Arch Plaster Study

I do a lot of reading. The older I get – and the less time I spend in the field – the more I read all the things that I used to tell myself I would get around to reading when I wasn’t too busy cleaning pools.

And, man, oh man, am I disappointed. For most of my career I’ve just had my head down, focusing on taking care of my pools, going to the odd show here or there, attending a water chemistry seminar now and then. But most of my experience and knowledge was gained poolside. I haven’t paid a lot of attention to what The Experts write – with the exception of Bob Lowry of Lowry Consulting Group. I’ve said it elsewhere in this blog; if you passed the IPSSA water chemistry exam in the last 20 or 25 years, you probably used Mr. Lowry’s books to study for it. He writes great, layman’s explanations of what’s happening in pool and spa water. But other than his stuff and what I’ve picked up on my own from textbooks and the like, I haven’t paid a lot of attention to many of the documents that end up, through their influence, controlling the direction of our industry.

They’re not really documents, per se. You seldom, if ever, see the actual study information – like the real research data, for instance. The internet is huge and space on it is free, or next to free. But still, you never get a look at how tests were really done, or all the data that was collected. Mostly they’re just reports, or, more correctly, brochures. And the ones that seem to have the most stacked decks and the most biased information are the ones from companies selling stuff to us.

Imagine that.

Now, if you’re a homeowner wondering what any of this has to do with how salt damaged your pool, it doesn’t. Use the Labels on the right to find blog pieces about your symptoms or about Making Salt Work for your pool, because this blog piece is going to have a huge water chemistry geek factor. But if you’re one of the guys who is in that spot that I was in until about a year ago, busy with your route and your repairs, with your head down and hardly any time to read what it is everybody says are the latest governing documents for how we ought to take care of our pools, take a minute and read this:

There’s this report that’s been rattling around the internet and the trade shows and seminars for the last several years. You can find it here:

Sorry. Dead Link

or here:

http://piscines-apollo.com/docs/arch_plaster_study.pdf

It’s title on that first website is:

High Cyanuric Acid Levels & Plaster Degradation In Swimming Pools

by Ellen M. Meyer, Ph.D

It’s commonly referred to as the Arch Study. It was a three part study; the first part 5 weeks long, the second part 6 months long, and the third part 4 months long. The gist of the first part of the study is that they put some freshly made plaster coupons into some test tanks and then added as much as 500 ppm cyanuric acid to them, and that over a period of 5 weeks, the cyanuric acid level fell from 500 ppm to about 140 ppm in one tank, and from 200 ppm to about 100 ppm in another tank, and that in both tanks, the cyanuric acid collected as a residue on the surface of the plaster. The fourth paragraph says, “surface analysis showed the accumulation of cyanuric acid on the plaster”.

Okay, so just stop. Stop right there and think for a minute. We’ve all seen pools with 200 ppm stabilizer, right? If you’re honest with yourself, unless you’re Super Poolman, you probably have a handful of pools like that on service right now. I know I do. Most of my pools are under 100. But there are some that are higher. I admit it.

Now, ask yourself a simple question; have you ever seen the cyanuric acid level in those pools drop to as low as 100 ppm and deposit as a residue on the plaster in a 5 week period?

I didn’t think so. In fact, I know so. In fact, it is safe to say – through thirty years of empirical observation - this has never happened anywhere outside the laboratories of Arch Chemicals.

So, how much stabilizer is 500 ppm? Well, it’s about 42 lbs. of stabilizer dissolved into your average 20,000 gallon pool. I’m talking pure, granular stabilizer melted into a freshly plastered backyard pool. Because that’s how this study was done. They took freshly troweled plaster coupons and put them in a tank and put in an amount equal to you putting 42 lbs of stabilizer on Day One of start-up. And how do I know that? Because I finally sat down and gave it several careful readings – something I don’t think many of us have done – and down in the 5th paragraph, in talking about pH control during the 6 month study, they say “because the plaster coupons were new, the pH rose continuously…”

Oh, yeah, that’s Real World. Throwing 42 lbs. of stabilizer into a freshly plastered pool.

So, the assumption I make about that first 5 week test was that they put these new plaster coupons into tanks and didn’t adjust the pH during the 5 week test, and viola! The pH skyrockets and the cyanuric acid falls out of solution, accumulating on the surface of the plaster. Here’s a quote from Dr. Meyer in a Pool & Spa News article: “The cyanuric acid was no longer in solution… It was on the plaster surface, having some kind of affect.”

http://www.poolspanews.com/2008/052/052acid.html

Now, that’s not really a scathing indictment, is it? Having some kind of affect?

I promise you, if you plastered and filled a 20,000 gallon pool, and on Day One you dissolved 42 lbs. of cyanuric acid into the water, then went away for 5 weeks, when you come back, it would be a logical result to have more than half your cyanuric acid plated out on that pool’s surface.

But then, if you didn’t have any pH control for 5 weeks, you’d have to demo that plaster and start over, because a little cyanuric acid on the surface of the plaster would be the least of your problems.

So, based on these shocking results, this company - that coincidentally makes cal hypo products and owns a few non-chlorine alternative sanitizer labels - decided to do a 6 month tank test. Now they introduce water chemistry parameters. I know that because the say so, a conversation conspicuously absent from the 5 week test. They say the “water in the test tank was adjusted to try and maintain pH between 7.2 and 7.8 and alkalinity between 60 to 100 ppm”. The key phrase there is “try and maintain”. Note that it doesn’t say, like it does later when talking about the 4 month test in test pools “were maintained at…” Old “try and maintain” indicates that boat was missed. So we can assume, from the very language of the report, that, because they were using new plaster coupons, they weren’t able to maintain their own stated water chemistry parameters. You know how it is; three day weekends, somebody forgot, etc.

Too, repeat those water chemistry parameters back to yourself; 7.2 to 7.8 pH and 60 to 100 ppm alkalinity. What happened to 7.4 to 7.6 and 80 to 120? That’s industry standard, isn’t it? Then, after stating these parameters, they contradict them in the next to the last paragraph, where they admit “that pH and alkalinity of the tanks ran on the high side (pH~8, TA~90 ppm), but then they say that despite “the high pH and alkalinity in the test tank, plaster degradation was still seen.

Really? Look at the 3 photos, labeled 100 ppm, 250 ppm & 500 ppm. Those are the ones from the test tanks. Looks like scaling to me, which is exactly what you get when you run your pool water scaling on the Saturation Index.

Now, these “dramatic results” prompted them to do yet a third study; “additional tests were initiated in larger bodies of water where the water balance could be maintained more easily”. They operated five test pools, maintaining their water chemistry at 7.2 to 7.6 pH, alkalinity at 80 to 120 ppm and calcium hardness at 180 to 250.

After four months, they took pictures, which you can see at the bottom of their page. On the left, you have 14X magnified plaster coupon immersed for 4 months in 0 ppm cyanuric acid. Look hard at that photo. Doesn’t that surface look like the beginning of an etched surface? Doesn’t that look like we’ve already burned off the butter and we’re starting to expose the aggregate?

Now look at the plaster coupon on the right, the one that was in the pool with 200-250 ppm cyanuric acid. That’s looks severely etched, doesn’t it? Well, 7.2 pH, 80 ppm alkalinity and 180 ppm calcium hardness is an aggressive environment, all the way up to 80 degrees, assuming a minimum TDS of 430 (their calcium hardness and their cyanuric acid), and all the way up to 90 degrees if the TDS was a little higher, even as little as 80 points higher.

But let’s say that this was done in an air conditioned laboratory in Georgia. A reasonable assumption, right? So, let’s assume a water temperature of 72 degrees. That water is even more corrosive. An extra 0.1, and it being a logarithmic number, 0.1 is a doubling of it’s corrosiveness. Basically, that water is 5 times more corrosive than water balanced to the industry standard of 7.5 pH, 100 ppm TA, 200 minimum Calcium Hardness and average water temp of 78 degrees.

I’m using the handy automated Langelier Index provided by one of the folks who host this study on the internet. You can find it here:

http://www.tricitypool.com/tc-satindex.html

Now, I have a couple of questions about this report.

1. Why did they use such low calcium levels? 180 to 250 isn’t mean calcium as recommended in our industry. When we all start up pools, we make sure the calcium is at least 200 ppm, and I’ve always been told by plaster consultants whose opinions I have come to respect that probably 250 ppm is a better place to start, that 200 ppm is the minimum. And the reason we start our calcium so low is to let the level grow over time, with condensation and the addition of calcium based chlorine products. But why run it so low in the lab? Why not set and hold all pools at 250 or 300 ppm? Because the lower calcium sure clouds the conclusion that it was cyanuric acid, and not out of balance water, that caused the etching.

2. Why is the loss of cyanuric acid only mentioned in the first 5 week study? Did the application of water chemistry parameters in the 2 subsequent tests eliminate that phenomena? Shouldn’t we be able to see the buildup that they talked about in the first test in the 5 photos from the second and third test that accompany this article? Shouldn’t there have been some mention of how they were constantly reintroducing cyanuric acid to the test tanks and test pool in the 6 month and 4 month studies? Remember that quote from Dr. Meyer in a Pool & Spa News article: “The cyanuric acid was no longer in solution… It was on the plaster surface, having some kind of affect.”

Obviously, she’s referring to the first 5 week test. But that quote is mixed in, where the previous paragraph is talking about the 6 and 4 month tests, making it sound like every time you get high stabilizer levels you end up with cyanuric acid falling out of solution. If that were the case, we really wouldn’t have to worry about high stabilizer, would we? Every time it hit 200, we’d just wait a few weeks for it to drop back to 100 and then vacuum the residue to waste.

3. Why in the world would they use freshly troweled plaster coupons to run this test? When would new, uncured plaster ever be exposed to cyanuric acid levels as high as 500 ppm? Not only is it not Real World, it’s not even Real Lab. After all, shouldn’t the lab make an effort to replicate the conditions you’re going to face in your customer’s backyards. Like I said, unless you bring a 50 lbs. bucket of cyanuric acid poolside and dissolve most of it in on Day One of startup, you’re never going to see the conditions they talk about in this report. And by the time you do, you’re going to have two or three year old, very well cured plaster. Of course, there will be folks who will want to play What If on this point. All I can say is that What If is a game for children and not one we ought to be playing in the laboratories and in the professional journals of our industry.

So, why do I care about the Arch Study? Because it is having an affect on our industries perception of cyanuric acid. Look at all the places I’ve found where it’s referenced as the report that shines the light on plaster damage caused by cyanuric acid:

http://www.tricitypool.com/tc-plaster_study.html

http://piscines-apollo.com/docs/arch_plaster_study.pdf

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NTB/is_23_44/ai_n15932555

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-139716069.html

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-139716069.html

http://www.bookrags.com/highbeam/plaster-problem-arch-study-tackles-hb/

http://www.allbusiness.com/arts-entertainment-recreation/875089-1.html

http://www.tricitypool.com/tc-plaster_cyanuric_study.html

http://www.poolspanews.com/2008/052/052acid.html

That took five minutes of googling to come up with those links. And it doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the times this study is linked to in the forums - or the Finger Pulling Contest, as I like to call them - and probably 50 or 100 times throughout the thousands of forum threads discussing pools and plaster problems.

But now, whenever people google for the Arch Plaster Study, a link to this blog piece will come up as well.

What irritates me the most is how easily we were all duped. Honestly, why didn’t everyone say to themselves, “200 ppm stabilizer in the water may be high, but if I wait 5 weeks half of it is not going to fall out of solution, UNLESS I jack around with the water chemistry so much that EVERYTHING is going to fall out of solution.”

And that was the first chart on the page. We’ve all sat here and looked at that for all these years, and none of us, me included, has stopped to say, “Hey, wait a minute. That never happens.”

Is it just politeness that causes us to not ask those basic questions? I mean, when knowledgeable people have interviewed Dr. Meyer over the years, didn’t it come up? Something like, “Gosh, Dr. Meyer, you’re the first person in the history of history to report a 50 to 70% loss of cyanuric acid over a 5 week period. Are you sure you were watching that pH and not, intentionally or unintentionally, creating an environment where that was the only logical outcome?”

The Elephant in the Room, as it were.

Or is it because this report supports what a lot of people want to believe about cyanuric acid, and so it becomes the Straw Man for that camp? If you’re face is reddening as you read this, then maybe there’s some truth to that.

The craziest thing about all this is, I’ve heard there are people trying to DUPLICATE THE RESULTS OF THIS TEST and consider their tests failures when they don’t achieve the same results. You see, this thing has become the standard that other efforts are gauged by. It is now assumed that cyanuric acid damages plaster and it’s just a matter of holding your tongue right to achieve the same “proof” that Dr. Meyer achieved.

All I know is this thing gets referenced all the time, usually as “recent studies indicate that large quantities of cyanuric acid can even damage plaster”.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my!

This study is being used by different groups of people to different ends. The folks at Arch are using it to generate heat for cya based products and a bump for sales of their calcium based chlorine and another reason for people to consider their alternative sanitizers, like Baquacil. People have argued with me that I’m wrong there because Arch also sells cya based products, too. Well, how is encouraging people to keep their cya level between 25 and 50 ppm anything but good for trichlor sales?

That tricity link is on the website of a company that’s big on UV sanitizing. There’s nothing wrong with that. UV sanitizing works and it’s not a scam to be selling the units. And throwing rocks at high cyanuric acid won’t hurt those sales, either.

This report supports a philosophy, a philosophy that high cyanuric acid is bad for us. And it is. The more I read and research, the more convinced I become that high levels of cyanuric acid are inhibiting our ability to effectively combat the growing threat of cryptosporidium outbreaks. Too, from what I've read, it does have the general effect, in high levels, of reducing the kill time of chlorine.

But it doesn’t destroy plaster. Not in the Real World. If a guy lets his pool get to 200 or 300 or 500 ppm cyanuric acid, he’s got enough other bad water chemistry habits to destroy the plaster without cyanuric acid having anything to do with it.

Now, I tried to play fair on this. I e-mailed Dr. Meyer on February 28th and asked her, “when you raised cyanuric acid to 250 and 500 ppm, did you use any correction factor on your observed TA?”

On March, 13th, she wrote back that, “yes, we did use a correction factor on our observed TA for the pool study that was run. We subtracted 1/3 of our CYA reading from the observed total alkalinity to get the carbonate alkalinity.”

I wrote again on March 14th to ask her about the issues of the cyanuric acid falling out of solution, and asked why they used new plaster vice cured plaster coupons for their tests.

She has not responded. If she does, and if she can explain any of this, then I’ll gladly amend what I’ve posted here.

Instead of arguing about whether you can create test tank or test pool environments that will damage plaster, how about somebody asking a useful question, like, "why, when I buy that Chinese cyanuric acid in bulk from my supplier do I end up using twice as much as I used to?"

I'm working on it. I'll have an answer in a couple of months. Sooner, I hope. Also, there’s a second, more “in-depth” brochure about the effects of high cyanuric acid that Arch has produced. I’ll be reviewing it in the next few weeks. So stay tuned.

The Summer Lull

It happens every year. Most of us in the Pool Biz are used to it, and ready for it. There’s a flurry of service and repair calls as everybody gets their pools ready for the swimming season, and then there’s a slow down, where everybody’s all set and the phone calls slow down. That’s when we settle into our normal workaday level of activity. That’s what you try to dial your business to handle; that summer lull. The busy time right before the lull makes you feel like you’re going to pull your hair out, and then again in the fall, when there’s so much junk falling into the pools and overstressing the pumps and clogging the lines that the phone rings off the hook all over again. But that’s how the game is played.

At least here in Texas. I know a bit about other markets because I’ve worked in a few. Like I know that southern California isn’t as much like that. They really don’t have a high debris season, like our spring and fall, and their swimming season is longer than here. I cleaned the pool of a college professor in southern California that swam laps for an hour a day in his pool year ‘round, using a wet suit for a few months in the winter. You really couldn’t do that here in Texas. When the water gets to forty-five degrees, it’s going to be cold even with a wet suit.

But that’s really the trick in business, isn’t it? Knowing your market? Like a couple of weeks ago, I posted a blog piece about all the rain we’re having here and how, because our pools here in Texas are built with modern conveniences like tile line drains so that pool owners don’t have to go out and pump water off the pool every time it rains, the result on salt pools is that you end up losing a lot of salty water out the tile line drain. And so, for guys like me, that means humping more and more salt to the pools every time it rains. Kind of a hard position to challenge, wouldn’t you think?

Well, there’s this one Salt Peddler, and he just went off over what I said, blathering on and on about how if I was carrying something called Jerry Jugs, that he says hold two and a half gallons and weigh in at twenty pounds apiece, and if I had a hundred customers and if they were using one Jerry Jug a week, I’d be humping eight thousand six hundred pounds of chlorine a month, so why was I bitching about the salt?

What the hell’s a Jerry Jug? No, really, I know what a Jerry Jug is. It’s those little containers we use to fill up our lawnmowers and stuff. This guy lives in Florida. And I admit, I don’t know the Florida market very well. I know a lot of their pools have screened rooms over them. I hear that they are often pool-only setups, with no attached spa. I hear that they use a lot of small pumps (1 horsepower) and small (100 square foot or so) cartridge filters. They don’t tend to use automatic cleaners because they’re in enclosures, but if they do, they use suction side cleaners, like Kreepy Krawleys or Navigators. I hear their water is hard, so it makes sense to me that they use liquid chlorine to shock their pools, and if it’s cheap enough, with the increase in trichlor prices over the last couple of years, I could see where they might decide to run their pools exclusively on liquid chlorine, even with the extra muriatic acid and stabilizer they’ll have to buy to go along with it.

And so the Jerry Jugs come in because they probably have a big reservoir of liquid chlorine on their service trucks that they use to pump the Jerry Jug full.

How am I doing? I’m guessing, you see. Because I haven’t been to Florida since I visited my Gramma in Dunedin Beach in 1968 when I was a teenager. And, you see, I don’t claim to be an expert on the Florida market because I don’t live and work there.

People that do live and work in the servicing end of this business in Florida have come to appreciate salt a lot more than we have here it Texas, because it gets them out of a closed loop that they’re stuck in: 1 horsepower pumps, 100 square foot cartridge filters, in-line tablet feeders, a lot less tile line drains and constantly rising stabilizer levels. Just go back and read Evan’s comments on Rain, Rain Go Away to see what I’m talking about. Evan works in a pool & spa supply center in Florida and I would imagine tests a lot of water and knows the typical equipment profile for his customers.

He says that the problems we see with salt really haven’t presented themselves like they have here in Texas and in Arizona. And I take what he says at face value. After all, it’s his market, and he knows his market, and he doesn’t claim to know mine. It sounds like he’s in south Florida, but, again, I’m guessing.

Not like the Salt Peddler, who, by the way, is the National Sales something-or-other for his company, and goes around the entire country to all the pool expos holding his Bum Dope Seminars, and while you may think that’s mean for me to call them that, consider that the guy doesn’t even know that you can’t buy liquid chlorine at the pool suppliers here in Dallas, Texas. I mean, he doesn’t have the first idea about the typical chemicals that the average pool serviceman carries on his truck to do his job each day here in Texas. And that’s because he hasn’t considered for a minute the differences in our water over the water in Florida. And that’s because he’s busier coming up with excuses why guys like me are all wrong than he is investigating the claims that salt may not be appropriate for all pools. Like that one in Canada, as-a-big-effing-fer-instance… But he’s sure his Salt System is right for your pool.

And all I can say is that this guy’s not unique. His level of understanding is pretty typical of most of the Sales Reps I run into. Their knowledge of the subject is usually very regional. In fact, it’s often so regional that if they don’t see the problem on their own pool in their own back yard, then it doesn’t exist. Not to mention that the Sales Boss told them it doesn’t exist. Now, you’ll usually find a lot more technical knowledge when you talk to their Technical Reps. That’s the nature of the beast, Salesmen Sell; Tech Reps Fix – and keep their mouths shut.

The other unique flaw inherent in trying to represent salt systems, and one that’s not really been very well explored, is that for a guy to properly represent them he needs to be a technical AND chemical whiz kid. So far, I haven’t met any of those. But then, if a guy was both, he would see how deeply flawed the technology is, and he wouldn’t want to Sell It or Fix It.

A south Florida pool builder wrote to me recently. He had experience with salt systems from the last company he worked with before getting out on his own:

“I too think the salt systems are [a] joke. Before moving out on my own, I use to argue with my last boss…about what a profit drain the salt cells became. He spent more money running service reps around to adjust and repair them than he could ever hope to make on the sale of the unit.”

Later, he and I were discussing the regional aspects of salt damage and he wrote:

“I do agree that maybe some of the damage is centralized to The Great State of Texas (I grew up in Irving) and Arizona but only because y'all (felt good to the dust of that vocabulary word) use more natural stones than other parts of the country. With the freeze/thaw cycle up north the natural stones fall apart. Down here in Florida…wages are paid in sunshine and beaches… and [people] very seldom go for the exotic materials. Although the trend is expanding as people are getting tired of cracked concrete decks. Acrylic topped decks have been the rage for the last 10 years. Now pavers seem to be all anyone wants anymore. I will be curious to see what impact salt has [on] these materials.”

He doesn’t sell salt systems. Doesn’t want to be part of the problem.

Then, there’s another Gulf Coast builder who will only sell a salt system to those “few customers that absolutely insist on having salt systems and… sign the extensive waiver that pretty much absolves me of any warranty on the pool whatsoever.” It’s only after his best effort to dissuade them and only when he’s starting to get that belligerent attitude and the customer is starting to accuse him of just trying to make money "off the stuff we are pushing" in his store, and that the customer has lots of friends who have the system and "just love it", or the best accusation so far, that he should get on the internet and investigate these new systems and "get out of the stone age".

So much for consumer protection.

So, while I respect Evan’s comments that salt has been a good fit in Florida, some of the builders in that general region of the country - the ones who have to stand warranty on the pool structure after the sale - are telling a different story. Granted, it doesn’t get your stabilizer levels down if you go back to tabs, and so I see where you might want to see salt as the answer, or at least as less of a problem. But ask yourself this:

How many builders are making people sign a damage waiver before they’ll install a tab feeder on a swimming pool?

I want to make one more point and then I’m going to take advantage of the Summer Lull and go on Vacation for two weeks – which means I’ll post again on August 5th. There’s an interesting Letter to the Editor here

Robert A. Carson, the Environmental Programs Administrator for the City of Thousand Oaks, California, quite objectively states that “these systems are brackish…filter backwash….rainwater overflow… pool draining… are going to be significant issues. Salt and chloride are pass through pollutants for a wastewater treatment plant. …regulation of chloride-rich waste streams will be forthcoming in many areas. I wouldn’t want to be the vendor or contractor trying to explain to customers why this state-of-the-art system is obsolete, that draining his pool is illegal, that a parade of tanker trucks will be needed to haul away his…pool water.”

Now, before you say, “yeah, another whacky Californian tree hugger”, let me tell you a bit about Thousand Oaks. These are people who voted for W and Arnold. I mean, this is Limbaugh Country. There are probably more defense contractors per square mile than anywhere outside the Washington Beltway. They are fiscally conservative Republicans, for the most part, and it just makes fiscal sense not to put salt in water if you’re going to have to pay to take it out later. Where have I heard that before?

Oh, yes! It was me! But as good as this letter is, it’s not what I want to talk about. It’s the article that this letter is about. You have to do a little digging to find that. I’ve done that for you. Click here.

It’s the Water Conditioning and Purification International Online November 2006 issue. It’s an article called Solving Public Pool Water Quality Problems Forever! by Bill Kent. The first paragraph of the article points out that the recent outbreak of Recreational Water Illnesses (RWI) are disturbing and bring to light the need for facility managers to “investigate regenerative chlorination systems”. That’s it. That’s the last time RWI is mentioned. The rest of the article is a straight sales job on salt chlorine generation. I really encourage you to read it and see if you don’t agree. Whether you’re pro or anti salt, just read it and you’ll see. Especially if you read the heavily footnoted and referenced Swimming Pool Disinfection: Techniques and Pitfalls by David M. Bonnick, the other feature article in the November 2006 issue.

There is a sharp contrast. One is a research paper, the other a marketing brochure.

But that makes sense. Bill Kent is the President of Team Horner. They probably have the lion’s share of the commercial application of salt systems in the US through their AutoPilot commercial chlorine systems. Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of this. This is America, and Bill’s got every right to submit articles about the technology he believes in. And he has a right, in the future, to point to the article he wrote and have folks Google it for more information. And now, when they do, they’ll also get this blog, and a link to Bob Carson’s warning about chloride-rich waste streams and parades of tanker trucks and a link to the YouTube clip of the WFAA report on Why Salt Sucks.

I bring this all up as nothing more than a counter balance to this kind of thing. This is an old article, written in 1984, and dug up by the same Bill Kent in 1993. He slapped a cover letter on the article and called it a "Research Report". Now, it's not just my opinion that this thing is just an article. The last page of the article says, "This article is based on a technical report prepared by Mr. D. S. Novak of ELTECH Systems Corporation titled 'Review of Factors Influencing Corrosion in Swimming Pools,' June 20, 1984." But the technical report is nowhere to be found.

Eltech owned the salt system Lectranator back then, which was blowing through stainless steel filter tanks like they were butter. So, they bought some "research" that said, "it's not the salt, it's the unstabilized chlorine". Then, Eltech sold Lectranator to Olin and Olin sold it to Team Horner, and they got the research along with the machines. They renamed Lectranator AutoPilot in 1995, which makes a casual reader not put the two and two together and see that this article is just Eltech saying way back in the early eighties that salt wasn't eating up stainless steel filter tanks. Since then, we've all learned, even the biggest pro-salties, that you don't put salt systems on pools with stainless steel filter tanks.

But this flawed little piece of "research" keeps coming up in forums, being presented as "proof" of a mitigating circumstance for why salt is okay today, and why if you're seeing problems with your salt pool, it's probably the unstabilized chlorine and not the salt that's doing the damage. The whole idea that this article is presented without making the underlying research available makes even hosting it a dubious decision, if you ask me. Especially in light of the fact that it was recently re-introduced to the forums by a representative of AutoPilot.

And you can read on countless threads on these forums about "the well documented research of how lower stabilizer levels will result in much higher corrosivity from chlorine", and if you ever bother to ask about the source of this well documented research, they just point back to that little three page article.

And I just don't want the same thing to happen with this most recent article about RWI's. I don't want, ten years from now, to see that article referenced as "the research done in 2006 that proves SCG's effectiveness in fighting RWI's".

And now, after I post this and the search engine wordbots have crawled through this piece and indexed all of these words and all of these links, no one will ever be able to talk about those things again without this blog piece being part of the discussion, too.

God! I love the Internet!

You should all try it. It's just about the only democracy we have left.

A Tale of Two Articles



You can tell a lot about a magazine by the flavor of it’s reporting. Give you an example; if I wanted hard news about the state of politics in America, I might read Time, or Newsweek, or US News & World Report, or maybe National Review or Harpers, depending on which way I liked to vote.

On the other hand, if I wanted to know if Britney Spears shaves her pubis, I’d read People or Us or Entertainment Weekly or Hollywood Reporter.

So, anyway, I was reading two of our industry magazines this week; Pool & Spa News and Pool & Spa Marketing.

This week, Pool & Spa News ran a second article about the problems we’re seeing because of salt systems. This new one is called "Coping With Salt" and it shows a two page closeup picture of a single piece of limestone coping that looks much like the surface of the moon. Much like the pictures I’ve been publishing along with some of my blog pieces. The article quoted Greg Donoho, the director for IPSSA Region 9, talking about an eight month old fountain where the coping looked like someone had taken a claw hammer to it.

They quoted Lew Aikens, the owner of Ocean Quest Pools, saying that he’s replaced $100,000.00 worth of Lueders limestone on his projects because of the damage from salt.

They quoted Guy Wood of Westside Pools and Buzz Ghiz of Paddock Pools. They all said the same thing; Salt is ruining our pools.

They even quoted me; "With other products out there, when there was a defect, it would just malfunction or fail. But this is the only product I’ve seen that damaged the whole pool."

They did the Fair & Balanced thing, of course, and allotted about 50% of the article space to the manufacturers so they could tell their lies, like "it must be the homeowners fault", and "3,000 ppm salt isn’t corrosive", and a bunch of guff about everybody ought to start using stronger and more corrosion resistant metals... Wait a minute. If 3,000 ppm isn’t corrosive, then why do we need to use more corrosion resistant metal?

Because they want to have it both ways. They want everybody to upgrade their metals so that they can continue to sell their Pandora’s Boxes, but they don’t want to accept any of the liability for the latent defect that has caused all this damage because they didn’t tell you to upgrade your metals in the first place.

The manufacturer’s also used their interview time to try to foster the myth that every responsible stone mason and pool builder and homeowner has been sealing their stone decks since the beginning of time, and so, you see, they’re not really liable for all the damage to all that stone, like that $100,000.00 that Lew Aikens spent, or the ten’s of millions that will have to be spent nationwide to fix all the failed coping and decks.

And it is a myth that everybody has always sealed their stone and concrete. I’ve been walking on concrete and stone pool decks every day for 28 years, and the only ones I’ve ever seen that might have benefitted from sealing are the ones that disintegrate on salt pools.

But that’s what the manufacturers are trying to do now. They’re playing a waiting game; "The group (of seven manufacturers) plan to conduct research on the topic and have it available by next pool season". The way this game works is you delay, and while you’re delaying, you send your army of reps out there saying the same things over and over again. Things like, "we should be sealing all stone and concrete on every pool anyway", and "we ought to be using marine grade stainless steel anyway". And then, by the time you release your research, you’ve changed the perception of what the problems were to begin with and you’ve got people thinking that it was their own damn fault for not sealing everything like they were supposed to. And why were they such cheapskates as not to afford their customers the benefit of marine grade stainless steel?

But you really have to give Pool & Spa News huge kudos for trying. I mean, they have to do the Fair & Balanced thing. All News Organizations do. And just think where we’d be if we didn’t have Pool & Spa News and people like Rebecca Robledo to bring this discussion out in the open?

Which brings me to the second article I read this week about salt systems. It’s from Pool & Spa Marketing, written by the editor, David Barnsley. It’s titled Salt Chlorine Generators, A Competitive Alternative to Man Made Chlorine, and it’s billed as the Feature Article. But, just as the term "alternative to man made chlorine" is misleading - as if chlorine generators just fell from the sky or something - this whole Feature Article would be more appropriately set in a box labeled This Is A Paid Advertisement.

For that is surely what it is. I won’t go so far as to say that David didn’t write this ad piece - I’m sure that as the editor of Pool & Spa Marketing he’s quite capable of turning out three or four pages of text - but given the fact that there are so many issues these days with salt systems and that none of them are addressed in this Feature Article, I kind of hope that the manufacturers did write the whole thing for him. Then there would at least be a clear cut reason why the whole four page piece is just a salt system pep rally, nothing more than a marketing brochure for nearly every salt system out there, complete with pictures of all of these systems.

The closest the piece comes to touching on any of the real issues that surround salt systems is near the end where they quote the American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM) saying "when natural stone is properly treated... it will last indefinitely. If not properly treated natural stone can be very porous and vulnerable to weathering and deterioration - whether the stone is used with a salt chlorine pool or not. It is therefore imperative that pool and spa builders and stone suppliers educate homeowners about the appropriate treatment of any type of stone they should use."

And you see? This is how it’s done. You buy space in a magazine so you can get your word out there, that those dumb old builders and homeowners should have been sealing their stone and concrete all along. And you keep buying that space and saying it over and over and over again.

Pretty soon, it’ll stand proud and tall alongside all the rest of the lies that have been swallowed as the truth, like:

No More Green Hair!

Well Below The Level Of Taste!

Never Buy Chlorine Again!

You Need Only Check pH And Alkalinity Periodically!

You call it a Feature Article. I call it Paid Advertisement dressed up as a Feature Article. Advertising parading as News. And this isn’t the first one they’ve done. If you subscribe to Pool & Sap - I mean Spa - Marketing, look back one issue to their Product Insight piece titled Electrolysis & Corrosion From Chorine Generators. It’s another, "Everything is fine, folks. Go back to sleep." piece. It quotes just enough "industry experts" to sound legitimate. But if you check their credentials, you’ll see that they are, for the most part, reps from the companies selling chlorine generators. Zodiac was heavily quoted and Zodiac had a 1/3 page ad on the last page of the piece.

Coincidence?

Next week, I’m going to get back to some of the technical issues with salt systems. I received an e-mail from a builder that just set me on fire again. Here’s a little taste of it before I sign off. He’s talking here about chasing warranty issues on his salt pools over the last fifteen years:

"I think the biggest single factor was the propensity [for the salt system] 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."

And just when I thought I’d run out of bad things to say about salt.