Stray Currents Are Still Dissolving Your Salt Swimming Pool




"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." – Upton Sinclair

I often get e-mails from Salt Reps. Often, they are not pleasant. I understand why. If I’m successful in getting the word out about how salt is destroying your pools, their world will have to change. They’ll have to get a new hustle. So I understand when the tone of their e-mails drifts over the line a bit.

Like Sean Assam at AutoPilot. He sent me a flurry of e-mails this week. You see, Sean’s convinced that an exploding salt cell I talked about some weeks ago blew up because of a water hammer in the in-floor cleaning system and not because of hydrogen gas buildup. And he’s been dogging me for more details about the incident. Not because he wants to help make Mr. Baker, the pool owner, whole again. It’s not Sean’s system that blew up. It’s because he wants to point out that the "Clearwater manual... cautions against operating over 29 psi (if I recall correctly). I'd say most in floor systems operate at 25 - 35 psi on a routine basis", then later, "AutoPilot does not have a clear body cell. We can handle and have been tested by NSF to 60 psi."

He did offer up one interesting side note on his way to pointing out this pressure sensitive Market Separator, "AGAIN, I'm not saying that it [hydrogen buildup and explosion] couldn't happen as I've seen the results of an exploded cartridge filter. The homeowner, who also happened to be the pool service contractor, admitted to installing the system incorrectly and causing the resulting damage. Basically he jumped out the flow switch rather than replacing it, lost prime and the rest was explosive."

I spent some time when I first got out of the Navy as a Logistics Engineer for a defense contractor. God-was-that-a-boring-job. It’s the main reason I ran away to the Pool Circus. But one of the things I studied as a logistics engineer were failure modes; all the different ways that a component, like a flow switch, can fail. Then we’d extrapolate what the results would be. I’ve done enough of that kind of forecasting to be able to say that there By God is at least one failure mode for that flow switch that will act the same as if it were bypassed (Sean’s jumped out). Something as simple as the contacts sticking together when the pump loses prime will make the system think that it’s supposed to keep operating.

So, there’s another Salt Rep on record admitting that salt chorine generators can explode.

You can read about the exploding chlorinator incident here:

http://thepoolbiz.blogspot.com/2007/02/boom-goes-salt-cell-this-weeks-blog.html

But the exploding chlorinator was really just cover for why he wrote to me this past week. I think perhaps he’d asked for one too many extra shots at the Starbucks drive thru, because once he’d built the pretense for the e-mail by asking again about the water hammer theory, he began ranting about last week’s Stray Currents blog piece:

"Why do you only give credibility to the dealer [sic] that have problems and blame salt... Why is there such merit given to a builder that blame [sic] salt for doing the damage to the bonding grids and causing electrolysis or causing the pool water to shock his customers because it has corroded the bonding grid???? What research was done to determine this? 15 years of researching the pools he's installed with salt systems? 200 pools/year x 15 years? WOW, that as much as 3000 salt systems! Why didn't this builder go out of business after 2 years of salt systems? What research did they do to evaluate the soil conditions? How much salt was in, or HOW ACIDIC was the soil to begin with? Where did they get all the salt from, the pool water from backwashing? [Pool Guy Note: Right here, Sean makes my case for me. I have been saying over and over again in this blog that backwashing your salt pool is going to have an adverse effect on your soil. If you can sorta read between the lines of his rant, you can see that what he’s saying is that backwashing your filter onto the ground around your pool is just as likely to create corrosive soil that did the damage to the bonding grid as Stray Currents. You have to wonder if it’s not because he’s seen that situation. But whether it’s Stray Currents or salty soil that caused the damage, getting rid of the salt system will fix the problem. The fact that Sean can’t see that goes back to Sinclair’s quote at the top of this blog piece. Now, back to Sean;] Where is the logic to your last blog's dealers letter blaming salt systems to corrode the electrical grids? I think you're getting tired or loosing [sic] your touch. Could this "builder" be decieving [sic] you with this letter? Apparently you've got his voltage charts to support his letter. Please realize that according to UL1081, we are not allowed to introduce stray voltage into the pool? [Akin to the quote, "Please be advised that as Captain of the SS Titanic, I am forbidden from hitting icebergs".] What is going from the positive electrode is routed to the negative electrode and not into the pool water or any other ground. This is not "electronically" the path of least resistance. Water is a POOR conductor of electricity. There is no tendency for the voltage to stray from the cell to the light ring, handrail or ladder, if the system is operated and bonded properly. The tendency is to find the nearest negative to discharge to, that's usually a inch away, on the negative electrode IN the cell."

Now, this last part about WATER BEING A POOR CONDUCTOR is the funniest thing anyone has ever said to me. While it is true that pure, deionized water won’t conduct electricity, this webpage, for anybody who bought Sean’s hooee and needs straightening out, will explain;

http://msnucleus.org/membership/html/k-6/wc/oceans/4/wcoc4_2a.html

I sited this reference before, in my second blog piece, Why Salt Sucks. It illustrates that "when a salt, like sodium chloride is dissolved in water, the sodium and chloride separate temporarily. The sodium atom will become a positively charged ion and the chloride atom will become a negatively charged ion. An ion is an atom or group of atoms that has a negative or positive electric charge. Negative ions are formed by atoms gaining electrons, and positive ions are formed by atoms losing electrons. Substances that conduct electric current are called electrolytes. They are formed as a result of a dissociation into positively and negatively charged particles called ions."

What this is, is a fourth grade science experiment designed to teach ten year olds "that the ions in the water make salt water an electrolyte. An electrolyte is a nonmetallic electric conductor in which a current is carried by the movement of ions". In the experiment, the children observe that as they begin to add salt to the water, the water begins to conduct electricity, and the light begins to glow. The more salt they add, the more brightly the light glows."

IT IS THE VERY ACT OF POURING SALT INTO YOUR POOL THAT MAKES ALL OF THESE THINGS OCCUR, BECAUSE BEFORE YOU PUT SALT INTO YOUR POOL, YOUR WATER WASN’T AN ELECTROLYTE. IT WAS JUST WATER.

Sorry for shouting. I just really want to get my point across to you about this. And I’m not shouting at Sean. I’ve accepted the truth in the statement, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." This enables him to believe that salty water is a poor conductor of electricity.

On the subject of stray currents, he had previously written that, "our manual also states that the installation should be performed by a licensed electrician, whom we assume should know to bond the equipment, so stray currents/voltage are not a problem... When a pool is not bonded properly, or if the installation of the salt system... is NOT installed according to the manufacturers instructions and the National Electric Code (NEC) guidelines, it may allow stray currents/voltage into the pool."

Now, you all need to stop and think about that. Who installed your salt system? Was it a licensed electrician? Or was it your pool man? Because if it was your pool man, then AutoPilot is off the hook if anything goes wrong. It says so right in their manual. And that is the point of that statement. To get them off the hook. And to drive that point home, Sean said in another e-mail, "...as a result of... any pool company being able to buy a salt system over the counter at their local distributor, and not knowing anything about it, reselling it to a pool owner. No training, no education, ignorance. It is a shame."

Pretty scathing indictment of pool supply distribution and local pool companies. Wouldn’t you say? That’s you, Pool Guys. That’s you he’s talking about. Did you know that if you don’t have a licensed electrician do the work, then you’re on your own if anything goes wrong?

On the subject of salt’s corrosivity, he wrote, "as I sweat (which can be up to 9000 ppm salinity) on my elliptical trainer, I don't bother to wipe it down everytime, [sic] so is my persiration, [sic] which also evaporates leaving a high salinity behind, causing corrosion to the metal frame of my elliptical device? I haven't seen any."

So, in Sean’s World, salty sweat isn’t corrosive. All of you Gym Rats out there can tell him different. Right? You’ve all seen the corroded metal from that very thing.

He’s also the fellow who wrote to me and said, "I have to admit and thank you though, as you are causing me to reflect on what I present in my seminars, and am forcing me to research more of the ‘facts’ related to salt levels, such as: EPA standards for the taste threshold for chloride is 250 ppm (I neven [sic] knew this). Although I've also found other sites where it states the salt taste threshold for humans are as low as 50 ppm or as much as 1000 ppm. I've been stating it to be 3500 ppm for years."

Odd. His references tell him that the taste threshold is anywhere from 50 to 1000 ppm, but it’s convenient to use 3500 ppm in training seminars because... hmm, let’s see... could it be because that’s the upper threshold for operating his salt system?

On the subject of the lie that all the salt system manufacturer’s tell that you’ll "Never Have To Buy Chlorine Again", Sean qualifies the lie thus; "To support our marketing statement, if you're producing your own chlorine, why buy chlorine again? Regarding never having to shock your pool again, our Owners Manual states that you may occasionally have to shock your pool, page 12 under chemistry, and page 16 under troubleshooting. Although we recommend a non-chlorine shock (MPS), there's no reason why a chlorine shock should not be used, but using monopersulfate certainly allows the statement to be correct in never having to buy chlorine again, even to shock."

The thing that makes it okay to say "Never Buy Chlorine Again" is that they want you to buy the more expensive non-chlorine shock instead.

So there’s that.

The first time Sean wrote to me, I responded by saying "I don't think we can have much of a dialogue". But he persisted. And he vacillated between being insulting and rude - like the rant that opened this blog piece - to apologetic, like "I apologize for the ‘nasty’ tone of my e-mail" - his very next correspondence, as a matter of fact. But in the end, he wrote, "I think our communication has disintegrated" and swore never to write to me again, sorta like, "well, you won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more".

These are the people who are selling you salt systems. Makes you want to run right out and switch over to salt, doesn’t it?

Res Ipsa Loquitur.