It's Still The Environment, Stupid, Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odd. Wouldn't you say?

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

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

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

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

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

It's Still The Environment, Stupid

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

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

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

As another fer’instance:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a Small Club, isn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven Point Five.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck with that.

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

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

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

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

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

The 2.6 Million Dollar Salt System (cont.)

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

EDIT:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you
Ron Krell Manager

Southland Leisure Centre # 159

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

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

But there's more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Green Pools - and other nonsense - In Florida

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She responded the same day:

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

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

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

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

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

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

She responded:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t you?

How To Use This Blog

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

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

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

How Salt Systems Don’t Work

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

I didn’t go.

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Salt system conducting electricity on handrails

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


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

Pool salt system conducting electricity

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

Stray electric current salt water pools

Zinc anode skimmer basket does it work

“Chlorine generator” “copper pipes”

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

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

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

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

From Day One.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck with that.