question he asked me was, “What’s the salt level?”
“Well, the meter reads 3100.” I told him. “Oh, you can’t trust that.” he said. “Use your salt test kit if you want to know how much salt is really in the water.”
Okay. Good to know. Don’t trust the manufacturer’s equipment. I’ve called on other occasions and tried to draw out various 1-800 tech support folks on how their meter works and what it’s measuring.
“Uh, yeah. Let me put you on hold for a minute,” is the most common answer I get.
You want to have some fun? Take time out of your week and call one of those 1-800 tech support lines and ask them just exactly how their meter works. It’ll be like the old Flash Crowd phenomenon. It’ll be a Flash Question. Come on. Do it. Just once... all your friends are doing it...
But, just so’s you know, in case you get stuck on Ignore when you call, it’s more than likely just a conductivity reading. Basically, it’s a Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) meter. From what I could learn on the internet, you can load a computer with the conductivity curve for a particular substance, like NaCl, so that it will convert the conductivity reading to parts per million NaCl for your display, but it’s assuming that everything that went into that conductivity reading was NaCl.
Now, maybe I’m wrong and they have high dollar reflectometers installed in all those salt systems out there. Those would read just the NaCl. But I doubt it.
I did a quick test on three of my salt pools, comparing the displayed value against what my little Taylor 200 ppm per drop test kit told me, and used my Taylor 5 way to measure the calcium level, and at the end of the day, the results were all over the board. After subtracting the calcium level from the displayed value and comparing it with the titrate salt test, the results were sometimes higher, sometimes lower. Inconclusive is what they were. But then, that’s pretty much real world out there on the pool route.
I need to add, though, that when I did the test, all the pools were around 59 or 60 degrees. That’s a big number with salt systems.
For example, Aqua Rites drop down to 20% output when the water temp is between 50 and 60 degrees, and completely stops chlorine production below 50 degrees.
Pentair’s FAQ’s points out that below 59 degress, the Intellichlor stops generating chlorine.
A 1-800 rep once explained to me that it did this to protect the cells from damage caused by running with too little salt, because when the water gets cold, the calculation for salinity is so out to lunch that it can’t be trusted. Hmm... so I guess it isn’t a reflectometer after all.
Moving on.
Not too long ago, I had a spa that plated out copper everywhere. It’s really a spa and fountain. Real high dollar stuff. Octagon shaped, with eight recessed brass pencil jets, and a bubbler in the center, raising about a two foot tall column of water right at the point where the streams of the eight pencil jets meet. Real Sparklett’s Dancing Waters kind of stuff.
And I couldn’t figure out why it plated out. It was just under a year old. My first thought was that the pH had been run too low. But this spa had a salt system, a Jandy Aqua Pure 700, and the one thing I have to say about a salt system; I’ve never had to worry about LOW pH when there’s a salt system on the job.
At first, I considered that maybe we had overcompensated with too much acid on our cleaning visits. But with over one hundred pools and spas on service and forty-five of them with salt systems (Don’t look at me. I didn’t sell them.), I found it hard to believe that this was the only spa we screwed up on with too much acid. I admit, It remains a possibility. But a pretty thin one.
This all happened before I’d heard the term galvanic corrosion, so at that time, the best reason I could figure had to do with those eight brass pencil jets at the end of a pipe being fed by a chlorine generator. Perhaps the corrosive produced at the cell was making it’s way down the line, causing the brass to break down into it’s components, zinc and copper. Then the copper fell out of solution due to the wide variances in pH and temperature. Remember, it’s a spa; 50 to 104 degrees three or four nights a week all winter long.
I did have some support for that theory. About six months earlier, someone I know had queried a published water chemistry guy about another pool he’d seen with a salt system feeding into copper return lines.
Here’s what the published water chemistry guy said: “The short answer to your question is that I do NOT recommend using a chlorine generator on any swimming pool that has copper plumbing lines. The chance of salt corrosion, high levels of acid and caustic, and high levels of chlorine all will contribute to dissolving of the copper pipes and subsequent depositing of the copper compounds on the vessel.”
So, I sold the folks with the coppery spa an acid wash, disconnected their salt system and plumbed in a tab feeder on the return line to the center bubbler. Nothing but PVC all the way. That way, too, they only melt tabs while in the fountain mode. Not the spa mode.
Then, I started reading about galvanic corrosion and I started leaning toward that as the explanation for the brass breaking down so fast. But still, it puzzled me why I didn’t see this kind of problem on all of my pools and spas with salt systems and brass water features.
Then, the other day, I was reading Jandy’s brochure and they were all bragging how their cell is so much better than everybody else’s because they have “solid titanium plates coated with precious metals for durability and longevity”. Further down the page, they even show 7X and 14X photos of the cell plates of their competitor’s versus their own, coated with “30+ layers of Ruthenium”. I found out that Pentair’s Intellichlor also uses ruthenium coated cell plates for corrosion resistance.
Then I went here:
http://education.jlab.org/itselemental/ele044.html
and read: “Adding 0.1% ruthenium to titanium makes titanium 100 times more resistant to corrosion.”
Then I went here:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/v880614u2kx8g524/
and read: “There is evidence of anodic inhibition and this seems to be responsible for the observed increased corrosion resistance of the duplex stainless steels with small ruthenium additions.”
So, ruthenium added to stainless steel will make it less susceptible to galvanic corrosion. It sounds like ruthenium added to any metal makes it more corrosion resistant and more likely to galvanically corrode other metals. What I understand about galvanic corrosion is that the more resistant to corrosion a metal is, the more galvanic effect it will have on metals less “noble”, or less anodic. And while I couldn’t find anything that came right out and said “titanium enhanced with ruthenium will make the alloy even more anodic”, I found this:
http://www.p2pays.org/ref/05/04159.pdf
It’s pretty boring stuff, so I’ve italicized the important parts. It says: “Traditionally 0.15% of palladium has been included in the alloy which greatly increases resistance to crevice corrosion for titanium alloys. Palladium is very expensive and the introduction of this small percentage virtually doubles the cost of the alloy. However, recent work has indicated that the palladium content can be reduced to 0.05% for most applications. Alternatively the palladium can be replaced by 0.10% of ruthenium. The lower palladium addition restricts the increase in cost to 30% whilst the addition of ruthenium increases the cost by only 10%. The ruthenium enhanced alloys are a new development and are being specified in such commercial activities as wet oxidation, deep sour gas, hydrometallurgy for mining, geothermal wells, offshore platforms and subsea systems.”
Which, from what I can deduce, is blah, blah, blah for “one tenth of one percent of ruthenium added to titanium makes it kick ass corrosion resistant in salt water. You know, like swimming pool kind of salt water”.
Later, this report says, and this is sort of the smoking gun part: “When in contact with other metals in seawater, titanium is normally a cathode and this may accelerate the attack on other active metals such as aluminium, and copper alloys. The extent of galvanic corrosion will depend on the anode to cathode ratio, seawater velocity and seawater chemistry”. Or, in our case, anode to cathode ratio, pump gpm output and chlorine generator salinity requirements.
Brass is a copper alloy. Copper and zinc, as a matter of fact.
So, when Jandy and Pentair increased their salt cell corrosion resistance by a factor of 100 by adding ruthenium, how much did they increase the anode to cathode ratio of their cell plates to my brass pencil jets? Enough to cause the brass to break down and put copper in the water? Enough copper to be really noticeable in a little old spa? Does that mean that the same configuration of salt systems and brass features or fixtures on your pools, with lots more water than my spa, would cause the same buildup of copper over a longer period of time?
I don’t know. Do you?
But, shifting gears here, I do know this; another way that we’re getting screwed on these salt systems is on the five year warranties. Like the warranties from Zodiac, Goldline and Jandy. They have a deal that if the salt cell goes out in less than five years, they’ll sell the customer a new cell at a pro-rated amount. So, after about year three, when the cells typically fail, they sell it at 60% of the “suggested retail price”. It’s an over-the-phone, credit card only, customer to manufacturer deal that leaves you sitting on the sideline, playing errand boy to let your customer know they have a bad cell so they can go buy it directly from the manufacturer. The manufacturer makes a tidy profit at 60%, seeing as how you and distribution are cut out of the deal. In year four, for Zodiac and Jandy, it’s 80% of “suggested retail price”. Just a quick question here... has anything for a swimming pool ever sold at the “manufacturer’s suggested retail price”? Wouldn’t you just love to get some of that?
Too bad. They take it all for themselves.
You see, the way this works is: YOU maintain it. YOU clean the cell when it needs it. YOU hump the salt to the pool every time it rains. YOU fight the high pH. But the manufacturer gets the resale. And this goes on forever. Every three years or so, the cell fails and the manufacturer sells YOUR CUSTOMER a new cell.
And you don’t think this deal is cooked to keep you out of the loop? Ring up your distributor and get a load of your pricing for replacement cells. First, they’re usually special order because nobody but the manufacturer is selling them, and B, the “wholesale” price is set so that even if you wanted to, you can’t compete with their pro-rated pricing for those first five years. Five years is FOREVER in our business, and ETERNITY for a salt cell. You see, they're just playing the Circle Game. It's a game played by two: the manufacturer and your customer. Over and over and over again.
What? You don’t believe the three year cell life thing? Go to the FAQ’s on a Pentair sell sheet and read this:
“ ‘Life’ light is flashing
If flashing, the Intellichlor has limited remaining life. The Intellichlor under proper operating conditions should provide over 10,000 hours of operation, which is 3 to 5 years of normal use.”
Do the math. Here in Texas, when the water hits 88 and 90 degrees, we’re running our pools 10 and 12 hours a day and the salt systems are running on high output. Even factoring in fewer hours for winter operations, these systems are running an easy 3,000 to 3,500 hours per year. So 10,000 hours is 3 years or a little less from date of purchase.
Pentair offers a three year warranty on their cells. At least you have one manufacturer that admits the cells only lasts three years, even with ruthenium alloyed titanium plates, and they provide a warranty to match that anticipated life. The rest provide a 5 year warranty and capture 100% of the resale market in years 3 through 5. The customer is no better off than if they’d been able to buy a “discounted” cell from you in year 3 or 4, because if the manufacturers hadn’t rigged the warranty program, they would be providing cells to distribution at a much lower price, a price not meant to keep you from competing in the first place. The bottom line is the manufacturer is making way more profit per unit than if they sold those same cells through normal distribution. The only one who’s profit is being thrown away is yours and distributions. And the risk for the manufacturer is the same in years 1 and 2 and right up to 3; almost nil. And if a cell does make it past 5 years, they still make nearly as much money with their current “wholesale” pricing when you buy it special order from distribution.
These systems have been out there for a while now. Ask yourself. How many cells have you sold after the warranty expired? How many got replaced during the warranty for the pro-rated price?
Sweet deal for the manufacturers. Wouldn’t you say?
Oh, and something else I found interesting on the Pentair FAQ’s sheet:
“What happens if I add too much salt?
Over salting will not harm the Intellichlor, but will cause the water to taste salty. In addition, if salt level is too high (over 4000ppm) you can sustain corrosion damage to metallic equipment such as stainless steel handrails, ladders, filters, light rings or copper heat exchangers.”
So, are they just picking on Zodiac, a system that operates at 4,000 ppm, or do they really believe that a level 500 ppm above their own system’s maximum recommended salt level (3,500) is somehow a magic number that suddenly makes salt bad - Bad salt! Bad salt! - and will corrode all your metal? That’s slightly more than one bag too much salt in a 15,000 gallon pool. You ever poured one too many bags of salt into a pool? What happens if you read the salt meter when the water temp is 59 and add salt based on that? Will you be adding too much or too little? Will you have 3,500 or 4,000 ppm?
Boy. This whole enterprise seems fraught with peril, and very little profit, if you ask me.
Postscript: I swear what I’m about to say is true. It just happened today. A lady who takes care of her own pool called me for advise. She asked, “Three days ago, my salt system was scrolling Check Salt Level on the display. Now it’s not and the salt’s reading 2900. What’s the deal?”
“What have you done since then?” I asked her.
“All I did was heat my pool for the Thanksgiving holiday.”
The thing really does speak for itself. Res Ipsa Loquitur.
This week we’ll talk about salt and the meters that read it; we’ll explore another sterling example of the power of galvanic corrosion; and discuss warranty policies that take sales away from you.
So, just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, huh? Just when you thought this seemingly endless screed about salt had to have run it’s course, had to be winding down, as it were, along comes our favorite celebrity contributor, Baboosa, and stirs the pot again.
If you missed his comment on last week’s post, I quote it here:
“Hey Pool Guy, I was thinking... I have this cute little meter that says it measures NaCl. My suspicions are it just measures conductivity and lots of different salts like maybe even calcium chloride. So how do it know? what the NaCl level is. Am I supposed to just believe what it says and trust them.. cause it is printed? Okay well I was just wondering if I actually had the right amount of salt in my pool degenerator.”
You know, in all of the hub-bub these last several weeks, with all of the really crappy things about salt systems that there are to talk about, I forgot to mention how that little meter on your salt system operates, or what, precisely, it measures.
It reminds me of a trouble call I had many years back. I was at a pool with a salt system and we were having trouble holding a chlorine level. So, I called the 1-800 number and got tech support on the line. The first question he asked me was, “What’s the salt level?”
“Well, the meter reads 3100.” I told him. “Oh, you can’t trust that.” he said. “Use your salt test kit if you want to know how much salt is really in the water.”
Okay. Good to know. Don’t trust the manufacturer’s equipment. I’ve called on other occasions and tried to draw out various 1-800 tech support folks on how their meter works and what it’s measuring.
“Uh, yeah. Let me put you on hold for a minute,” is the most common answer I get.
You want to have some fun? Take time out of your week and call one of those 1-800 tech support lines and ask them just exactly how their meter works. It’ll be like the old Flash Crowd phenomenon. It’ll be a Flash Question. Come on. Do it. Just once... all your friends are doing it...
But, just so’s you know, in case you get stuck on Ignore when you call, it’s more than likely just a conductivity reading. Basically, it’s a Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) meter. From what I could learn on the internet, you can load a computer with the conductivity curve for a particular substance, like NaCl, so that it will convert the conductivity reading to parts per million NaCl for your display, but it’s assuming that everything that went into that conductivity reading was NaCl.
Now, maybe I’m wrong and they have high dollar reflectometers installed in all those salt systems out there. Those would read just the NaCl. But I doubt it.
I did a quick test on three of my salt pools, comparing the displayed value against what my little Taylor 200 ppm per drop test kit told me, and used my Taylor 5 way to measure the calcium level, and at the end of the day, the results were all over the board. After subtracting the calcium level from the displayed value and comparing it with the titrate salt test, the results were sometimes higher, sometimes lower. Inconclusive is what they were. But then, that’s pretty much real world out there on the pool route.
I need to add, though, that when I did the test, all the pools were around 59 or 60 degrees. That’s a big number with salt systems.
For example, Aqua Rites drop down to 20% output when the water temp is between 50 and 60 degrees, and completely stops chlorine production below 50 degrees.
Pentair’s FAQ’s points out that below 59 degress, the Intellichlor stops generating chlorine.
A 1-800 rep once explained to me that it did this to protect the cells from damage caused by running with too little salt, because when the water gets cold, the calculation for salinity is so out to lunch that it can’t be trusted. Hmm... so I guess it isn’t a reflectometer after all.
Moving on.
Not too long ago, I had a spa that plated out copper everywhere. It’s really a spa and fountain. Real high dollar stuff. Octagon shaped, with eight recessed brass pencil jets, and a bubbler in the center, raising about a two foot tall column of water right at the point where the streams of the eight pencil jets meet. Real Sparklett’s Dancing Waters kind of stuff.
And I couldn’t figure out why it plated out. It was just under a year old. My first thought was that the pH had been run too low. But this spa had a salt system, a Jandy Aqua Pure 700, and the one thing I have to say about a salt system; I’ve never had to worry about LOW pH when there’s a salt system on the job.
At first, I considered that maybe we had overcompensated with too much acid on our cleaning visits. But with over one hundred pools and spas on service and forty-five of them with salt systems (Don’t look at me. I didn’t sell them.), I found it hard to believe that this was the only spa we screwed up on with too much acid. I admit, It remains a possibility. But a pretty thin one.
This all happened before I’d heard the term galvanic corrosion, so at that time, the best reason I could figure had to do with those eight brass pencil jets at the end of a pipe being fed by a chlorine generator. Perhaps the corrosive produced at the cell was making it’s way down the line, causing the brass to break down into it’s components, zinc and copper. Then the copper fell out of solution due to the wide variances in pH and temperature. Remember, it’s a spa; 50 to 104 degrees three or four nights a week all winter long.
I did have some support for that theory. About six months earlier, someone I know had queried a published water chemistry guy about another pool he’d seen with a salt system feeding into copper return lines.
Here’s what the published water chemistry guy said: “The short answer to your question is that I do NOT recommend using a chlorine generator on any swimming pool that has copper plumbing lines. The chance of salt corrosion, high levels of acid and caustic, and high levels of chlorine all will contribute to dissolving of the copper pipes and subsequent depositing of the copper compounds on the vessel.”
So, I sold the folks with the coppery spa an acid wash, disconnected their salt system and plumbed in a tab feeder on the return line to the center bubbler. Nothing but PVC all the way. That way, too, they only melt tabs while in the fountain mode. Not the spa mode.
Then, I started reading about galvanic corrosion and I started leaning toward that as the explanation for the brass breaking down so fast. But still, it puzzled me why I didn’t see this kind of problem on all of my pools and spas with salt systems and brass water features.
Then, the other day, I was reading Jandy’s brochure and they were all bragging how their cell is so much better than everybody else’s because they have “solid titanium plates coated with precious metals for durability and longevity”. Further down the page, they even show 7X and 14X photos of the cell plates of their competitor’s versus their own, coated with “30+ layers of Ruthenium”. I found out that Pentair’s Intellichlor also uses ruthenium coated cell plates for corrosion resistance.
Then I went here:
http://education.jlab.org/itselemental/ele044.html
and read: “Adding 0.1% ruthenium to titanium makes titanium 100 times more resistant to corrosion.”
Then I went here:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/v880614u2kx8g524/
and read: “There is evidence of anodic inhibition and this seems to be responsible for the observed increased corrosion resistance of the duplex stainless steels with small ruthenium additions.”
So, ruthenium added to stainless steel will make it less susceptible to galvanic corrosion. It sounds like ruthenium added to any metal makes it more corrosion resistant and more likely to galvanically corrode other metals. What I understand about galvanic corrosion is that the more resistant to corrosion a metal is, the more galvanic effect it will have on metals less “noble”, or less anodic. And while I couldn’t find anything that came right out and said “titanium enhanced with ruthenium will make the alloy even more anodic”, I found this:
http://www.p2pays.org/ref/05/04159.pdf
It’s pretty boring stuff, so I’ve italicized the important parts. It says: “Traditionally 0.15% of palladium has been included in the alloy which greatly increases resistance to crevice corrosion for titanium alloys. Palladium is very expensive and the introduction of this small percentage virtually doubles the cost of the alloy. However, recent work has indicated that the palladium content can be reduced to 0.05% for most applications. Alternatively the palladium can be replaced by 0.10% of ruthenium. The lower palladium addition restricts the increase in cost to 30% whilst the addition of ruthenium increases the cost by only 10%. The ruthenium enhanced alloys are a new development and are being specified in such commercial activities as wet oxidation, deep sour gas, hydrometallurgy for mining, geothermal wells, offshore platforms and subsea systems.”
Which, from what I can deduce, is blah, blah, blah for “one tenth of one percent of ruthenium added to titanium makes it kick ass corrosion resistant in salt water. You know, like swimming pool kind of salt water”.
Later, this report says, and this is sort of the smoking gun part: “When in contact with other metals in seawater, titanium is normally a cathode and this may accelerate the attack on other active metals such as aluminium, and copper alloys. The extent of galvanic corrosion will depend on the anode to cathode ratio, seawater velocity and seawater chemistry”. Or, in our case, anode to cathode ratio, pump gpm output and chlorine generator salinity requirements.
Brass is a copper alloy. Copper and zinc, as a matter of fact.
So, when Jandy and Pentair increased their salt cell corrosion resistance by a factor of 100 by adding ruthenium, how much did they increase the anode to cathode ratio of their cell plates to my brass pencil jets? Enough to cause the brass to break down and put copper in the water? Enough copper to be really noticeable in a little old spa? Does that mean that the same configuration of salt systems and brass features or fixtures on your pools, with lots more water than my spa, would cause the same buildup of copper over a longer period of time?
I don’t know. Do you?
But, shifting gears here, I do know this; another way that we’re getting screwed on these salt systems is on the five year warranties. Like the warranties from Zodiac, Goldline and Jandy. They have a deal that if the salt cell goes out in less than five years, they’ll sell the customer a new cell at a pro-rated amount. So, after about year three, when the cells typically fail, they sell it at 60% of the “suggested retail price”. It’s an over-the-phone, credit card only, customer to manufacturer deal that leaves you sitting on the sideline, playing errand boy to let your customer know they have a bad cell so they can go buy it directly from the manufacturer. The manufacturer makes a tidy profit at 60%, seeing as how you and distribution are cut out of the deal. In year four, for Zodiac and Jandy, it’s 80% of “suggested retail price”. Just a quick question here... has anything for a swimming pool ever sold at the “manufacturer’s suggested retail price”? Wouldn’t you just love to get some of that?
Too bad. They take it all for themselves.
You see, the way this works is: YOU maintain it. YOU clean the cell when it needs it. YOU hump the salt to the pool every time it rains. YOU fight the high pH. But the manufacturer gets the resale. And this goes on forever. Every three years or so, the cell fails and the manufacturer sells YOUR CUSTOMER a new cell.
And you don’t think this deal is cooked to keep you out of the loop? Ring up your distributor and get a load of your pricing for replacement cells. First, they’re usually special order because nobody but the manufacturer is selling them, and B, the “wholesale” price is set so that even if you wanted to, you can’t compete with their pro-rated pricing for those first five years. Five years is FOREVER in our business, and ETERNITY for a salt cell. You see, they're just playing the Circle Game. It's a game played by two: the manufacturer and your customer. Over and over and over again.
What? You don’t believe the three year cell life thing? Go to the FAQ’s on a Pentair sell sheet and read this:
“ ‘Life’ light is flashing
If flashing, the Intellichlor has limited remaining life. The Intellichlor under proper operating conditions should provide over 10,000 hours of operation, which is 3 to 5 years of normal use.”
Do the math. Here in Texas, when the water hits 88 and 90 degrees, we’re running our pools 10 and 12 hours a day and the salt systems are running on high output. Even factoring in fewer hours for winter operations, these systems are running an easy 3,000 to 3,500 hours per year. So 10,000 hours is 3 years or a little less from date of purchase.
Pentair offers a three year warranty on their cells. At least you have one manufacturer that admits the cells only lasts three years, even with ruthenium alloyed titanium plates, and they provide a warranty to match that anticipated life. The rest provide a 5 year warranty and capture 100% of the resale market in years 3 through 5. The customer is no better off than if they’d been able to buy a “discounted” cell from you in year 3 or 4, because if the manufacturers hadn’t rigged the warranty program, they would be providing cells to distribution at a much lower price, a price not meant to keep you from competing in the first place. The bottom line is the manufacturer is making way more profit per unit than if they sold those same cells through normal distribution. The only one who’s profit is being thrown away is yours and distributions. And the risk for the manufacturer is the same in years 1 and 2 and right up to 3; almost nil. And if a cell does make it past 5 years, they still make nearly as much money with their current “wholesale” pricing when you buy it special order from distribution.
These systems have been out there for a while now. Ask yourself. How many cells have you sold after the warranty expired? How many got replaced during the warranty for the pro-rated price?
Sweet deal for the manufacturers. Wouldn’t you say?
Oh, and something else I found interesting on the Pentair FAQ’s sheet:
“What happens if I add too much salt?
Over salting will not harm the Intellichlor, but will cause the water to taste salty. In addition, if salt level is too high (over 4000ppm) you can sustain corrosion damage to metallic equipment such as stainless steel handrails, ladders, filters, light rings or copper heat exchangers.”
So, are they just picking on Zodiac, a system that operates at 4,000 ppm, or do they really believe that a level 500 ppm above their own system’s maximum recommended salt level (3,500) is somehow a magic number that suddenly makes salt bad - Bad salt! Bad salt! - and will corrode all your metal? That’s slightly more than one bag too much salt in a 15,000 gallon pool. You ever poured one too many bags of salt into a pool? What happens if you read the salt meter when the water temp is 59 and add salt based on that? Will you be adding too much or too little? Will you have 3,500 or 4,000 ppm?
Boy. This whole enterprise seems fraught with peril, and very little profit, if you ask me.
Postscript: I swear what I’m about to say is true. It just happened today. A lady who takes care of her own pool called me for advise. She asked, “Three days ago, my salt system was scrolling Check Salt Level on the display. Now it’s not and the salt’s reading 2900. What’s the deal?”
“What have you done since then?” I asked her.
“All I did was heat my pool for the Thanksgiving holiday.”
The thing really does speak for itself. Res Ipsa Loquitur.
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Lying Liars
There is so much going on, it’s hard to know where to start.
How about this? A really, really big pool builder here in the Great State of Texas has stopped selling salt systems. Now, this falls under the category of gossip, because I’m not a journalist. I’m a pool cleaner and a blogger. But I heard this stuff from four different stalwarts in the local industry hereabouts, and so I believe it.
But before we talk about that, listen to this:
I was roaming around the internet and I happened upon this little tidbit from the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services:
“Both Na+ and Cl- cause a taste in water. EPA has identified a concentration of over 250 mg/L of either Na+ & Cl- as a concentration which can be expected to impart a ‘salt’ taste to drinking water.” Read it HERE New Hampshire Govt.Website
Just to review, 1 mg/L equals 1part per million (ppm).
That reminded me of something I read recently from a manufacturer of salt systems where they were going on and on about how the amount of salt you put in your pool - three to four thousand parts per million, depending on the system - is “below the level of taste”. I couldn’t remember where I read it, so I Googled “below the level of taste” and “chlorine generator” and this is a sampling of what I got:
http://www.waynesolar.com/pdf/aquarite.pdf
http://www.bestbuypoolsupply.com/chlorinators.htm
http://www.solarblue.org/aqualogic.html
http://hayward.swimmingpool.com/chlorinegenerator
http://hayward.swimmingpool.com/logiccontrols
http://www.haywardnet.com/inground/products/controls/Aqua_Logic_Pool_Spa_Automation.cfm
http://www.h2opoolproducts.com/product_info.php?products_id=24
http://www.premierpoolsupplies.com/automaticcontrols_Hayward.html
Every one of these websites say that the amount of salt needed is “below the level of taste”.
So, um, uh... that’s a lie. It’s above the EPA identified level of taste by a factor of 12, to be precise.
Each of these websites, and plenty more, keep repeating the same lie over and over again until it becomes fact. That is the secret of Sales and Marketing. You tell a lie. You tell that lie for money. You get others to repeat that lie for the same reason; money. You rely on the fact that the average consumer and the average reseller aren’t going to question your lie, because there’s no profit in proving that it’s a lie. There’s no money in it, so why would anybody in their right mind set out to disprove the lie if, at the end of the day, it doesn’t make them any richer?
Because it’s a lie.
There are other, more subtle ways of pumping up a product without technically telling a lie. Like the same vendor’s claim:
“You'll never again have to worry about red irritated eyes, dry itchy skin, bleached bathing suits or green hair!”
http://www.goldlinecontrols.com/AquaRite.aspx
Green hair? Hmm... Green hair doesn’t come from other types of chlorine, which, if you follow the sleight of hand there, is implied but not said . Once again, Smoke and Mirrors, Sales and Marketing.
Green hair is caused by copper in the water.
http://www.10news.com/lorensfieldnotes/173301/detail.html
http://www.southshoregunitepools.com/resources/pdfs/green_hair.pdf
http://www.pg.com/science/haircare/hair_twh_97.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7233585
http://chemistry.about.com/od/howthingsworkfaqs/f/greenhair.htm
How about bleached bathing suits?
“Experts disagree widely about a maximum level for free chlorine, if any. AQUA TIPS interviewed swimmers who had been bathing in 5, then 10, and on up to 25 ppm free chlorine. In the files we found the story of a junior high school pool that was mistakenly carried at 60 ppm free chlorine for about a week's time. We interviewed one individual who had been swimming in 200 ppm free chlorine for 30 minutes. In each of these cases, pH and other water chemistry factors were almost perfectly balanced. Complaints in the above cases were of bleached bathing suits, dry skin, and mild eyeburn.”
http://www.stranco-leisure.co.uk/pdf/Back_to_Basics.pdf
There are several other websites with the same information. Just Google bleached bathing suits. Too, there are several websites that will tell you that chloramines cause red irritated eyes and dry, itchy skin. But bleached bathing suits? I’m sorry. That’s from too high a level of free available chlorine, and you’re just as likely to have it with a chlorine generator set too high as you are with a feeder stuffed with too many tabs.
So, why is this important? Because this is the small stuff. If they’re willing to lie and misdirect on the small stuff, what about the big stuff? Big stuff like galvanic corrosion, or ruined coping, or environmental issues. It begs the question, what else are they not telling you?
They’re not telling you things like this:
“Sodium and chloride are costly to remove from water... Normally the best method to control sodium and chloride in drinking water is to prevent or better manage those activities that dispose of salt near the water supply source”. (Whatcom County, WA Health Department, Sodium in Water)
That’s a link to the Whatcom County, Washington Health Department website. “...prevent or better manage” the disposal of salt. Just a crazy thought, but how about not putting salt in your pool in the first place?
Think about it. If you’re trying to maintain a level of less than 250 ppm in your water supply, then dumping a 20,000 gallon pool of 3,000 ppm salt water just brought 240,000 gallons of pure water right up to the level of taste. If it’s 4,000 ppm, then it’s 320,000 gallons.
How about a water park that uses salt chlorination? If you dump a 700,000 gallon Lazy River at the end of the season, that dilutes to as much as 11,200,000 gallons of 250 ppm water. And that’s if the dilute had 0 ppm salt to begin with. Not to mention that the Lazy River’s just one ride in the water park.
But it gets worse. The Salt Institute, a group that represents 36 foreign and domestic salt producers, admits you can taste salt at levels even lower than 250 ppm.
“The secondary drinking water standard for chloride is determined for taste and established at 250 mg/L. If 100% of the chloride in a particular drinking water were in the form of sodium chloride, water containing 250 mg/L chloride would contain 160 mg/L sodium. Thus, 160 mg/L would be the appropriate level where people would notice the taste of sodium chloride.”
http://www.saltinstitute.org/pubstat/ccl8-02.html - Update 03/09/09; this link is dead. It is no longer anywhere on the Salt Institute's website. It's no longer anywhere on the internet except here. I guess they no longer wanted to own that opinion, seeing as how it's been so effectively used to prove just the reverse of what they intended for it to do.
Remember, this is from the Salt Institute, the lobbying arm of the salt industry. So, that means that the folks selling salt systems to you just made up the idea that 3,000 to 4,000 ppm is below the level of taste and then put it in their Sales and Marketing brochures.
Are you insulted yet?
Every place I go in the real world - by real world, I mean things like water treatment info, or drinking water data, or environmental studies, or architectural information, or infrastructure impact studies - I read nothing but the negative impacts of salt.
Well, that’s not completely true. I did recently read how “salting, especially of meat, is an ancient preservation technique. The salt draws out moisture and creates an environment inhospitable to bacteria.”
http://home.howstuffworks.com/food-preservation5.htm
But starting around 1876, when Karl Paul Gottfried von Linder invented the first practical refrigeration unit, salting meat has been kind of tapering off.
So, there’s all this real world data about the negative impacts of salt.
And then there’s the world of Sales and Marketing, where salt is portrayed as a beautiful, naturally occurring substance that has revolutionized swimming pools and is protecting all those poor little rich folk from the horrible, unmentionable side effects of chlorine.
Be honest. How many homeowners have you talked to who had that exact impression when they contacted you about a salt system? And even when you tried to explain to them that, “chlorine’s chlorine, whether it comes from a tab or from an electronic box”, they give you that, “Yes, but salt’s better, right? More natural, right?”
The deliberate misinformation surrounding the introduction of salt systems is still startling to me, even after all these weeks of reading and writing about it. So, wake up, Also a Pool Guy. It’s not just a swimming pool. It is a conspiracy. A conspiracy to say whatever needs to be said to create and maintain a market for salt systems, whether they’re good for your business or not.
Which is a nice segue into the Big News this week. The Big News goes something like this:
Big Texas Builder came to the conclusion that salt systems, instead of being a profit center, are costing money and slowing production. The unrelenting damage caused by salt created tons of go-backs (doncha just love them free go-backs) to replace diving board stands, rip out ruined limestone, etc., tying up crews that otherwise would have been laying coping and mastic and such on new pools instead of pools under warranty. Not only was it costing a lot to redo the work, but it was costing a lot by slowing new production.
You have to wonder, too, if part of their reason wasn’t the lost referrals that always come with that kind of mess. It reminds me of a recent conversation I had with another builder. He’s a small custom builder, who lives and dies by the referral, and by way of telling me that he, too, had stopped selling salt systems, (that’s two; one Big Builder, one Small Builder) he told me the story of how he lost a whole town to a spate of heater problems a couple of years back. Gosh, I wonder which heater that was?
He’d been going great guns in this small community here in the Metroplex - for all you people not lucky enough to be from Texas, that’s what we call the Dallas/Fort Worth area - all from one customer telling a friend, and that friend telling a friend, (repeat until rich) what a great job he’d done for them. Then, the heaters stopped working. They wouldn’t fire during start up. The local reps were swamped with calls from everybody, so even herculean efforts on their part weren’t keeping up with the trouble calls. (Yes. Mark your calender. I just said something nice about reps. Technical Reps, that is.) Then, a week after the heaters were fixed, they’d fail again, creating an even more upset customer. And then another trouble call, and another, and yet another...
Pretty soon, what his customers out there were telling their friends changed from, “He’s so great and everything works so well”, to “I’m so mad at that guy. He sold me a spa I never get to use because he sold me a broken heater to go along with it.” And he hasn’t had a referral in that town in the three years since.
So there’s that.
And then, in closing, I wanted to thank Also A Pool Guy for his comments. And I wanted to clarify, like Another Pool Guy already pointed out, that 7.6 isn’t neutral pH. 7.0 is neutral pH. Further, the difference between 7.6 and 7.7 isn’t “slightly basic”. The difference between 7.6 and 7.7 is that 7.7 is 20% more base than 7.6. The pH scale is a logarithmic scale, where the number to the right of the decimal - the mantissa - is the logarithmic representation of the actual number. The number to the left of the decimal - the characteristic - represents the power of 10 the number is to be raised to. So, 7.6 represents -40,000,000 and 7.7 represents
-50,000,000. With that kind of progression, the difference between, say, 7.2 and 8.2 is -30,000,000 and -300,000,000, respectively. So, 8.2 is ten times more base than 7.2. The pH scale has fourteen orders of magnitude (0.0 to 14.0), expressed in this logarithmic notation, pH being the negative logarithm of the concentration of hydrogen ions. Kind of like 7.6 pH is 40,000,000 hydrogen ions per liter... not.
Phew! I wanted to spit all that out to illustrate what a bad idea it is to throw even a tenth of a point on the pH scale around so casually. And I realize that it’s open season on the above paragraph from all you chemists out there. So, go ahead. Take your best shot.
Also a Pool Guy has started his own blog here on Blogspot. He calls it Another Look at ThePoolBusiness. You can access it by clicking on his name at the bottom of his comment. He hasn’t posted anything, though. Perhaps he’s busy studying up on the pH scale.
Yes. I know. That was mean. I am ashamed. But I’m not stupid. And that brings up an interesting point about this blog. Usually the guys who will tell you the truth about anything aren’t nice guys. They’re rock throwers looking for a plate glass window. And they don’t have solutions. They have questions. If you think about it, they’re not supposed to have solutions. Because they didn’t build and sell the problem. They just point out that the problem exists.
Res Ipsa Loquitur.
There is so much going on, it’s hard to know where to start.
How about this? A really, really big pool builder here in the Great State of Texas has stopped selling salt systems. Now, this falls under the category of gossip, because I’m not a journalist. I’m a pool cleaner and a blogger. But I heard this stuff from four different stalwarts in the local industry hereabouts, and so I believe it.
But before we talk about that, listen to this:
I was roaming around the internet and I happened upon this little tidbit from the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services:
“Both Na+ and Cl- cause a taste in water. EPA has identified a concentration of over 250 mg/L of either Na+ & Cl- as a concentration which can be expected to impart a ‘salt’ taste to drinking water.” Read it HERE New Hampshire Govt.Website
Just to review, 1 mg/L equals 1part per million (ppm).
That reminded me of something I read recently from a manufacturer of salt systems where they were going on and on about how the amount of salt you put in your pool - three to four thousand parts per million, depending on the system - is “below the level of taste”. I couldn’t remember where I read it, so I Googled “below the level of taste” and “chlorine generator” and this is a sampling of what I got:
http://www.waynesolar.com/pdf/aquarite.pdf
http://www.bestbuypoolsupply.com/chlorinators.htm
http://www.solarblue.org/aqualogic.html
http://hayward.swimmingpool.com/chlorinegenerator
http://hayward.swimmingpool.com/logiccontrols
http://www.haywardnet.com/inground/products/controls/Aqua_Logic_Pool_Spa_Automation.cfm
http://www.h2opoolproducts.com/product_info.php?products_id=24
http://www.premierpoolsupplies.com/automaticcontrols_Hayward.html
Every one of these websites say that the amount of salt needed is “below the level of taste”.
So, um, uh... that’s a lie. It’s above the EPA identified level of taste by a factor of 12, to be precise.
Each of these websites, and plenty more, keep repeating the same lie over and over again until it becomes fact. That is the secret of Sales and Marketing. You tell a lie. You tell that lie for money. You get others to repeat that lie for the same reason; money. You rely on the fact that the average consumer and the average reseller aren’t going to question your lie, because there’s no profit in proving that it’s a lie. There’s no money in it, so why would anybody in their right mind set out to disprove the lie if, at the end of the day, it doesn’t make them any richer?
Because it’s a lie.
There are other, more subtle ways of pumping up a product without technically telling a lie. Like the same vendor’s claim:
“You'll never again have to worry about red irritated eyes, dry itchy skin, bleached bathing suits or green hair!”
http://www.goldlinecontrols.com/AquaRite.aspx
Green hair? Hmm... Green hair doesn’t come from other types of chlorine, which, if you follow the sleight of hand there, is implied but not said . Once again, Smoke and Mirrors, Sales and Marketing.
Green hair is caused by copper in the water.
http://www.10news.com/lorensfieldnotes/173301/detail.html
http://www.southshoregunitepools.com/resources/pdfs/green_hair.pdf
http://www.pg.com/science/haircare/hair_twh_97.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7233585
http://chemistry.about.com/od/howthingsworkfaqs/f/greenhair.htm
How about bleached bathing suits?
“Experts disagree widely about a maximum level for free chlorine, if any. AQUA TIPS interviewed swimmers who had been bathing in 5, then 10, and on up to 25 ppm free chlorine. In the files we found the story of a junior high school pool that was mistakenly carried at 60 ppm free chlorine for about a week's time. We interviewed one individual who had been swimming in 200 ppm free chlorine for 30 minutes. In each of these cases, pH and other water chemistry factors were almost perfectly balanced. Complaints in the above cases were of bleached bathing suits, dry skin, and mild eyeburn.”
http://www.stranco-leisure.co.uk/pdf/Back_to_Basics.pdf
There are several other websites with the same information. Just Google bleached bathing suits. Too, there are several websites that will tell you that chloramines cause red irritated eyes and dry, itchy skin. But bleached bathing suits? I’m sorry. That’s from too high a level of free available chlorine, and you’re just as likely to have it with a chlorine generator set too high as you are with a feeder stuffed with too many tabs.
So, why is this important? Because this is the small stuff. If they’re willing to lie and misdirect on the small stuff, what about the big stuff? Big stuff like galvanic corrosion, or ruined coping, or environmental issues. It begs the question, what else are they not telling you?
They’re not telling you things like this:
“Sodium and chloride are costly to remove from water... Normally the best method to control sodium and chloride in drinking water is to prevent or better manage those activities that dispose of salt near the water supply source”. (Whatcom County, WA Health Department, Sodium in Water)
That’s a link to the Whatcom County, Washington Health Department website. “...prevent or better manage” the disposal of salt. Just a crazy thought, but how about not putting salt in your pool in the first place?
Think about it. If you’re trying to maintain a level of less than 250 ppm in your water supply, then dumping a 20,000 gallon pool of 3,000 ppm salt water just brought 240,000 gallons of pure water right up to the level of taste. If it’s 4,000 ppm, then it’s 320,000 gallons.
How about a water park that uses salt chlorination? If you dump a 700,000 gallon Lazy River at the end of the season, that dilutes to as much as 11,200,000 gallons of 250 ppm water. And that’s if the dilute had 0 ppm salt to begin with. Not to mention that the Lazy River’s just one ride in the water park.
But it gets worse. The Salt Institute, a group that represents 36 foreign and domestic salt producers, admits you can taste salt at levels even lower than 250 ppm.
“The secondary drinking water standard for chloride is determined for taste and established at 250 mg/L. If 100% of the chloride in a particular drinking water were in the form of sodium chloride, water containing 250 mg/L chloride would contain 160 mg/L sodium. Thus, 160 mg/L would be the appropriate level where people would notice the taste of sodium chloride.”
http://www.saltinstitute.org/pubstat/ccl8-02.html - Update 03/09/09; this link is dead. It is no longer anywhere on the Salt Institute's website. It's no longer anywhere on the internet except here. I guess they no longer wanted to own that opinion, seeing as how it's been so effectively used to prove just the reverse of what they intended for it to do.
Remember, this is from the Salt Institute, the lobbying arm of the salt industry. So, that means that the folks selling salt systems to you just made up the idea that 3,000 to 4,000 ppm is below the level of taste and then put it in their Sales and Marketing brochures.
Are you insulted yet?
Every place I go in the real world - by real world, I mean things like water treatment info, or drinking water data, or environmental studies, or architectural information, or infrastructure impact studies - I read nothing but the negative impacts of salt.
Well, that’s not completely true. I did recently read how “salting, especially of meat, is an ancient preservation technique. The salt draws out moisture and creates an environment inhospitable to bacteria.”
http://home.howstuffworks.com/food-preservation5.htm
But starting around 1876, when Karl Paul Gottfried von Linder invented the first practical refrigeration unit, salting meat has been kind of tapering off.
So, there’s all this real world data about the negative impacts of salt.
And then there’s the world of Sales and Marketing, where salt is portrayed as a beautiful, naturally occurring substance that has revolutionized swimming pools and is protecting all those poor little rich folk from the horrible, unmentionable side effects of chlorine.
Be honest. How many homeowners have you talked to who had that exact impression when they contacted you about a salt system? And even when you tried to explain to them that, “chlorine’s chlorine, whether it comes from a tab or from an electronic box”, they give you that, “Yes, but salt’s better, right? More natural, right?”
The deliberate misinformation surrounding the introduction of salt systems is still startling to me, even after all these weeks of reading and writing about it. So, wake up, Also a Pool Guy. It’s not just a swimming pool. It is a conspiracy. A conspiracy to say whatever needs to be said to create and maintain a market for salt systems, whether they’re good for your business or not.
Which is a nice segue into the Big News this week. The Big News goes something like this:
Big Texas Builder came to the conclusion that salt systems, instead of being a profit center, are costing money and slowing production. The unrelenting damage caused by salt created tons of go-backs (doncha just love them free go-backs) to replace diving board stands, rip out ruined limestone, etc., tying up crews that otherwise would have been laying coping and mastic and such on new pools instead of pools under warranty. Not only was it costing a lot to redo the work, but it was costing a lot by slowing new production.
You have to wonder, too, if part of their reason wasn’t the lost referrals that always come with that kind of mess. It reminds me of a recent conversation I had with another builder. He’s a small custom builder, who lives and dies by the referral, and by way of telling me that he, too, had stopped selling salt systems, (that’s two; one Big Builder, one Small Builder) he told me the story of how he lost a whole town to a spate of heater problems a couple of years back. Gosh, I wonder which heater that was?
He’d been going great guns in this small community here in the Metroplex - for all you people not lucky enough to be from Texas, that’s what we call the Dallas/Fort Worth area - all from one customer telling a friend, and that friend telling a friend, (repeat until rich) what a great job he’d done for them. Then, the heaters stopped working. They wouldn’t fire during start up. The local reps were swamped with calls from everybody, so even herculean efforts on their part weren’t keeping up with the trouble calls. (Yes. Mark your calender. I just said something nice about reps. Technical Reps, that is.) Then, a week after the heaters were fixed, they’d fail again, creating an even more upset customer. And then another trouble call, and another, and yet another...
Pretty soon, what his customers out there were telling their friends changed from, “He’s so great and everything works so well”, to “I’m so mad at that guy. He sold me a spa I never get to use because he sold me a broken heater to go along with it.” And he hasn’t had a referral in that town in the three years since.
So there’s that.
And then, in closing, I wanted to thank Also A Pool Guy for his comments. And I wanted to clarify, like Another Pool Guy already pointed out, that 7.6 isn’t neutral pH. 7.0 is neutral pH. Further, the difference between 7.6 and 7.7 isn’t “slightly basic”. The difference between 7.6 and 7.7 is that 7.7 is 20% more base than 7.6. The pH scale is a logarithmic scale, where the number to the right of the decimal - the mantissa - is the logarithmic representation of the actual number. The number to the left of the decimal - the characteristic - represents the power of 10 the number is to be raised to. So, 7.6 represents -40,000,000 and 7.7 represents
-50,000,000. With that kind of progression, the difference between, say, 7.2 and 8.2 is -30,000,000 and -300,000,000, respectively. So, 8.2 is ten times more base than 7.2. The pH scale has fourteen orders of magnitude (0.0 to 14.0), expressed in this logarithmic notation, pH being the negative logarithm of the concentration of hydrogen ions. Kind of like 7.6 pH is 40,000,000 hydrogen ions per liter... not.
Phew! I wanted to spit all that out to illustrate what a bad idea it is to throw even a tenth of a point on the pH scale around so casually. And I realize that it’s open season on the above paragraph from all you chemists out there. So, go ahead. Take your best shot.
Also a Pool Guy has started his own blog here on Blogspot. He calls it Another Look at ThePoolBusiness. You can access it by clicking on his name at the bottom of his comment. He hasn’t posted anything, though. Perhaps he’s busy studying up on the pH scale.
Yes. I know. That was mean. I am ashamed. But I’m not stupid. And that brings up an interesting point about this blog. Usually the guys who will tell you the truth about anything aren’t nice guys. They’re rock throwers looking for a plate glass window. And they don’t have solutions. They have questions. If you think about it, they’re not supposed to have solutions. Because they didn’t build and sell the problem. They just point out that the problem exists.
Res Ipsa Loquitur.
Monday, November 13, 2006
RUST NEVER SLEEPS
When I first started cleaning pools, back in nineteen hundred and mumble-mumble..., one of the first things I learned about cleaning pools was to know the difference between debris that you could vacuum out, and the stains that you couldn’t. You saved yourself a lot of time knowing the difference. Part of noting that set me to wondering why there were these little rust stains on the pool floor around all the returns. I asked the guy I was working for and he gave me the old civil service salute - a shrug of his shoulders - and told me not to worry about it. We were working out of his garage, both of us cleaning pools part time. Me, I was just trying to hustle up some extra Chirstmas money. I was sure pools were just a passing thing. I knew there was just no way I was going to be doing pool work even a year later. So, I followed his advise and quit worrying about it.
A year later, I was cleaning pools full time for another guy. Funny how life works.
He built pools, too. Had a pool store, a design office and a fading showroom with dusty tile samples and plaster plugs and even a hot tub - an old redwood hot tub - on display. Yes, it was that long ago. Tub O’ Gold was a big seller back in those days.
So, I asked my new boss, who was a lot more serious about taking care of pools than me and my buddy had been, why most of the pools had those tiny rust stains on the plaster near the returns. In those days, almost all plaster was white, and that made those rust spots really stand out.
His eyes started to roll back in his head until all you could see were the whites, and drool slipped out of the corner of his mouth. His hands began to tremble and I got the coffee cup out of his grip just in time, and he collapsed backward into his chair, gasping for breath. His mouth gaped open and I knew I was witnessing a man in the throes of a heart attack or someone about to Speak in Tongues.
Instead, he said, "Well, you see, it’s because these sons-o-bitchess who build pools for a living sell heaters on the cheap and won’t pop an extra hundred bucks for bronze headers. And the sons-o-bitches who build the heaters shouldn’t be sellin’ them damn cast iron headers to begin with. By God, I’ll tell you what, they oughta take the whole lot of them crooked bastards out and..."
Perhaps you begin to see where I learned to be, shall we say, critical of our industry.
My old Mentor taught me lots that morning, and lots more as the months went by. Once he saw that I was interested, he would take time out of his day every now and then to show me this and teach me that.
Like that day. He explained that the problem with cast iron headers is that they’re made of cast iron. Even though they have a ceramic coating over the internal waterways, they’re still made of cast iron. You know. Iron. Of Iron Oxide fame. Rust.
Problem being that cast iron and ceramic have a different expansion/contraction coefficient when heated and cooled. Pretty much cast iron expands and contracts, and ceramic doesn’t. Eventually, the ceramic cracks, them flakes away, exposes the cast iron to corrosive chlorinated pool water. The cast iron rusts, flakes away and gets blown into the pool via the returns, where it settles to the bottom and sets to making rust stains.
That’s all water under the bridge these days. Now all the heaters have space age polymer headers. Pretty much, anyway. And I think the few cast iron headers left are internally coated with a resin epoxy that expands and contracts along with the cast iron. And the rest are bronze.
But getting back to the pre-polymer, pre-resin/epoxy days.
When I left my old Mentor’s shop and went out on my own, I knew that when I got a chance to sell a heater, the only thing I was going to sell was a heater with bronze headers. No cast iron for me or my customers.
To me, that made sense. The builder might have screwed the customer by starting them out with cast iron headers, but there was no reason I had to perpetuate the situation by repeating that mistake when it came time for a new heater. In the builder’s defense, maybe he’d just been living under a rock somewhere and hadn’t noticed that every remodel he went to bid on had funny little rust stains clustered around all the returns, or maybe he’d never had a single conversation with a pool cleaner in his life and so really didn’t have much of a feel for what a pool looked like a year and a day after it was built, or maybe he just figured that the ceramic got him through a one year warranty and the heck with what happened on day 366.
My idea was, sell them a heater with bronze headers and a light acid wash, or new plaster if they were due, and you made it all better.
So, finally, my phone rang one day and it was one of my customer’s wanting a new heater. She was tired of just looking at the spa part of her pool/spa and wanted to start using it again. I told her my story about cast iron versus bronze and told her to just look at the stains in her pool to see what I talking about. She did and came back to the phone - they had cords on them back in the olden days - and signed up for the whole program; the heater with bronze headers and the acid wash.
Imagine my surprise when I walked into the supplier next morning and asked them to load up a 400,000 BTU with bronze headers onto my truck and they looked at me and said, "Oh, bronze headers. That’s a special order. We don’t stock those. Everybody just sells cast iron."
"Even though cast iron rusts and blows chunks back in the pool after a couple of seasons?" I asked.
"Yeah. You want a heater today or not?"
I puzzled over that for a long time. I mean years. And I suppose I still do. Because none of it made any sense to me.
Cast iron headers weren’t as good as bronze headers, because they had that problem of eventually breaking down and blowing rust chunks into the pool. Granted, not a huge problem in the grand scheme of things. Just some small rust stains on the plaster finish. The heater still worked just fine. I mean, I never heard anybody say, "Gosh, I can’t heat my pool because the interior waterways of my heater headers are rusty".
But in my mind, it was still a problem. It was a misrepresentation, plain and simple. It was a manufacturer saying, "this ceramic coating works and it will continue to work for the anticipated life of this heater". When in fact, they knew that within a couple of years, it was going to start blowing rust chunks into the pool and marring an otherwise beautiful plaster finish.
It’s like knowing you have a problem going in, and knowing that the cost to fix the problem once it starts occurring isn’t going to be cheap - front and rear headers being just about the most costly parts to replace on a heater - and choosing to inflict the problem on your customer anyway.
It’s just like saying, "We’re a cheap company, with shoddy engineering practices and you can’t trust what we say".
Or, if you’re the builder, it’s just like saying, "I’m selling you equipment that’s built on the cheap, and as long as it makes it through the warranty period, then I’m home free".
And as harsh as that may sound, that is exactly the perspective that homeowners who have accomplished enough in life to be able to afford a pool think about you when, two years after the sale, their weekly pool cleaner guy tells them that the reason they have a bunch of stains on their plaster is because, even though bronze headers were available, the heater company chose to use cast iron, and the builder saved a hundred bucks or so and made a conscious decision to saddle them with the cheap headers.
In fact, their perception is even worse than that, because up until it’s explained to them how easily the problem could have been avoided - spending an extra couple of hundred bucks up front on a thirty-five thousand dollar swimming pool - most of them had been pleasantly surprised to find that the pool industry wasn’t the fly-by-nightmare experience that all their friends had warned them it was.
And then their pool guy tells them about the rusty headers and they nod and start to feel just like the guys at the office said they would, the guys who warned them that it would happen, that they would get screwed. It just took the screwing a couple of years to show up.
Why did we keep selling those heaters with cast iron headers? Is it because we just got so used to looking at those rust stains as we came up through the ranks from pool cleaner to repairman to remodeler to builder that we just accepted that those stains were part and parcel to having a pool and having a heater? Is it because we were afraid our customers would balk at the upcharge for bronze, even if we explained to them why they ought to get it?
I don’t know.
But I do know this. The Big Three can’t field a product that’s bad for your customers unless you help them. You may say that’s not true. You may say that they can advertise right around you and create the buzz that has your customers asking you for this or that product. And that’s true.
But you’re the Gatekeeper. If you say, "I wouldn’t buy that, and here’s the reasons why. Oh, and I have pictures in my office I can e-mail to you, too," then they’re going to believe you.
Because every time I ever told a customer about cast iron headers, when it came time to buy the next heater, they always bought bronze.
Like salt systems. If you have pools with damaged coping, take a digital photo and blow it up to 8 X 10 and show it to people when they ask for salt. If they want soft water, tell them to buy sodium tetraborate. If they’re tired of red eyes, and they have ten kids, tell them to buy a bucket of non-chlorine shock and shock the pool twice a week in the swimming season.
Soon enough, you’re going to need to have some answers for your customers about these salt systems. My customers with the weathered limestone and the ruined decks and the one with the dead pecan tree? What do you think I say to them when they ask me, "Why would they sell me this thing if they knew this was going to happen?"
Right now, all I can do is give them the old civil service salute and say, "I hate to admit it but... It’s the Pool Business".
Kinda like, "We have met the Enemy, and He is Us."
When I first started cleaning pools, back in nineteen hundred and mumble-mumble..., one of the first things I learned about cleaning pools was to know the difference between debris that you could vacuum out, and the stains that you couldn’t. You saved yourself a lot of time knowing the difference. Part of noting that set me to wondering why there were these little rust stains on the pool floor around all the returns. I asked the guy I was working for and he gave me the old civil service salute - a shrug of his shoulders - and told me not to worry about it. We were working out of his garage, both of us cleaning pools part time. Me, I was just trying to hustle up some extra Chirstmas money. I was sure pools were just a passing thing. I knew there was just no way I was going to be doing pool work even a year later. So, I followed his advise and quit worrying about it.
A year later, I was cleaning pools full time for another guy. Funny how life works.
He built pools, too. Had a pool store, a design office and a fading showroom with dusty tile samples and plaster plugs and even a hot tub - an old redwood hot tub - on display. Yes, it was that long ago. Tub O’ Gold was a big seller back in those days.
So, I asked my new boss, who was a lot more serious about taking care of pools than me and my buddy had been, why most of the pools had those tiny rust stains on the plaster near the returns. In those days, almost all plaster was white, and that made those rust spots really stand out.
His eyes started to roll back in his head until all you could see were the whites, and drool slipped out of the corner of his mouth. His hands began to tremble and I got the coffee cup out of his grip just in time, and he collapsed backward into his chair, gasping for breath. His mouth gaped open and I knew I was witnessing a man in the throes of a heart attack or someone about to Speak in Tongues.
Instead, he said, "Well, you see, it’s because these sons-o-bitchess who build pools for a living sell heaters on the cheap and won’t pop an extra hundred bucks for bronze headers. And the sons-o-bitches who build the heaters shouldn’t be sellin’ them damn cast iron headers to begin with. By God, I’ll tell you what, they oughta take the whole lot of them crooked bastards out and..."
Perhaps you begin to see where I learned to be, shall we say, critical of our industry.
My old Mentor taught me lots that morning, and lots more as the months went by. Once he saw that I was interested, he would take time out of his day every now and then to show me this and teach me that.
Like that day. He explained that the problem with cast iron headers is that they’re made of cast iron. Even though they have a ceramic coating over the internal waterways, they’re still made of cast iron. You know. Iron. Of Iron Oxide fame. Rust.
Problem being that cast iron and ceramic have a different expansion/contraction coefficient when heated and cooled. Pretty much cast iron expands and contracts, and ceramic doesn’t. Eventually, the ceramic cracks, them flakes away, exposes the cast iron to corrosive chlorinated pool water. The cast iron rusts, flakes away and gets blown into the pool via the returns, where it settles to the bottom and sets to making rust stains.
That’s all water under the bridge these days. Now all the heaters have space age polymer headers. Pretty much, anyway. And I think the few cast iron headers left are internally coated with a resin epoxy that expands and contracts along with the cast iron. And the rest are bronze.
But getting back to the pre-polymer, pre-resin/epoxy days.
When I left my old Mentor’s shop and went out on my own, I knew that when I got a chance to sell a heater, the only thing I was going to sell was a heater with bronze headers. No cast iron for me or my customers.
To me, that made sense. The builder might have screwed the customer by starting them out with cast iron headers, but there was no reason I had to perpetuate the situation by repeating that mistake when it came time for a new heater. In the builder’s defense, maybe he’d just been living under a rock somewhere and hadn’t noticed that every remodel he went to bid on had funny little rust stains clustered around all the returns, or maybe he’d never had a single conversation with a pool cleaner in his life and so really didn’t have much of a feel for what a pool looked like a year and a day after it was built, or maybe he just figured that the ceramic got him through a one year warranty and the heck with what happened on day 366.
My idea was, sell them a heater with bronze headers and a light acid wash, or new plaster if they were due, and you made it all better.
So, finally, my phone rang one day and it was one of my customer’s wanting a new heater. She was tired of just looking at the spa part of her pool/spa and wanted to start using it again. I told her my story about cast iron versus bronze and told her to just look at the stains in her pool to see what I talking about. She did and came back to the phone - they had cords on them back in the olden days - and signed up for the whole program; the heater with bronze headers and the acid wash.
Imagine my surprise when I walked into the supplier next morning and asked them to load up a 400,000 BTU with bronze headers onto my truck and they looked at me and said, "Oh, bronze headers. That’s a special order. We don’t stock those. Everybody just sells cast iron."
"Even though cast iron rusts and blows chunks back in the pool after a couple of seasons?" I asked.
"Yeah. You want a heater today or not?"
I puzzled over that for a long time. I mean years. And I suppose I still do. Because none of it made any sense to me.
Cast iron headers weren’t as good as bronze headers, because they had that problem of eventually breaking down and blowing rust chunks into the pool. Granted, not a huge problem in the grand scheme of things. Just some small rust stains on the plaster finish. The heater still worked just fine. I mean, I never heard anybody say, "Gosh, I can’t heat my pool because the interior waterways of my heater headers are rusty".
But in my mind, it was still a problem. It was a misrepresentation, plain and simple. It was a manufacturer saying, "this ceramic coating works and it will continue to work for the anticipated life of this heater". When in fact, they knew that within a couple of years, it was going to start blowing rust chunks into the pool and marring an otherwise beautiful plaster finish.
It’s like knowing you have a problem going in, and knowing that the cost to fix the problem once it starts occurring isn’t going to be cheap - front and rear headers being just about the most costly parts to replace on a heater - and choosing to inflict the problem on your customer anyway.
It’s just like saying, "We’re a cheap company, with shoddy engineering practices and you can’t trust what we say".
Or, if you’re the builder, it’s just like saying, "I’m selling you equipment that’s built on the cheap, and as long as it makes it through the warranty period, then I’m home free".
And as harsh as that may sound, that is exactly the perspective that homeowners who have accomplished enough in life to be able to afford a pool think about you when, two years after the sale, their weekly pool cleaner guy tells them that the reason they have a bunch of stains on their plaster is because, even though bronze headers were available, the heater company chose to use cast iron, and the builder saved a hundred bucks or so and made a conscious decision to saddle them with the cheap headers.
In fact, their perception is even worse than that, because up until it’s explained to them how easily the problem could have been avoided - spending an extra couple of hundred bucks up front on a thirty-five thousand dollar swimming pool - most of them had been pleasantly surprised to find that the pool industry wasn’t the fly-by-nightmare experience that all their friends had warned them it was.
And then their pool guy tells them about the rusty headers and they nod and start to feel just like the guys at the office said they would, the guys who warned them that it would happen, that they would get screwed. It just took the screwing a couple of years to show up.
Why did we keep selling those heaters with cast iron headers? Is it because we just got so used to looking at those rust stains as we came up through the ranks from pool cleaner to repairman to remodeler to builder that we just accepted that those stains were part and parcel to having a pool and having a heater? Is it because we were afraid our customers would balk at the upcharge for bronze, even if we explained to them why they ought to get it?
I don’t know.
But I do know this. The Big Three can’t field a product that’s bad for your customers unless you help them. You may say that’s not true. You may say that they can advertise right around you and create the buzz that has your customers asking you for this or that product. And that’s true.
But you’re the Gatekeeper. If you say, "I wouldn’t buy that, and here’s the reasons why. Oh, and I have pictures in my office I can e-mail to you, too," then they’re going to believe you.
Because every time I ever told a customer about cast iron headers, when it came time to buy the next heater, they always bought bronze.
Like salt systems. If you have pools with damaged coping, take a digital photo and blow it up to 8 X 10 and show it to people when they ask for salt. If they want soft water, tell them to buy sodium tetraborate. If they’re tired of red eyes, and they have ten kids, tell them to buy a bucket of non-chlorine shock and shock the pool twice a week in the swimming season.
Soon enough, you’re going to need to have some answers for your customers about these salt systems. My customers with the weathered limestone and the ruined decks and the one with the dead pecan tree? What do you think I say to them when they ask me, "Why would they sell me this thing if they knew this was going to happen?"
Right now, all I can do is give them the old civil service salute and say, "I hate to admit it but... It’s the Pool Business".
Kinda like, "We have met the Enemy, and He is Us."
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Welcome to The Caveat Emptorium
Funny, huh? You know, Caveat Emptor, Let The Buyer Beware... I know. Never explain jokes. But doesn’t it just conjure up images of a big box store, replete with lights and calliope music and chock full of dubious gadgets and services being hocked by those same carny barkers that run the midway at the state fair?
I can see it now. There’s the Gypsy greeter who meets you at the door with a smile and a wave and then tries to pick your pocket when you walk by. Next up is his wife, Desdemona; Pet Psychic. There’s a booth that sells waterless cookware for drought stricken countries. Another guy sells flood insurance that doesn’t cover wind driven water or storm insurance that doesn’t cover floods, choose one and only one please. Then there’s the guy in the gray flannel suit selling shares of Enron stock. "Ten shares for a penny!" he cries. "You never know when it might come roaring back!"
You can drop your children off at Caveat Emptorium’s Free Day Care, where they can bob for apples in the piranha tank, play Russian Roulette with a single shot pistol, or sign up for swimming lessons at the shark tank.
And, yes folks, you guessed it, no need to worry about the kiddies having those red, runny eyes after cheating death and learning the backstroke because... wait for it... we’re using salt water.
I thought this week we ought to try to look on the bright side of salt systems. Let’s start with the manufacturer’s claims.
"Enjoy sparkling clean water, naturally and automatically. Never buy, mix or measure chlorine again. No more red eyes or itchy skin. No chemical smell. Just pure, clear water for day after day of fun in the sun."
That’s a quote off a marketing brochure. Let’s talk about that statement.
The Way Salt Works:
I bought this book a while ago, called Pool Chlorination Facts, by Robert W. Lowery. I love this book. If you don’t have it, and you have anything to do with taking care of the water quality of pools, you ought to get it. He’s a really smart guy who writes like a regular person. You may have already read his stuff without knowing it. If you ever took the IPSSA water chemistry exam and read those three handbooks they give out to prep for it, then you’ve read his work.
He talks about three types of chlorine generators; the brine system - or the portable bomb as I like to call it, the in-line system, and the in-pool system. Most everything we see in the field these days is the in-line system.
What I got from reading his description of in-line systems is that as the salty water passes through the cell, DC current is applied to it, and that causes three things to be formed; chlorine gas, caustic soda and hydrogen gas.
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 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. You ask the reps why and they shrug their shoulders and tell you that your meds must need tweaking because "our system only produces pH neutral chlorine. It has be something you’re doing wrong because we’re your friends and we would never lie to you."
So, you add gallons and gallons of acid trying to neutralize this skyrocketing pH, which if you read your handbook, Guide to pH, Alkalinity, Water Testing & Water Balance, you know that all that acid is burning off your Total Alkalinity. So, then you start adding DE scoops of baking soda - oh, excuse me, let me put my sales and marketing hat on... ahem... I mean Total Alkalinity Control, $18.99 a twelve pound box - and you’re stuck in this vicious loop of trying to maintain the 80 to 120 ppm Total Alkalinity that our industry preaches to you. But the pH of the baking soda you’re adding is 8.3, or eight times more base than the proper pH of pool water. So, again, you’re raising the pH. So, you pour more acid...
Hmmm... What’s wrong with this picture?
If your calcium hardness is 300 ppm and your water temperature is 88 (pretty common in August around here) and you know your pH is going to be 8.0 before you get back next week, then use your watergram and tell me where your Total Alkalinity ought to be. It lines up at about 22 ppm. Now, you’re going to adjust the water to 7.5 while you’re there. So, what’s the Total Alkalinity supposed to be for 7.5? 70 ppm.
You need to add a few points to it because I don’t think they took 3,500 ppm TDS (salt plus everything else) into account when they built your watergram.
Same example except now it’s dead of winter and the water temp is 45. The watergram lines up at 50 ppm Total Alkalinity at 8.0 and 155 ppm at 7.5
Plug in your own calcium hardness and your own high and low water temps for your region and do the math.
But wait. This can’t be right. Go to the inside door of the salt system controller. Right there it says to keep Total Alkalinity between 80 and 120 ppm and the manufacturer’s rep already told you that they’re your friends and they would never lie to you. So, we’re back to adjusting your meds.
You see, in the textbook world of The Way Salt Works, pH isn’t increased when the chlorine is made, because the hydrogen gas didn’t gas off. So the manufacturers didn’t have to put any money toward research that would promulgate new and unique guidelines for salt pools. Because it wouldn’t have sounded nearly as good saying "Never buy, mix or measure chlorine again", if they’d had to tack on, "But, boy, are you ever gonna need a buttload of acid and baking soda and a way more sophisticated test kit than that measly little two-way tester you got away with when you were using tablets. Now you have to learn about calcium levels because if you don’t, that pH swing inherent in our system is going to rip right through that pretty plaster of yours. If we don’t scale it with high pH and high Total Alkalinity when you try to follow current water chemistry guidelines, then we’ll burn holes in it with low pH and low Total Alkalinity when you only do half the job and just adjust pH, because at the lower Total Alkalinities, there won’t be as much buffer and so when you do your acid demand test and read off the table how much acid to add, it’ll have a more drastic effect on the pH than you anticipated because the table was computed with industry standard 80 to 120 Total Alkalinity in mind ...".
Sorry. I got carried away. My point is that salt pools are a different animal than tablet pools. Standing there and saying that they’re not, when even the pool cleaners know that they are, just gives guys like me more ammunition to point out that the Emperor Has No Clothes and he’s a liar to boot.
So where else was this rambling screed going? Oh, yes. I was supposed to enumerate the good things about salt systems...
Oh, yeah! Here’s one.
You know how some of the manufacturers call the mode that forces the system to maximum output for 24 hours Super Chlorinate? Well, that’s a lie. But the good news is, it’s only half a lie. Or some part of a lie. How much of a lie depends on how much Combined Chlorine is in your pool and where the salt system output is when you turn on Super Chlorinate.
For example, if you’re running your system at 100% output and you flick on Super Chlorinate, the system will produce at 100%. Hmmm... That’s not going to work.
But, if you’re running your system at 20%, and with water temp and swimmer load and debris load and every other load, that 20% setting produces 2 ppm Free Available Chlorine for you, but your Total Chlorine is 2.5 ppm, which means that 0.5 is Combined Chlorine and you need 7 to 10 times the level of Combined Chlorine to get to Breakpoint and burn it out, then going to Super Chlorinate for 24 hours, in this example, will create 8 ppm more Free Available Chlorine. Somewhere around 5 ppm Free Available Chlorine, you’ll hit Breakpoint and burn out that 0.5 Combined Chlorine, leaving you with 5 ppm Free Available Chlorine. Maybe. As you can see, this is an exact science.
So, how do they get away with labeling the switch Super Chlorinate? Because it’s just an industry term. It has no definition beyond what the user gives it. It may mean something to you as a pool professional. But that doesn’t mean they can’t redefine it to mean "produce at 100% capacity for 24 hours".
That way, they can say, "Never buy, mix or measure chlorine again" Which is way easier than saying, "Never buy, mix or measure chlorine again... as long as you never have to run your salt system at a level that precludes achieving an output 7 to 10 times your level of Combined Chlorine".
And that is a look on the bright side of salt systems. Caveat Emptor.
Funny, huh? You know, Caveat Emptor, Let The Buyer Beware... I know. Never explain jokes. But doesn’t it just conjure up images of a big box store, replete with lights and calliope music and chock full of dubious gadgets and services being hocked by those same carny barkers that run the midway at the state fair?
I can see it now. There’s the Gypsy greeter who meets you at the door with a smile and a wave and then tries to pick your pocket when you walk by. Next up is his wife, Desdemona; Pet Psychic. There’s a booth that sells waterless cookware for drought stricken countries. Another guy sells flood insurance that doesn’t cover wind driven water or storm insurance that doesn’t cover floods, choose one and only one please. Then there’s the guy in the gray flannel suit selling shares of Enron stock. "Ten shares for a penny!" he cries. "You never know when it might come roaring back!"
You can drop your children off at Caveat Emptorium’s Free Day Care, where they can bob for apples in the piranha tank, play Russian Roulette with a single shot pistol, or sign up for swimming lessons at the shark tank.
And, yes folks, you guessed it, no need to worry about the kiddies having those red, runny eyes after cheating death and learning the backstroke because... wait for it... we’re using salt water.
I thought this week we ought to try to look on the bright side of salt systems. Let’s start with the manufacturer’s claims.
"Enjoy sparkling clean water, naturally and automatically. Never buy, mix or measure chlorine again. No more red eyes or itchy skin. No chemical smell. Just pure, clear water for day after day of fun in the sun."
That’s a quote off a marketing brochure. Let’s talk about that statement.
The Way Salt Works:
I bought this book a while ago, called Pool Chlorination Facts, by Robert W. Lowery. I love this book. If you don’t have it, and you have anything to do with taking care of the water quality of pools, you ought to get it. He’s a really smart guy who writes like a regular person. You may have already read his stuff without knowing it. If you ever took the IPSSA water chemistry exam and read those three handbooks they give out to prep for it, then you’ve read his work.
He talks about three types of chlorine generators; the brine system - or the portable bomb as I like to call it, the in-line system, and the in-pool system. Most everything we see in the field these days is the in-line system.
What I got from reading his description of in-line systems is that as the salty water passes through the cell, DC current is applied to it, and that causes three things to be formed; chlorine gas, caustic soda and hydrogen gas.
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 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. You ask the reps why and they shrug their shoulders and tell you that your meds must need tweaking because "our system only produces pH neutral chlorine. It has be something you’re doing wrong because we’re your friends and we would never lie to you."
So, you add gallons and gallons of acid trying to neutralize this skyrocketing pH, which if you read your handbook, Guide to pH, Alkalinity, Water Testing & Water Balance, you know that all that acid is burning off your Total Alkalinity. So, then you start adding DE scoops of baking soda - oh, excuse me, let me put my sales and marketing hat on... ahem... I mean Total Alkalinity Control, $18.99 a twelve pound box - and you’re stuck in this vicious loop of trying to maintain the 80 to 120 ppm Total Alkalinity that our industry preaches to you. But the pH of the baking soda you’re adding is 8.3, or eight times more base than the proper pH of pool water. So, again, you’re raising the pH. So, you pour more acid...
Hmmm... What’s wrong with this picture?
If your calcium hardness is 300 ppm and your water temperature is 88 (pretty common in August around here) and you know your pH is going to be 8.0 before you get back next week, then use your watergram and tell me where your Total Alkalinity ought to be. It lines up at about 22 ppm. Now, you’re going to adjust the water to 7.5 while you’re there. So, what’s the Total Alkalinity supposed to be for 7.5? 70 ppm.
You need to add a few points to it because I don’t think they took 3,500 ppm TDS (salt plus everything else) into account when they built your watergram.
Same example except now it’s dead of winter and the water temp is 45. The watergram lines up at 50 ppm Total Alkalinity at 8.0 and 155 ppm at 7.5
Plug in your own calcium hardness and your own high and low water temps for your region and do the math.
But wait. This can’t be right. Go to the inside door of the salt system controller. Right there it says to keep Total Alkalinity between 80 and 120 ppm and the manufacturer’s rep already told you that they’re your friends and they would never lie to you. So, we’re back to adjusting your meds.
You see, in the textbook world of The Way Salt Works, pH isn’t increased when the chlorine is made, because the hydrogen gas didn’t gas off. So the manufacturers didn’t have to put any money toward research that would promulgate new and unique guidelines for salt pools. Because it wouldn’t have sounded nearly as good saying "Never buy, mix or measure chlorine again", if they’d had to tack on, "But, boy, are you ever gonna need a buttload of acid and baking soda and a way more sophisticated test kit than that measly little two-way tester you got away with when you were using tablets. Now you have to learn about calcium levels because if you don’t, that pH swing inherent in our system is going to rip right through that pretty plaster of yours. If we don’t scale it with high pH and high Total Alkalinity when you try to follow current water chemistry guidelines, then we’ll burn holes in it with low pH and low Total Alkalinity when you only do half the job and just adjust pH, because at the lower Total Alkalinities, there won’t be as much buffer and so when you do your acid demand test and read off the table how much acid to add, it’ll have a more drastic effect on the pH than you anticipated because the table was computed with industry standard 80 to 120 Total Alkalinity in mind ...".
Sorry. I got carried away. My point is that salt pools are a different animal than tablet pools. Standing there and saying that they’re not, when even the pool cleaners know that they are, just gives guys like me more ammunition to point out that the Emperor Has No Clothes and he’s a liar to boot.
So where else was this rambling screed going? Oh, yes. I was supposed to enumerate the good things about salt systems...
Oh, yeah! Here’s one.
You know how some of the manufacturers call the mode that forces the system to maximum output for 24 hours Super Chlorinate? Well, that’s a lie. But the good news is, it’s only half a lie. Or some part of a lie. How much of a lie depends on how much Combined Chlorine is in your pool and where the salt system output is when you turn on Super Chlorinate.
For example, if you’re running your system at 100% output and you flick on Super Chlorinate, the system will produce at 100%. Hmmm... That’s not going to work.
But, if you’re running your system at 20%, and with water temp and swimmer load and debris load and every other load, that 20% setting produces 2 ppm Free Available Chlorine for you, but your Total Chlorine is 2.5 ppm, which means that 0.5 is Combined Chlorine and you need 7 to 10 times the level of Combined Chlorine to get to Breakpoint and burn it out, then going to Super Chlorinate for 24 hours, in this example, will create 8 ppm more Free Available Chlorine. Somewhere around 5 ppm Free Available Chlorine, you’ll hit Breakpoint and burn out that 0.5 Combined Chlorine, leaving you with 5 ppm Free Available Chlorine. Maybe. As you can see, this is an exact science.
So, how do they get away with labeling the switch Super Chlorinate? Because it’s just an industry term. It has no definition beyond what the user gives it. It may mean something to you as a pool professional. But that doesn’t mean they can’t redefine it to mean "produce at 100% capacity for 24 hours".
That way, they can say, "Never buy, mix or measure chlorine again" Which is way easier than saying, "Never buy, mix or measure chlorine again... as long as you never have to run your salt system at a level that precludes achieving an output 7 to 10 times your level of Combined Chlorine".
And that is a look on the bright side of salt systems. Caveat Emptor.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Res Ipsa Loquitur
I have always held that every event in life - every action, every thought, every feeling - has already been played out in a movie somewhere. And if you’ve seen too many movies - like I have - then as your life unspools, the scenes of your life seem to play out as re-enactments from this or that movie.
This week, I’m blessed with playing Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward to the elusive Baboosa’s Deep Throat. Remember? Hal Holbrook’s parking garage freak? Then again, maybe I’m Dustin Hoffman in this scene. Because, unlike Woodward, I don’t know who Baboosa is. I just know he comes in the night and whispers in my ear.
“Galvanic corrosion.”
“Zinc Chloride.”
“Follow the money... What’s that noise? Are you sure you weren’t followed? ” and when I look back, he’s gone.
So, this week, we’re chasing leads to see where zinc chloride takes us, and learning lots along the way. I’m reminded of a much younger - nineteen year old - Navy Guy me, with my buddy, Tee Newman, crawling around in the slippery, slimy free flood areas to inspect the Zincs while we were in dry dock. I remember not even being sure what it was we were supposed to be looking for. But Tee had inspected Zincs before. You see, Tee lived and thrived in the rarified air that the Navy reserved for screw-ups. He always got jobs like this. I was pretty new to screwing up, but I was finding it to be a comfortable, less hurried place to be. Like this Zinc job. It may have been slimy and nasty, but once we disappeared into the free flood, as far as our Chief was concerned, we were out of sight and out of mind. And to Tee’s way of thinking, out of sight and out of mind was where he planned on us staying the rest of the day.
The vague directions the Chief had given us were that if the Zincs looked too corroded, then we were to put in a work order to get them replaced. We took chisels and mallets with us to scrape and pound the white clumps off the big Zincs so we could see how much metal was left under all the corrosion.
Ah, yes. The white clumps. I remember Tee telling me, “Don’t get any of that white stuff in your eyes. It burns like a....” Well, you know. Swear like a sailor, and all that. And when we got down to it, there were lots of white clumps. Lots and lots of white clumps. It turned what I thought was going to be an easy, cruise kind of day into an itchy, scratchy, crappy kind of day that had me rethinking the merits of Screwing Up versus Doing What You’re Told.
The reason it turned into an itchy, scratchy kind of day and the reason Tee cautioned me about getting the white clumps in my eyes is because zinc chloride has a pH of anywhere from 1.8 to 4.0, depending on which Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) you look up. Here’s a couple I found online:
http://www.zaclon.com/pdf/zinc_chloride_granular_msds.pdf (This one says 1.8, )
http://physchem.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/ZI/zinc_chloride.html (This one says 4.0)
So, it’s either 1000 times more acidic than pool water, or 100,000 times more acidic, depending on which MSDS you believe. Tri-chlor tabs are 2.8 pH, or about 10,000 times more acidic than pool water, to give you a point of reference.
Neither of those numbers would be anything I’d want growing in my pump pots, though. It would be like putting tri-chlor tabs in the pump pot. Growing is what the zinc chloride does, by the way. As near as I can understand it, the zinc combines with the chloride and forms - you guessed it - zinc chloride crystals. The Wikipedia entry led me to the MSDS’s. The MSDS’s got me googling for zinc’s. And seeing the marine zincs made me remember that day in the free floods with Tee.
So, how do you always know where to point me, Baboosa? This goes deeper than I think, doesn’t it? Hmmm... didn’t Robert Redford say that about halfway through All The President’s Men?
Yes. Now I remember. Follow the Money. As true then as it is today. If you follow the money, you’ll see that the Big Three have dumped quite a few million dollars and staked their international reputations (read stock prices) on the success of salt systems. So, of course, they can’t admit that they, and we, have a growing problem.
I mean, I started out bitching about limestone degradation and DE filter tanks, and along the way I’ve discovered that it’s not just a little bit of a problem for a few select building materials and stainless steel.
I’ve learned that ALL METAL is at risk. And, so far, the manufacturer’s only fix for galvanic corrosion is to grow corrosive irritants in our pump pots.
I’ve learned that ALL STONE AND CONCRETE is affected. Plaster is a concrete... Right? White Portland Cement, if I’m not mistaken.
You think I’m just being dramatic? Look at this:
http://www.amazon.com/Stone-Architecture-Durability-Erhard-Winkler/dp/3540576266
This is a book, Stone In Architecture, by Erhard M. Winkler, with a wealth of information about stone. I was put onto this book not by Deep Throat, I mean, Baboosa, but by a Brother From A Different Mother, whose as sick and tired as I am about hearing what a boon salt is for all of us. It would seem to me that anybody who lays stone for a living, or anybody who sells pools where somebody has laid stone, ought to have this book in their library. But if you don’t, never fear. Amazon has added a new feature, called Amazon Online Reader. So, just log in to Amazon - create an account, you don’t have to buy anything - and then, on the web page for this book, enter the term Halite into the box in the Search This Book icon. Then, when the Amazon Online Reader opens up, click on the reference to page 166 and look at the chart on that page.
What you’re looking at is a chart that shows the different crystallization pressures of different salts. Look down the list to NaCl. That’s our salt. Notice how it’s crystallization pressure is nearly twice as much as the next nearest compound? Notice how it’s as much as eleven times more than some of those compounds?
So, what does that mean? Now I may get this wrong, because like I’ve said before, I’m just a pool cleaner. And so if any of you experts in this field want to put in your two cents worth via the comments section of this blog and correct any errors, please feel free. But even pool cleaners can read, and what I get from reading the text that supports this page is that when salt enters stone or concrete in a strong enough concentration, that it will begin to crystallize, causing “crystallization expansion”, exerting pressure on that stone or concrete. It results in damage like you see in the picture that accompanies this post. That picture is of a type of stone called silver mist. It seems to be somewhere between a sandstone and a flagstone - like Pennsylvania blue - in density. That stone was put in six months before the picture was taken. And the damage done to it is called “roof jacking” which is a different phenomenon that what I’ve seen with limestone and sandstone, where they just disintegrate.
Now, lets’ go back to what those manufacturer’s reps always tell us about why all of this is impossible. We’re only putting 3,000 to 4,000 parts per million (ppm) in pools, and salt isn’t corrosive in those concentrations. And even Winkler says that you need 36 grams per 100 milliliters of water for halite to start to crystalize at temps above freezing. That’s 360 grams per liter, and that’s 360,000 ppm. So, it would appear that they have a point, right?
But most of the damage occurs where water splashes out onto the stone or concrete. The water evaporates, but the salt is left behind, inside the stone. The next splash deposits another 3,000 to 4,000 ppm. And the next. And the next. So, in about a year, you have heavily saturated stone and concrete. About 36 grams per 100 milliliters, in fact. Enough for crystallization to begin and the damage to start.
But it gets worse. Winkler also points out that at temps below freezing, NaCl crystallizes as hydrohalite. “The crystallization of hydrohalite below freezing point can much accelerate the decay process of stone surfaces... despite much lower crystallization pressures than for halite.” That’s on page 167. Read it for yourself.
So, as you can see, we don’t even have to wait for the build up of salt through splash out if we just get one good cold snap. The hydrohalite (salty water) will freeze and burst the stone from the inside out. Just like those other science guys I quoted in my very first rant on this blog:
“The most remarkable feature of salt scaling is that the damage is absent if the pool contains pure water...(and that) ...salt scaling is a consequence of the fracture behavior of ice. The stress arises from thermal expansion mismatch between ice and concrete, which puts the ice in tension as the temperature drops.”
Winkler published his book in 1994. Most of the studies he cites in his research go back to the mid sixties. But for twelve years there’s been a definitive text out there detailing exactly what would happen to ALL STONE AND CONCRETE if you mixed salt and water.
Galvanic corrosion has been a known phenomenon since 1800, when Allesandro Volta (Volta... volts... get it?) invented the first battery.
How come a pool cleaner knows about these things and the Big Three don’t?
Because if they knew about it, they would have told you before they sold you these salt systems. Right? Wouldn’t they?
Who’s got your back now?
There’s a chill in the air. Halloween’s right around the corner. Before you know it, it’ll be winter. Are you sure you want to keep pouring that salt in those pools of yours?
And Res Ipsa Loquitur? The thing speaks for itself.
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