Proof That Builder Not Playing With Full Deck Emerges

Yep. You guessed it. The Pool Guy Rides Again. Hi Ho, Silver, and all that...

Reason I just can't keep quiet is on full display in these two photos. Take a look and tell me, "what's wrong with these photos"?

Yes. That's a Coates Electric Heater.















And yes, that's an Intellichlor Salt Cell plumbed into the outlet of that Coates Electric Heater.














Still see nothing wrong with this? Okay. Let's try doing a little light reading (you're gonna have to click on the Limited Warranty to make it big enough to read. Here's a little hint; skip down to item 4 on the Coates Heater Limited Warranty):




Isn't that funny? A builder intentionally built a spa and used a Coates stainless steel electric heater with a Intellichlor salt system big enough for at least a 15,000 gallon pool, which automatically voided the warranty on the Coates electric heater.

Why would he do that, you may ask. Especially when he's building that spa for a guy who can afford all of this:





























Truth is, he built a reflecting pool on the other terrace of this guy's penthouse. Built it in the same style as the spa, with the big glass walls and - yep, you guessed it - a salt system. He sold him another Intellichlor salt system for a six inch deep basin of water that no one even wades in. And guess what material he used for the corners to join the glass panels on both the spa and the reflecting pool?
























That's right. Once again, our Intrepid Builder used stainless steel. Because if it's good enough for the electric heater folks, it's good enough... Hey, wait a minute. Something's not right here. It's NOT good enough for the heater folks. In fact, they denied the warranty claim on the failed and leaking heat exchanger the minute they saw that salt cell plumbed in line. And maybe that's why the reflecting pool lost watertight integrity at one of those stainless steel corners and leaked out and down and through the deck and then through the ceiling of the penthouse below. And of course there was an automatic water leveler on the reflecting pool so no one put two and two together for awhile on where the water was coming from.

Imagine that phone call...

Ring... Ring... "Hello.. Yeah, this is (owner of penthouse upstairs from the flooding penthouse). Who's this? Maintenance? Yeah, what can I do for you? No. I'm not leaking any water up here. I'm good to go. No, my reflecting pool's just fine... What's that? How do I know it's fine? Because the water level is the same as it always is, that's how I know it's just fine."


Now, anyone who's read very many of my blog posts knows that I'm somewhat less than forgiving when so-called Pool & Spa Professionals make bone-head mistakes like this. I figure if you're gonna advertise your services as Pro Builder, then Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride. And in this case, if this was all that was wrong, I'd say it's just a moron who knows squat about equipment, material and salt compatibility, even though every trade journal and even some manufacturers have been saying for years that you need to READ THE FU&%$G DIRECTIONS, especially the Limited Warranties - hence the term LIMITED warranty - before you spec a project that's going to include salt.

But this guy holds a special place in my heart, because in addition to all of these money grubbing, bone headed moves, he sold two - count 'em; two - complete Intellitouch control systems: One for the spa (okay, I'll buy that) and one for the reflecting pool...

Yes, that's right. One for the reflecting pool. The one that doesn't do anything but... well, reflect.

And so it goes....

Stray Currents Are Still Destroying Your Pool... and Spa... Especially Your Heater

Got this great comment today from PFLOVING in response to one of my first posts, in October '06, Why Salt Sucks. I didn't want it to just be buried in the comments so I'm creating a post just for it:

Found this blog and boy u guys are onto something. I too am battling this question on corrosion. here is my story. I have a hot tub with a swg eco spa generator. Made it one year and the inline heater started to show signs of corrosion around the heater terminal. It was replaced and my pool guy placed a zinc anode disc in the strainer basket and ran a copper wire to the bonding/ground terminal on the side of the balboa heater box. In 3 months the heater was toast. The stainless turned into a rusty dripy mess. The thought was that the swg was putting out too much clorine and maybe aggressive water since he had installed lots of these swg's without very many problems in our area. I questioned the bonding that was done from Coleman since it wasn't a contiuous wire linking all the pumps and heater together. So that heater was replaced and all the bonding was tightened down the way Coleman had installed it since most connections were very loose and dielectric grease placed on those connections. 2 months later now the new heater is destroyed....eaten up. He doesn't know what to think but I know it is stray current in salt water and dissimiar metals causing this. I also think, from my research, that the titanium plates and the stainless in the heater are reacting. The zinc anode goes uneffected since its not bonded to anything, at least thats my thought. One person in the industry suggested to bond everything together but don't hook that bond up to ground or back to the house panel as this is where you get stray current. This way everything is at the same potential. Also hook the zinc anode to the bond wire which it will complete that circuit and the zinc should dissolve and not the stainless heater. Thoughts?

PF: thanks for the great comment!

And, yes. I have quite a few thoughts on this subject. Your description of the problem fits in exactly with what I've come to believe about salt pools; if there is any Stray Current on the grid, proper bonding and salty water will amplify it's damage. Not to say that every electrical appliance attached to a pool shouldn't be properly bonded. They absolutely should be. That's how we keep people safe in water that is filtered, circulated, sanitized and illuminated via electrical devices; through proper bonding.

That's why I can't say that your idea of creating a separate bonding grid for your spa is a good one; because I don't think it would meet code. Check with an electrician in your area to be sure. But the last thing you want to do is to compromise your bonding where water and people are involved. And you may say that you're just creating a separate grid from the other, so it will be safe and isolated from the problems. But if anyone gets hurt, all that will matter is that you may have violated code to try to create a less susceptible bonding grid.

Second, Ground is Ground the World 'Round. Driving a new rod into the ground a few yards away from where your house's bonding rod is doesn't change much. If there are Stray Currents in the vicinity, they will be felt on your new grid as well.

Any electricians out there who want to contribute here, I'd appreciate it. I think my logic is right on this, but I invite everyone's input.

Having said all that; the fact that your second heater failed faster than your first heater AFTER you cleaned up the bonding indicates that the better the bonding for the appliance, the more susceptible it will be to Stray Current Corrosion. IF there is any Stray Current on the grid, it will be amplified by the highly conductive salt water and the cleaned up bonding grid will present even less resistance and a more conductive path to the equipment, in this case your heater.

So, the issue becomes one of either getting rid of the amplifier (salty water) or troubleshooting the grid to isolate and eliminate the sources of the Stray Currents. Here's a link to a story from a pool builder, Rod Ogilve, who had a similar problem with Stray Currents. It's a thread over at the APSP website about salt pools and what the builders think of them. Scroll down to his post that starts, "at the risk of sounding like another salt blast..." It is very applicable to your problem. After that, scroll through the whole thread while you're there. There's lots of great Horror Show pictures of salt damage to pools.

Also, take a look at this post; The Trouble With Heater. Scroll down until you get to the part in italics. it's the latest update to the Never Ending Saga of trying to find a pool heater that plays well with salt. So far, none do.

My best advice is take the salt system off your spa, use a little Twenty Mule Team Borax to soften the water and forget all your problems with Stray Current Corrosion. Or spend hundreds of dollars on electricians to find out that your neighbor two blocks away has a bad sump pump.

Good luck with your spa!

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 Tide Has Turned

I was in two backyards these last few weeks, bidding weekly cleaning service for brand new pools, and in both instances the owners asked me whatever happened to salt systems? Said they were surprised when they found out that the builders they got bids from weren’t offering it any more, and when they asked around the office, they were surprised to find that they had tapped into a real vein of anger from folks they knew who had salt systems and last year were talking about how great they were and this year were beginning to suffer the consequences that are normal with a salt pool a couple of years down the road. They felt lucky they had dodged the bullet and wanted to know what I thought of salt.

Try to guess what I told them.

Then, I ran into another relatively new pool owner – her pool is four months old. I was there to bid weekly cleaning service because she was ready to fire her present pool service company. The reason she was upset is that she’d watched her beautiful dark green plaster turn to chalky white all across the bottom of her pool in the four months since startup. The pool service company owner is telling her that’s “normal mottling”. I call it scaling. She showed me one of the cards they left after the last cleaning service. It detailed what they’d done to clean the pool, the water conditions they’d observed and the chemicals they’d used to balance the pool. Right there on the card, it said that the pH was 7.8, and that they’d added 3 lbs. of cal hypo to shock her pool. They added no acid to balance the pH or counteract the effect of 3 lbs. of 11.8 pH cal hypo. Do that every other week for four months on a salt pool with new plaster and tell me what you get.

There was a symmetry to her initial selection of the pool service company that she was about to fire. They came recommended by the pool builder. Now, this builder sold her about 110 feet of beautiful travertine coping, a diving board with a metal stand, and a salt system to go with all that. And, before you ask; no, he’s not retarded. The proof is he didn’t sell her a stainless steel filter tank. But that’s the only proof I could find.

The oddest thing is this builder recently went out on his own after many years as a project manager for a very large area builder. That very large area builder had even stopped selling salt for awhile, and only went back to selling it on those jobs where they couldn’t talk the customer out of it and only after the customer signed a damage waiver. So, it’s not like this guys could have missed the memo.

The diving board stand has been replaced once already. The second one is already beginning to rust. The travertine coping around the spa is already starting to pit from the bubbler water feature in the center of the spa creating the standard circular splash zone around the edges.

What’s happened to that pool is a travesty. I gave her the number of a pool inspector I know and told her she needs to get a written report with photos of the damage thus far. I hate to rat out fellow Pool Guys, but when their answer to the problem of rapid scaling is that its “normal mottling”, and the diving board issue will go away once the one year warranty expires (the workman they sent to replace the stand actually said that to the customer), and the travertine will get through the same warranty period before it really starts to resemble the surface of the moon… well, they need to be ratted out. And maybe when they’ve had to pay for new coping and at least an acid wash on a few pools, they’ll stop listening to the sales hype and start considering what even the salt system manufacturers are reluctantly admitting; that you need to THINK before you install a salt system about the environment you’re placing it in. All materials are NOT compatible with salt. Further, you need to QUESTION whether you’re going to have personnel sufficiently trained in water chemistry to maintain these pools without turning the pools into basket cases in four months.

Oh, and last but not least, they put a DE filter on this pool, which made it nearly as environmentally unfriendly as possible, since they’ll be backwashing 3500 ppm brackish water into the sewer system, as required by code. The only way it could have been any more environmentally unfriendly is if they’d put a sand filter on it. Then, you’d be backwashing nearly every week instead of every six to eight weeks.

But the moral of this story is that The Tide Has Turned. Two years ago, chances are all three of those brand new pools would have been salt pools. Last year, probably two of them would have been. Now, we’re down to one in three, and four months in, the one is already crying Uncle on salt.

And the underlying moral of this story is that the Salt Manufacturers and the Salt Reps have done this to themselves. Their irresponsible introduction of these systems without any guidelines or restrictions, their lack of support for their dealers and their builders when the problems started to surface, their now transparent efforts to delay and obfuscate when it all started going south, and their lack of accountability for the damages their ill-introduced gadget has caused is YET ANOTHER Black Eye for an industry sorely in need of a moral compass to begin with. I mean, it’s hard enough to lace up my flip flops and go into backyards and say, “Yes, I know there’s better than a 90% chance that you’ve had a bad experience with somebody in the pool business… but trust me.”

It’s like the old joke, “I’m from the Government. I’m here to help.” That’s it. That’s the joke.

Of course, the Salt Guy’s Spinmeisters will blame the demise of salt on Guys Like Me. They’ll accuse us of being the Nattering Nabobs of Negatism that destroyed a Great, Yet Sadly Misunderstood Product. You know, Spiro Agnew was the first to use the Nattering Nabobs line, and he repeated it often, until we trundled him out of Washington and banished him to some nameless golf course in Maryland for taking cash bribes across his desk in the office of The Vice President of the United States.

But the truth is that it’s hardly Guys Like Me who did it. Salt did it. The damage finally arrived. The Bill finally came and it was marked Past Due. I mean, it is such a stretch to think that this blog did anything more than report a phenomena as it grew and then collapsed. To date, I’ve had a total of 13,000 visitors in nearly a year. And about 12,000 of those were probably PoolSean. So, let’s face it; real world experiences and word of mouth are what killed the Goose that Laid those Golden – albeit Salty – Eggs.

And That’s That.

Stray Currents Are Still Dissolving Your Salt Water Swimming Pool, Part Three


I have tossed around the term Stray Current a lot lately. Before, I always thought of it as just another name for Galvanic Corrosion, until I was contacted by a pool builder who specializes in in-ground vinyl lined pools. He explained how he had been chasing Stray Current Corrosion issues for the last fifteen years, since way back to the Lectranator days. Once I started reading up on Stray Current Corrosion, about three weeks ago, I found that it's prevalent in DC systems. Like our salt systems. When you add in the Galvanic Mismatch of the metals we use in our pools, it explains a lot.

I’ve printed his comments about the problems he’s seen in previous blog pieces. In fact, his quotes are what started me titling my weekly installments as “ Stray Currents Are Dissolving Your Salt Water Swimming Pool”.

You see, it wasn’t until I talked to him that things started really gelling in my head and I was able o say that I really understand the theory what’s happening to our pools with salt water chlorination. That’s what the manufactures are counting on; that it’ll be too hard for us to put all the disparate pieces together to overcome their lies.

Like when I first started asking questions about why everything was falling apart, they would say, “We’re only using 3,000 ppm salt. How could that be corrosive? Salt’s not corrosive until…” then fill in the blank with the myriad BS salt levels they come up with.

Then, when I asked, “What about galvanic corrosion?” they said, “It can’t be galvanic corrosion because the metals aren’t touching.” And that answer really stumped me for awhile. I couldn’t figure out how to get around that. I knew the pool metals were corroding, and I knew that it was really only happening so very rapidly on salt pools, but the truth is the metals weren’t touching. So what was causing it?

Then I got his first e-mails, where he talked about chasing Stray Currents and talked about how those Stray Currents were corroding the lugs off the pool bonding wires, and everything started making sense.

So, I asked him for a procedure that we could all use to see for ourselves what was going on with our salt water pools. The following is what he sent me:

Before I start with this, I want to make sure you understand that I fault no particular manufacturer, but rather this applies to all products identified as "Salt Chlorine Generators" that produce sodium hypochlorite through the cell process. That is mostly because you don't have to look hard to find out who makes the cell plates for everyone. It just happens to be the same guys who make titanium exchangers for most heat pumps.

I have thought some on the step-by-step process where a pool can be checked. I guess the best I can say is that it is very situational, i.e. what components are on a pool, what level a generator is running at, length of grounding run to equipment, style of coping, and so forth.

I tested two pools yesterday that are built very much the same so that I would have a basis of comparison. Luckily, one was mine and the other was our lead technician who, up until recently, sung the praises of salt as "just too easy". I welcomed the opportunity to publicly tell him "I told you so" when he mentioned that his aluminum coping was starting to erode. His question to me after I had him do some extensive measurements on his pool, was please explain why my pool is doing what it is doing. I must have had a smirk on my face during the entire explanation, but I was glad to at least have a solid convert under my roof.

What we got yesterday was as follows. First reading is from his salt pool, second reading is from my erosion feeder pool:

Amps 0a 0a
This was not the norm, but it has been very dry and the ground wire was shallow.

DCV 480mv 10mv
Measured from water to ground

DCV 750mv 50mv
Measured from water to aluminum coping

ACV 380mv 150mv
Measured from water to ground

ACV 250mv 30mv
Measured from water to aluminum coping

Res. 5 ohms 500 Kohms
Measured from water to ground

Ohms 10 ohms 400 Kohms
Measured from water to aluminum coping

The point of these measurements is to give an indication of the "conductivity" of the pool. Since these pools were built in the same way, using the same materials, and I am pretty sure by the same builder, I think there are some clear implications. First, the only difference between the pools is that his has a salt system and mine a simple erosion feeder. I take no better care of my pool than anyone else and I also think that they were built at the same time.

What I always focused on was the DC voltage in the water and the resistance to ground. The higher the voltage (I have measured up to 1 volt in some cases) and the lower the resistance (2-3 ohms being the lowest) the faster the problems presented. Now I know that a quick student of ohms law would tell me that the higher voltage is due to a larger resistance to develop a "load" and that it should not be possible to have both a higher voltage and lower resistance given similar circumstances. However, there are other factors that would allow such an occurrence and they are far too complicated for this explanation.

Since the origin of the voltage is the cell (no matter what the manufacturer says) which to an average student of battery operation would conclude that starting at the cell, the current must migrate back to the source to complete the path. I think the builders of the cell would argue that the current is passing straight from one cell plate to the next in a closed loop at the generating cell. I guess I would just say then that perhaps the water rushing by the plates must "wash" some of the electrons out into the pool unintentionally and they just fall harmlessly to the bottom of the pool waiting to be vacuumed later. Clearly, under the best of circumstances, current will find multiple paths back to the source (path of least resistance notwithstanding). I am not implying that all the current generated at the cell is passing through the water. What we are talking about here is "stray" current that is not intentional. Otherwise the speed of deterioration would be much more dramatic.

Our experiences are not limited to vinyl. The problems are across the spectrum of pool construction and include concrete and fiberglass. The only difference is what is does to the particular surface material. What is common is what happens to metal components: Ladders that rust into nothingness, stainless niches that lose their conduit connectors, ground lugs, and niche rings, aluminum coping that starts decaying at the point where it meets the concrete, and so on and so on. I have ladders laying in the yard that look like they were processed in an electroplating bath. Then there are the countless pools that shock the users because some or all of the ground connectors are decayed into non-connection. Why? Current migration back to the source. However you want to define the process whether galvanic corrosion, electrolysis, (insert your type here), the result is the same. And in cases where the water carries a contaminant such as magnesium, the gray staining is also present.

In these cases, the gray color was pronounced on locations that would be most likely to allow current migration. Specifically, the stains were at the panel seams, wall bases, floors where the water jet forced water, etc. We actually sent liners away to labs to have spectrum analysis run on them to identify the stains. While we understood the items found, it took a while to connect the cause.

In all of these cases the common factor was a salt system. Now, we could not blame the units where the customer just let them do their thing without checking them from time-to-time. In those cases, when the chlorine got to 50ppm plus, it was hard to blame anyone else for what happened to the liner. That is when we found out that a liner can "absorb" half its weight in water under the right circumstances.

But like I said earlier, at least an erosion feeder would run out after enough neglect. What got terribly old through all of this was the manufacturers oft repeated phrase, "well I just don't know what to say, none of my other dealers are having this problem" or "I swear, it is only happening to you guys". This was repeated enough that we warned our reps that if they said that one more time, they could not return to the property--ever.

It has been about three years or so now and I am happy to report that our problems have gone away completely. I think it is no coincidence that it was about the same time that we stopped installing salt systems of any type. At this point, there is no sales person alive that could make an eloquent enough speech to convince us that the units are "fixed" and we would do well to "try" them again. That issue is dead for us and we won't even talk about it with anyone.

So, there you have it. Of course, the same old squeaky wheels out there – the Salt Reps – are going to say, “that’s just one builder. His findings don’t represent the whole industry”. And while that’s true, stop and ask yourself why his findings are the only findings available when there are reports nationwide about the very things that he and I are talking about.

Let’s face reality for a minute. These salt manufacturers are making boatloads of money selling you on the Joy of Salt, and the other half the industry is making a buck saying that all salt pools need sacrificial anodes because of incidence of staining, discoloration and metal deterioration – like Pool Tool Co and others. This is a problem. The whole thing is degenerating into a snake oil scam. The Salt Manufacturers are taking all this profit, walking away from all this damage, leaving the builders and service companies and other manufacturers of products destroyed by salt stuck with the liability for all this damage.

And the reason that research like what our friend has given us is the only research we can find is because the manufacturers already know that any real peer reviewed research that is performed will only point to the fact that they're baling water on a sinking technology; salt water chlorination through electrolysis.

And the proof is in the "companion products" being sold with salt systems. Pool Tool Co,on their own website, says that sacrificial anodes will stop plaster discoloration, metal erosion, heater damage and black stains around your pool light.

http://www.pooltoolco.com/catalog4.html

These are smart people at Pool Tool Co. They know that the problem exists. How can the manufacturers keep stonewalling and saying, “Nah, you’re seeing things”? Somebody’s lying to us. So when you show this handy dandy little procedure for checking for Stray Currents to your Salt Rep and he says, “No way. Stray Currents don’t exist,” tell him that he needs to get an injunction against Pool Tool Co then. Because the Salt Reps have already told us, it can’t be Galvanic Corrosion.

You see, the metals don’t touch,and we're only using 3,000 ppm, and you must have bonding issues, and you're using inferior grade stainless steel, and, and...Oh, look. I've run out of excuses.

Stray Currents Are Dissolving
Your Salt Swimming Pool

I finally see how the manufacturers get away with selling you something that does so much damage to your pool while their sales continue to increase and no one comes along and shuts them down.

It’s because it’s hard work finding out about this stuff. And that’s what they’re counting on. They’re depending on the fact that none of us in the business who work on the user end of these Trojan Horses will have time to do more than bitch to each other about what their product is doing to all the pools, and that you pool owners, since you’re only looking at one pool, won’t have anything to compare it to and won’t ever draw the conclusion that if you get shocked when you reach for the ladder or hand rail and after extensive and expensive troubleshooting an electrician tells you that it’s because your bonding lugs have dissolved off your bonding wire, that it’s all because of your salt system.

I’m a perfect example of that. I looked at these problems and wondered what was going on for a long, long time before I wrote my first blog piece last September. And I wrote it and posted it in pure frustration that, as badly as the pools were dissolving right before my very eyes, nobody seemed like they were even thinking about not selling salt systems to new pool owners. I’d show up at a brand new pool and see about 120 feet of beautiful limestone coping, several hundred square feet of white Mexican travertine pavers, six or eight brass pencil jets or fan sprayers, maybe even one of those really slick high end, brass sheer descents, and a Goldline or Zodiac salt system to go along with it all. I would be standing there looking at what I knew was going to look like the surface of the moon - with copper stains - in a little over a year, and I’d want to cry.

Knowing what I know, how was I supposed to congratulate the new owners on their beautiful new pool and then just keep my mouth shut and take their money for cleaning their pool each week, and then play dumb when they came to me a year later asking me for answers?

As you can see, I didn’t keep my mouth shut. Not only did I start telling my customers what I knew and what I suspected, but I posted a blog piece. One single blog piece. Then, a fella named Baboosa wrote and said, "Nice ! You did that so well and never even touched on the part about galvanic corrosion and how salt systems help sell heat exchangers."

And off I went looking at galvanic corrosion. Which led to looking at sacrificial zinc anodes. Which led back to a harder look at why the limestone and sand stone were being destroyed. Which eventually led to exploding chorinators. Which led... well, the point I’m trying to make here is that every topic, except the first one I posted, has been written as a result of getting an e-mail or a phone call or having a face to face conversation with people in our industry who are just as concerned about all of this as I am. One by one, they said, "Hey, Pool Guy, take a look at enter disastrous side effect here ".

Now get a load of this. Most of them could make more money if they would just keep their mouth’s shut and sell salt systems. None of them are manufacturers of competing products - like ozonators or tab feeders or anything else. They are, almost exclusively, service, repair, and construction folks, and salt pool owners.

Not to say that salt’s competition hasn’t tried to influence me. If you’re a regular reader, I’m sure you remember Jeff Jones’ ill advised e-mails. Then, two weeks ago, Tim Dickson, Director of Business Development for Chemilizer Products thought that maybe I could introduce him to all these pool builders I talk to who have become disillusioned with salt, because he’s just positive that his product is the answer to their prayers. And just this week, Chris Brennan, East Coast Sales Manager for UltraPure ozone generators offered to give me a free unit for "your test and evaluation at no cost".

But getting back to what I started out to talk about. I only get one morning a week to do this blog. My wife likes to sleep in on Sunday mornings - which I’m sure to some of you makes us Godless Heathens, or Seventh Day Adventists. Take a wild ass guess which - so I take that one morning of the week to put down on plasma what has been percolating in my head all week. The process starts with one of you telling me something and then me having that on my mind - like a dog with a bone - as I go from pool to pool all week long. Then I regurgitate it here.

As far as I know, this blog, and two articles in Pool & Spa News, are the sum total of opposition to the idea that salt should rule the pool world. Yet nearly all of us who have worked with salt and aren’t blinded by greed and avarice think it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to our industry.

And, sadly, that’s why salt sales are still on the upswing. Even when there are builders out there who write me e-mails like this:

"Pool Guy,

I read your material with great interest and wish to encourage you to keep up the fight. I run a reasonably large pool company... that has been building pools... for 30 years. We started using salt systems about 15 years ago when they were in their infancy (we tend to be front runners on pool issues). We started with units like the Lectronator and other arcane units. During [a] 15 year period... almost every [in-ground vinyl liner] pool we built (about 200 a year) had a salt system on it.
My indoctrination was in the form of countless service calls for staining, [electrical] shocking, and a host of other "unrelated" issues. I spent a year tracking complaints, making voltage checks, resistance checks, breaking down different units into its components and so forth. What I found was exactly what I expected given the construction of this system in the form of a battery. What I could not understand was the industry manufacturers with their (what I understand now to be scripted) answers to my problems. As you say, it ranged from "grounding issues", improper materials, low grade stainless, and on and on. Especially frustrating was that we all knew how long we had been in business and that the only common denominator [to all these problems] was the salt system. By the time I had amassed my data, based on the soil type and condition of an install, I was able to tell the manufacturer of the last generator we were using what the stray voltage amount would be and how long before the stains and corrosion would appear. Like I said, we tried [5 different major manufacturer’s salt systems]. In the end, we decided that there was insufficient profit in pursuing what was clearly a damaging component.

Over the years, we have dealt with all manner of product that has one or more detrimental effects on a pool. But not until these salt systems had we encountered a unit that deals a blow to the entire pool. I think the biggest single factor was the propensity to negatively effect the grounding system around the pool. The stray current in the system created an environment where the grounding lugs would corrode off and leave large portions of the pool disconnected and very prone to shocking our customers. Whether it was hand rails or coping sections, it made the whole pool experience less inviting.

It is nice to see that the rest of the industry is finally learning what we already know--salt systems are evil. What is going to suck for everyone is when customers discover that these are known problems--it might be a tobacco settlement fight scenario with everyone wanting to be made whole."

So, you can start to see how this blog really isn’t written by me. I mean, if I was on my own here, the only experience I’d have to call on are the pools I see. And I would never hear about stuff like this. Neither would you, for that matter. That’s why things like this blog and the few truly open pool forums out there are so important. This is a perfect example. Here’s a guy who did a yoeman’s job to support a new technology for fifteen years, at great expense to his company. All along the way, he documented his problems and tried over and over again, with five different salt systems, to integrate them into the pool environments he was building. To no avail.

And here’s why: Ohm’s Law

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_and_parallel_circuits

If you never took a course in basic electricity, then reading about parallel circuits at Wikipedia won’t really help you understand what’s going on. But if you think of it as a plumbing situation, it’ll be easier to see. Electrons, like water, follow the path of least resistance. If you have a big pipe and you’re pushing water through it, then you’ll have 100% of the water come out the other end of that pipe. If you plumb a bunch of tiny pipes, even as tiny as a strand of hair, onto your big pipe then some of that water is going to follow the path of least resistance and flow down those little pipes, too. Granted, almost all of the water is still going to come out at the end of the big pipe, but some will be lost down those little pipes.

Now, think about your salt cell. What we’re doing is literally jumping current flow from one cell plate to the other using salty water as our conductor. You see, the salt not only makes the chlorine, but it makes the water more conductive - turns it into an electrolyte - so that this whole thing can happen. Think of that gap between the plates as our big pipe. Most of the current flows harmlessly from one plate to the other. Now, think of the distance from those cell plates and your heater heat exchanger as one of the little tiny pipes. Some of the current is going to flow there.

It Has To. It’s Ohm’s Law. It’s The Way Things Work. It’s Science.

And this is also where our old friend Galvanic Corrosion comes into play.

http://thepoolbiz.blogspot.com/2006/10/why-salt-sucks-so-do-i-have-your.html

Depending on how anodic or cathodic on the Galvanic Index the metal is, that will determine how big it’s tiny pipe is. Like Tim Mott at Pool Plaza said about the salt system blowing through the guy’s stainless steel filter in one month.

http://thepoolbiz.blogspot.com/2007/02/comments-lost-in-shuffle-i-have-posted.html

The filter tanks are stainless, way up the list from titanium on the Galvanic Index, and the filter tanks aren’t grounded. They bear the whole brunt of the Stray Current and Galvanic Mismatch Attack. The light rings are next, because they’re stainless, too. But they’re grounded and so they last longer. The heaters are next up because copper is closer to titanium and so presents less of a difference of potential. But it still makes a tiny pipe and draws a little current. If the heater is properly grounded, then most of the current is shunted to that bare copper bonding wire, and it flows down that wire to the, oops, brass bonding lug, another Galvanic Mismatch, where the induced current flow causes Galvanic Corrosion to accelerate in proportion to the amount of the Stray Current. Eventually, you disintegrate the lug or the wire. Then, nothing is bonded to earth ground. Now we kick the damage done by Stray Currents into high gear. The metals can’t shunt the current flow to their bare copper bonding wire, because it’s not grounded any more, and the metals bear the full brunt of the attack like the ungrounded stainless steel filter tank did, and they start to disintegrate.

You can go right down the list of the metals that have to be in your pool and pretty much predict which metal will fail first and last. That’s why the heater manufacturers are changing from copper to cupro nickel headers because, once again, it’s closer to titanium on the Galvanic Index. Mostly these days the only reason they use metals at all is because they haven’t figured out how to build a plastic heat exchanger that won’t melt. And they don’t know how to conduct electricity through plastic, either.

But, hey, how much current are we talking about? I mean, the current flow between the plates must be pretty small to begin with. Right? Well, Goldline, which is the only one I could find who publishes the current flow for their cell, puts it at 4.5 to 7.8 amps, using 22 to 25 Volts DC.

According to this guy;

http://www.mikeholt.com/documents/powerquality/Shock_Stray.pdf

"The majority of people can feel 0.003 to 0.004 amperes". This is a research paper about the electrical shock hazards due to Stray Currents. So 7.8 amps, the max current flow between a salt cell’s plates, is 2,600 times more than the 0.003 amps, or 3 milliamps, that you can feel. And if I remember my US Navy Basic Electricity and Electronics Ratings Course, 10 milliamps is enough to cause paralysis and 100 milliamps is enough to kill you. That’s one tenth of one amp, and we have 7.8 of them.

Now, I’m not saying that people are dying by the bushel basket in salt swimming pools. I’m saying that there are, by the immutable laws of physics, Stray Currents that go hand in hand with a salt system on your swimming pool. And I’m saying that over time, those Stray Currents will cause deterioration of the grounding and bonding of the other equipment that supports your pool and will cause damage to the bonding connections which keep your pool safe to swim in even though it’s operated with electricity for everything from your pump to your heater to your lights.

The definition of Stray Currents is electrical current through a path other than the intended path, these unintended paths being those little pipes branching off of the big pipe. According one website:

"Stray current corrosion results from (direct) current flow through paths other than the intended circuit. For example, by any extraneous current in the earth. This type of corrosion is sometimes also called "electrolysis" , because of its mechanism.... Generally, stray current corrosion is caused by uncontrolled electrical currents (DC is most harmful) from extraneous sources through unintended paths... These are mostly the result of bad earth return on electrical equipment, giving rise to leakage of currents through metal structures and other preferentially conductive paths... If current passes in and out the metal structure, an electrolysis cell is set up (hence the name: ‘electrolysis’ sometimes used for stray current corrosion). As a result, the area where the positive current exits the metal structure is forced to react as an anodic site. This causes the local oxidation (corrosion reaction) of the metal piece, which may lead to a rapid consumption of the metal and, eventually, to a complete penetration of a metal wall (e.g., from a pipeline, etc.)."

When you read this, it makes you realize that installing a salt system on a swimming pool and then pouring salt into the water is the only way that you can make this type of corrosion attack a swimming pool. Salt Cells use DC current, and like the paragraph above says, "DC is most harmful".

Of course, if you ask a salt system manufacturer about Stray Currents, they’re going to tell you that they don’t exist. Because in the Land of Sales & Marketing, the Laws of Physics are suspended until your check clears.

But if that’s true, then why is the Pool Tool Company, an outfit that’s been making special tools for us Pool Guys for more than 35 years, doing a land office business in sacrificial zinc anodes? To quote their page, the in-line zinc anode is:

"A Must For Salt Water Pools

[Stops]

Plaster Discoloration
Metal Erosion
Heater Damage
Black Stains Around the Pool Light

The in-line zinc anode is attached to the bonding wire thereby protecting all metal parts against the effects of electrolysis. The see-through housing allows the anodeto be easily replaced when depleted."

They sell two other sacrificial zinc anode products, both designed for use only with salt pools. See for yourself:

http://www.pooltool.com/index.php


Yet salt system sales continue to rise. Because there’s hundreds of Them working long days every day to tell you why you Just Gotta Have Salt! While there’s only a few of us who manage to get a few hours a week to try to tell you that you’re better off drilling extra holes in your head than you are blowing twelve hundred bucks on a salt system.

But if the builder who sent me that e-mail is right and enough independent research gets done to prove that the manufacturers had to know about these problems, then the fit really will hit the shan. He also sent me some of his comparison voltage readings between nearly identical pools, one with fresh water and one with salt, and next week I’ll post those along with some readings I’m going to take on my pools.

This is all I have time for this week and I know it’s beyond plenty to read and digest. The fact that it's too much is, after all, what they’re counting on.

Maybe somebody else could start another salt blog and lend me a hand baling all this salty water. I’d really appreciate it.

Comments Lost in the Shuffle



I have posted twenty-one pieces to this blog. That’s a total of about 46,000 words. As a point of reference, a good novel weighs in at about 125,000. There have been about 25 comments made to various pieces. You can access them by clicking on the tiny little icon at that bottom of the blog piece that says, // posted by The Pool Guy @ 10:33 AM 1 comments. You click where it says 1 comments and it’ll take you to the page where the comments for that piece are listed.

I don’t think many people do, and I think that folk’s comments, their opinions about what I write here, get lost in the shuffle and go unheard. Which is fine with me. If I really wanted to debate this stuff, I’d be posting at a forum. I don’t want to debate it because I think that at this point in the evolution of salt systems, the only people left on the other side of this issue are fast buck artists - and arguing with them is like arguing with a cash register - and those members of our industry who have been so thoroughly snowed by the fast buck artists that they still believe the salesmen’s hype while Rome burns around them.

Every day I hear of yet another builder who has stopped selling salt systems, or yet another tile and coping sub who tells his builder’s that he’s only warrantying his work on decks and coping where there’s no salt system installed.

Every day I talk to another pool serviceman or repairman who nods knowingly when the subject of salt and damage come up.

Even our biggest internet seller, The Pool Plaza, run by Tim Mott here in Dallas, Texas, has posted a warning on his website on the page titled: How to Choose a Salt system:

"Make sure your pool equipment is compatible with a salt system.

Most pool equipment is compatible with salt, but there are a few pieces that are not. If in doubt, check with the manufacturer of the equipment to see if your pump, filter and heater are compatible. Some warranties may be voided by the installation of a salt system. In particular some heaters and newer stainless steel filters are not designed for use with a salt system. The older stainless steel filters like Swimquip DES series filters handle salt just fine, but the newer Pentair NS stainless steel filters can develop corrosion issues quickly and the manufacturer will not warranty it."

http://www.poolplaza.com/pool-school/salt_choosing_system.shtml

I wrote and asked him about the distinction he draws between older DES filter tanks and the newer NS tanks, and he responded:

"As I recall, originally Sta-Rite's warranty contained a disclaimer, however I'm sure that they have changed that since they are a part of Pentair and a salt proponent now.

Our experience with NS and DES tanks is very similar. Of course, I cannot guarantee that someone with one such tank will not experienced a greater level of corrosion, but typically it does not significantly shorten the life expectancy of the filter.

I think that the difference in the old stainless and the new stainless is the quality of the stainless steel and the quality of the welds. I do not recall if the older tanks have any welds. I don't remember any offhand. On the newer tanks, it is the welds that will go. I had one go out in about amonth on a Nautilus Plus. I had tried to get the guy to go FNS plus, but he would not listen."

Now, Tim Mott is no small change. He doesn’t just run an internet store. He also runs a pool service and repair company called Tropix, and except for the fact that he still sells salt systems - a position I wish he would reconsider - I would be prone to listen to what he has to say about what goes on out there on his pool routes. And you heard it here first; salt blew through a brand new stainless steel filter tank in one month.

Salt will also eat through that thin metal band on the FNS Plus that was added to that DE filter a few years ago. It's located right at that crucial point where the tank halves come together. When that band fails, does that make that tank any less stable under pressure? That sure would be good to know. The only other thing inside the FNS Plus tank that’s metal are the stainless steel rods and the plated brass nut/fasteners, which, we all now know, are susceptible to galvanic corrosion. Read about galvanic corrosion here:

http://thepoolbiz.blogspot.com/2006/10/why-salt-sucks-so-do-i-have-your.html

But I’m wandering off my point about the comments being lost in the shuffle. Let me make one more side point here and then I’ll get to that. Anyone who reads this blog with any regularity knows that I’m not adverse to throwing someone under the bus. And for the most part, no more thought goes into it than, "Well, the bus is coming , and he’s standing right there. Ah, what the hell..." And I guess the reason I’m so cavalier about it is, I only throw people under that bus if they’re engaged in selling salt systems to unsuspecting homeowners. In my mind, it’s kind of like disposing of a guy who runs a payday loan business, where they actually make people write postdated checks and charge them anywhere from 300 to 1,000% interest for a short term loan. And while you may think I’m being unkind to salt peddlers, they sell you a system for about $1,200 and if you’re lucky you’ll get off with $10,000 damage to coping, equipment and decks. That’s nearly 1,000% interest you’re being charged.

But anyway! Getting back to the comments lost in the shuffle thing. A Salt Peddler took exception to me throwing him under the bus, twice. You see, it’s Harry Clay, of Castaic Pools. In my first blog piece, I wrote about his opposition to the Santa Clarita Sanitation district’s salt pool ban, and then when I republished that piece last week, of course, he was mentioned again. So he posted a comment. It is published with last week’s piece and you can read it there by clicking on the little 1 comments thing, or read it here. Here, I’ve added comments - rebuttals, as it were - in italics:

You wrote an interesting article; I don't agree with many of your opinions. Harry, they’re hardly opinions. They are backed up by facts. Facts that are cited and made available as Hyperlinks in the body of every piece I write.

I do take exception to your inference that my only concern is profiting from the destruction of the environment. Then quit encouraging people in your part of the country to circumvent the spirit of a local ordinance intended to protect our environment by pointing out that, by the letter of the law, it’s okay to spew their backwash waste onto the ground or into a storm drain. Where do you think storm drains go, Harry? Have you ever heard about the phenomenon experienced in some northern parts of our country and in Canada where their ground water chloride levels are elevated due to winter road salt percolating down to the the aquifers? Wake up. Everything has a cumulative effect. There were about 8,000 cars in the US in 1900. 107 years later, we melt the polar ice cap with their emmisions.

I build projects utilizing the best evidence & techniques available, with the intention of constructing a long lasting structure that will give the homeowner the most pleasent [sic] experience, with the least likely chance of failure, & greatest longevity. Then why, oh, why on earth would you sell them a salt system? I know it bugged you when you saw that I had quoted you and had posted a link to your website, but if you’d just get over it and read the rest of my posts about salt, and then read the references I’ve cited, many of which are studies and texts that builders who are going to use salt owe it to themselves and their customers to read before they embark on the use of salt just because some Sales Rep said, "it’ll be okay", I think you’ll come away with a lot of questions about the wisdom of selling salt.

I believe the vast majority of saline pool owners will attest to the fact that saline sanitation systems provide a much more pleasant, cleaner, clearer, attractive, & healthy environment for their families to enjoy. Harry, I know that most everybody was fooled when salt systems came back this time. We all said, "Well, so much more of our equipment is plastic. Maybe it’ll work this time." But then the deck and coping issues showed up, and the galvanic corrosion issues on the remaining metal showed up. You want to make me a bet on how long the stainless light niche to copper conduit galvanic mismatch is going to hold up before the leak detect guys start making a land office business in fixing those, too? I understand that your customers like it now. But they will be cussing you when the problems start.

As in any form of sanitation, care must be taken to carefully balance the water; but if manufacturer's guidelines are carefully followed, I believe that saline pools provide the most satisfying experience for the pool owner. I’ve pointed out time and again in this blog how people like you always resort to this excuse about how careful monitoring and balancing the water is the real issue, and how that automatically makes it the homeowner’s fault when everything goes south. Yet every brochure from every manufacturer pitches these systems on the falsehood that they are trouble-free. "No more mixing, measuring or messing with harsh chemicals. No more hassles buying, storing, measuring chlorine." "You only need to check the pH and total alkalinity periodically". That first quote was from Hayward Goldline. The second from Zodiac, who now owns Jandy. That probably represents 80% of the salt systems out there.

I'd like to think that it's possible to have an honest difference of opinion, without engaging in ridicule, & personal attacks regarding motives of people you don't even know. Ah... finally, the meat of the matter. I hurt your feelings. Just one question? How is it okay for you to ridicule the folks who wrote the Santa Clarita Sanitation District's salt pool ban, but it’s not okay for me to ridicule you for your position on this issue? I have read quite a bit about the situation there, and there are real issues with high chloride levels in the upper Santa Clarita River resulting in decreased crop yields and leaf burn, the leaf burn making the agricultural product less attractive and so less valuable. The limit of 100 milligrams per liter for the upper Santa Clarita River weren’t established by some local town council bent on picking on your pool business. It was set by the California Regional Water Quality Control Board for the Los Angeles region in 1978. And the ordinance never even said you couldn’t sell salt systems. It said you couldn’t install a salt system on a pool where the backwash line was plumbed to the sewer.

So, why did you dedicate a whole page of your website to a rant about "ill advised legislation" when after you took a minute to read it, even you had to admit that it wasn’t a salt system ban, but a prohibition of installing salt systems where the backwash goes to the sewer? If I remember correctly, in the tone of your rant you took great delight in pointing out that, nanner-nanner-haha, pools aren’t plumbed to the sewer, so it's okay to spew our backwash right into the dirt or down the storm drain.

Now, I see that you’ve dropped that page from your website. I see that you no longer want to own those sentiments. And good for you. It couldn’t have helped your local image to be seen by some as a callous poolman more interested in the bottom line that in the local environment or the local economy so dependent on the health of the Santa Clarita River for irrigation.

But try this; Google "Santa Clarita Salt Ban" and go to page two of the returns and this is what you’ll find:

Salt Water Pool Update

On November 9th of 2005, the Board Members of the Santa Clarita Valley Sanitation ... picked up the story, with headlines stating "Ban On Salt Water Pools"

www.castaicpools.com/article6.htm

Look familiar? You still own those comments, Harry. Good luck with that.

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.