Pool & Spa News reports that people are already taking exception to the NPIRC/IPSSA report on how hard it is to take care of salt pools with weekly service visits. The crux of their complaint is that IPSSA used the wrong Total Alkalinity standard for their testing because salt chlorine generators are a base type sanitizer, so a lower Total Alkalinity should have been used for testing.
IPPSA responded by pretty much rolling over, beating their breast, crying, "We're sorry!", and swearing it'll never happen again. Here's what they said; "We didn’t really take total alkalinity into account," (I just can't believe anyone would ever allow themselves to be quoted saying that) "and we should have... For all our calculations, we were working from the IPSSA point of view and based our figures on IPSSA’s general alkalinity, pH and hardness recommendations. I admit we didn’t test any further than those.”
What they should have said was, "You people have been lying in all of your advertising for all of these years that your salt based chlorine generators produce a 'pH neutral' chlorine - not a base type chlorine - and so we tested your sorry salt boxes based on the claims made in your own ads. You've been building and selling these machines in mass quantities for the last 8 or 10 years and never once did any of you do a minute of research into these questions, leaving it up to non-profits and not-for-profits to do the testing that you, as allegedly responsible manufacturers, should have done before the first unit went out the factory door. Builders and service folks have been crying for guidance for years on this technology and all you've done is obfuscate, mislead and misdirect, changing your mind more often than Italy changed governments in the sixties, never once setting forth concrete water chemistry guidelines for your own equipment, and then repeatedly denied salt damage to stone and metals. And now you send out the same old 'aquarium-laboratory-in-the-garage guys' to throw rocks at us."
But they didn't. Search me why.
