It’s The Environment, Stupid… And The Taxes
I learned something from a Salt Rep a while back. To set Google Alerts for things like Chlorine Generator and Salt System and Salt Ban and Electrolysis and Southland Leisure Centre, and that way I can track any information that pops up on the web on any of these topics.
It has been a gold mine of information. Take, for example, this headline that came to me by way of the Salt Ban Alert:
Hard choice on water softeners
Dixon City Council is studying the possible ban on salt-based systems.
It turns out that the voters in Dixon, California overturned an effort to raise their taxes to fund an expansion at the wastewater plant. The expansion was to handle the ever increasing salinity level of their treated wastewater discharge. When they refused to pony up more taxes, that put the city out of compliance with state guidelines for salinity levels in treated waste discharge, and that got the state of California breathing down the necks of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, who, in turn, started breathing down the necks of the City of Dixon to come up with a solution. You know how it is, poorly treated waste rolls downhill.
So it continued to roll downhill until it plopped into the laps of the Dixon Wastewater Project Committee. They were tasked with coming up with ways that don’t cost the taxpayers any money but will still reduce the salinity level of their wastewater. And it occurred to them, “What if we stopped putting salt in the water? Do you think that might help?”
At that point, someone pointed out that it seems to have done the trick over in Santa Clarita, and so the committee came back to the city council with three proposals that pretty much read:
1. Get rid of salt based water softeners.
2. Teach people how to get rid of salt based water softeners.
3. Study the long term effects of getting rid of salt based water softeners.
And we all know what happens next, right? If Santa Clarita is any indicator, in about two and a half years, they’ll come back and say;
1. Get rid of swimming pool salt pool chlorine generators.
2. Teach people how to get rid of salt pool chlorine generators.
3. Study the long term effects of getting rid of salt pool chlorine generators.
But it might be sooner, because since I have Google Alerts, I was able to see that story the day it published and send a blizzard of links to everybody in Dixon who’s e-mail I could find to tell them that they ought to just go ahead and throw salt pools in there while they’re thinking about banning salty stuff.
Isn’t networking Neat?
And I know, I know. I can already hear the Salt Is Great Amen Choir reciting the California building code that backwash lines for pools aren’t hooked to the sewer so they’re not technically increasing the salinity of the waste stream, because it just spews onto the ground, and anybody who keeps up with the Breaking News at some of the more popular internet pool forums knows that “unless your soil already has very high salt concentrations or you are growing the very most tempermental [sic] plants in the world SWG pool water will be just fine for watering plants for years and years…”, to which another Living Online Instead of In the Real World forum regular adds, “Our deck-o-drain drains out to the side of our [pool] directly into a small flower bed. Out of all our new plants, it is probably doing the best, so you'd be hard pressed to convince me that a little low salinity water is bad for plants - let alone 'toxic waste' ".
And that, my friends, is the state of the Salt Pool Biz on the Internet. The consumer is faced with either going to the manufacturer’s website, where the lies are so thick you can cut them with a knife, or going to these forums, which so much resemble a bunch of guys sitting around the garage, drinking beer, pulling each other’s fingers and convincing each other that salt's okay. One of them recommends that everybody water their plants "for years and years" with salt water, and another thinks that the salty water is helping his plants. If anybody with any real knowledge of agriculture were walking by when they said it, they would laugh themselves silly and tell them that is such a load of... poorly treated waste. But then, they wouldn’t be invited to the next finger pulling contest.
And really, what do I know? I just read facts that are printed in silly old newspapers and dumb old research journals and b-o-r-i-n-g professional waste water management publications. It’s not like I KNOW anything, like these guys at the forums who got solid C’s in chemistry and earth science in school, or the Salt Reps, who are really your friends and would never tell you a lie for something as base as a wad of greasy cash.
What the heck, though. Here’s some more of those dumb old facts about salt ruining drinking water:
Too much salt in New Jersey's water?
“United Water company has been sending notices out to its customers in Bergen and Hudson counties warning that the sodium level in the water supply is higher than it should be.
The company blames the winter task of salting the roads to keep them clear of ice.
The salt and snow melt from the roads spilled into reservoirs, taking the concentration of sodium higher than state guidelines -- and the water processing can't flush it out.
But the company is required to put out the warning for people with high blood pressure or other high sodium sensitive health concerns. It advises them to talk to their doctors.”
So now you’re advised to talk to your doctor before you drink the water in Jersey because of salt. Of all the things I thought you’d have to worry about drinking Jersey water, salt was pretty far down on the list. But there it is.
And on the off chance that you’re brain damaged and you don’t readily see the connection between salt on the roads and salt pools… It’s all salt. Salt pools are elective. They’re not mandatory. Why would you be part of the problem when you can be part of the solution?
This also dovetails nicely into why it’s not okay to blow your salty backwash onto the ground as if you needed to be told fer-Chrissakes…
Deep breaths…. Counting to ten… Okay... Better now.
But my favorite little tidbit to come my way via my Google Alerts is this one. It’s a thread on the Water Technology Bulletin Board. Click it and read through it a couple of times to get the drift of what they’re talking about. I’ll give you the synopsis, but don’t trust me. Go read it for yourself.
This guy named Dirkson is asking a bunch of Real Water Experts to respond with their approach to solving a water quality issue. Now, these are people who make a living working with the technologies that make your water drinkable. They are not like your local Salt Reps who make a living by making your water undrinkable, or people who post on pool forums who, for the most part, just own a pool and do something else besides know anything about water for a day job. The water quality issue was providing about 1,000 gallons per week with a source water that had a hardness of about 3800 ppm and a salinity of about 2100 ppm. Your salt pool water has nearly double that salinty.
The thread quickly becomes defined as RE: Brackish Water Treatment by the responders, and, as we all know, brackish is defined as salty tasting. So they’re all keying on the high salinity, which like I said, is only a little more than half what your salt pool water is.
The first responder says, “There is NO EASY ANSWER. That is why no one is responding to your post”, and he goes on to recommend solar stills because the energy costs to reclaim that water would be too high.
The next responder says, sure, it can be treated. System cost for 500 gallons per day would be about $10,000. That would just about cover Mom and Dad and the three kids, each averaging about 100 gallons of water a day (that’s the US average).
The next couple responders point out that even at the $10,000 mark, there’s a problem with all that salinity. Using RO and water softeners to reclaim the water creates a brine discharge problem.
“Even worse where do you get rid of all the brine from the regenerations? I would never want to allow it to be dispersed on the land. Especially, if the land is above a water table. “
But, gosh, the Pool Gurus on the pool forums said that it was good for plants and stuff. Said I could blow it all over the ground for years and years. You mean to tell me that they were wrong? You mean to tell me that… their opinion was just… an opinion? I am crushed.
Of course, the folks who make a living creating polluted pool water – that is, after all, what 3,500 ppm salt water is; polluted water that needs treatment according to EVERYBODY IN WASTEWATER MANAGEMENT – the same folks who want to keep selling you salt systems will say that this is all just those guy’s opinions. But their opinions coincide with legislation that keeps popping up all over the country about how our excessive use of salt is causing increasing costs in waste water reclamation.
So, if you’re one of those Red State Republicans who hates new taxes, the way all good Republicans are supposed to, and you just happen to have a salt system on your pool, remember that you can’t vote NO when your municipality comes hat in hand asking for more money to desalinate the waste water. Unless, of course, you want them to legislate your salt pool out of existence. Because that would logically be next. Like in Santa Clarita, and perhaps soon to come in Dixon, and perhaps coming to a municipality near you soon.
There’s just one more little factoid I want to pass along that I found out there in cyberspace this week. It’s kind of a good fit to put the lie to the Other Guy’s baloney that they’re big companies and they know what’s best for you, and that, at the very least, they certainly know better than some dumb old pool cleaner in Dallas, Texas.
In 1957, the Ford Motor Company (pretty big company, wouldn’t you say?) unveiled a concept car, called the Nucleon. Then, again in 1962, they came to the Seattle World’s Fair with another concept car they called the Ford Seattle-ite XXI. The Nucleon and especially the Seatlle-ite XXI were cars designed for the 21st century, when everybody would own several small nuclear reactors to fuel their energy needs. Both cars were envisioned to be powered by a slightly larger version of the reactor that powers your lawnmower and your kid’s jet bike.
What? You say you don’t have a nuclear fueled lawnmower and your kid is still pedaling around the neighborhood?
But you have salt in your pool water? Who have you been listening to?
Showing posts with label Pool Forums. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pool Forums. Show all posts
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Call It Hubris
One of my favorite authors is Mark Twain. He was truly a great American and a great American writer. And just as much as he is probably our greatest writer, he was one of our greatest social commentators and satirists. It is probably that vein of irreverence for convention, shot through everything he wrote, that makes me love his writing so much. He, like most great Americans, was very critical of the America that he saw, because in his heart, he envisioned the America that could be.
It is easy to understand why he was so critical of his world. He grew up in the age of slavery. He ran away out West to avoid fighting in the Civil War. He lived through the assassination of the President, and the awful Reconstruction period that followed. He watched the Gilded Age flourish, where a few families – like JP Morgan and the Rockefellers – amassed the greatest fortunes ever seen on the planet through the devices of sweat shop labor and overpowering financial manipulations. So, it is no small wonder that, in his later years, when he began to tour and lecture, he joked incessantly about the smallness of great men and the crookedness of their most forthright pronouncements.
He had no great love for politicians and big business. The love he had left was for humanity and for his country and for the unachieved potential that he saw for it to do more than make the rich richer.
He died poor. That is usually the way of it, though. There’s hardly ever a buck in telling the Truth, or even pointing people in the general direction of the Truth. Because the Truth is kind of like taking medicine. It’s not always pleasant. It’s not always something you’re going to want to do, or see, or hear. You see, people will build a million constructs in their mind for denying the Truth if it even looks like medicine, or if it means that they have to surrender even one of their guilty pleasures.
Like people who smoke. Those of us who don’t smoke know that they’re not only killing themselves but they’re killing us too with their second hand smoke. I can hear the collective mouse click as 21% of you – the smokers out there – close this window. Some of you – those of you who still smoke in your homes – are killing your children, too.
But they still smoke. They don’t want to swallow the medicine of Truth that says that smoking causes cancer and a boatload of other diseases for them and for the people around them.
With smokers, at least they have an excuse, They’re addicted to a drug, and so when they defend their Right To Smoke it’s not really them talking. It’s the Drug. It’s like that Crackhead begging change in traffic with the Will Work For Food sign and all those good reasons why he can’t give up The Rock today. The next time you’re stuck at the light listening to his jibberish, nodding your head and trying to roll up your window, think about the arguments your friends give you for why they still smoke.
Except for the shabby clothes and that you smelled him coming, there’s really not a lot of difference, is there? Wait a minute. Not a good comparison. I can smell cigarette smokers coming, too. That’s something else I don’t think smokers are aware of; how much they positively reek when they’ve just stubbed out a cigarette. Cigarette smokers always stink. But, man, right after they’ve put one out. Whew!
Or like people who drive V-8 powered, third and fourth row seating SUV’s. Yes. I know. Another huge mouse click just occurred. But seriously, unless you’re an unreformed Mormon (another, albeit smaller, mouse click), with three wives and 12 kids, I don’t get mega-row seating. I don’t get the need to be that environmentally unconscious just so you can take your 2.3 kids to McDonalds.
I don’t think it would bother me so much if those of you who do it would just say, “I do it because I want to and because I don’t care about the US being a nation dependent on oil from regions that are often hostile to the US, and I don’t care about the ever increasing gasoline prices, and I don’t care that all the legislation from the 1970’s that put safety bumpers on autos is for naught because every one of those cars fits UNDER my SUV come crash time and I know that I’m gypping everybody by taking the Heavy Equipment tax deduction on my luxury laden, $75,000 pimped out SUV. I just don’t care. I want my SUV”, instead of saying, “I feel safer and I think that global warming is a myth”.
Because then you’re starting to sound like the Crackhead with 35 Very Good Reasons Why I Can’t Quit Today.
And those of you who see The Truth in what I’m saying know that you can’t reason with them. Not with any of them. It doesn’t matter what proofs you show them. It doesn’t matter how much evidence you amass. It doesn’t matter how many people are saying the same thing you are.
Because you’re screwing with their Comfort Zone. Once someone’s adopted a toy or a gadget and likes the way it looks, feels, smells, tastes, works, etc., you might as well hang up having a rational conversation with them about The Side Effects.
Like with SUV’s. One side effect is we may have to send some of our children, as they’re just leaving their teen years and before we invest any real money or effort in educating or training them, to fight and possibly die in some far away country that just happens to be strategically located over one of the world’s largest remaining oil reserves. You may not like the way that sounds, but it’s a pretty fair summation of how our society fights it’s wars, and, generally speaking, who fights them, and why they’re fought. You can jump down my throat with all kinds of arguments about the security of our nation and defending freedom and democracy and such, but before you know it, you’re sounding a lot like our friends who smoke cigarettes.
Getting back to cigarettes for a minute. We’ve all seen the movies with Russell Crow and Al Pacino and that new one with Aaron Eckhert, Thank You For Smoking. We all know now that the tobacco companies lied about the link from cigarette smoking to cancer for about 40 or 50 years. We just laughed our asses off at a comedy movie portraying that very fact. According to the World Health Organization, “worldwide, some 5 million persons die from tobacco related illnesses every year”. We all know that corporate America lied to us and as a result, millions and millions of people have died.
And I know that some of you out there who read this blog regularly are thinking, “Oh, God, the Pool Guy’s really flipped. He’s going to compare salt systems to the Cigarette Death Merchants.”
Not at all. But I want to point out that when it comes to your best interest, there’s no one that’s going to legislate your toys. Nobody’s watching. The government isn’t in the business of protecting you. If they were, the CEO’s of the major cigarette manufacturers would have been prosecuted as accomplices in the deaths of all of those people for all of the years that the cigarette companies sat on that data.
But nothing happened. All of their stocks are still a Good Investment. My Country Tis of Thee, huh?
So, empirically and historically, there’s more evidence to support my argument that salt systems are bad for your pool and that they’re lying to you when they say that I’m a crackpot than there is that corporate America is fully disclosing everything they know about the long term damage that salt and the electrolysis process will do to your pool.
Call me crazy. Go ahead.
It is the craziest thing to me that we venerate the Truth Tellers many years later after we can no longer deny that they were, in fact, Telling the Truth.
Like Mark Twain. In his day, lots of people thought Mark Twain was a smart-aleck who was bad for business. It turns out he was a smart-aleck who was bad for business and he was Right. Being Right, and funny, is why we admire him now.
Here’s a real polarizing example that’ll get a lot of mouses clicking:
Michael Moore. So many people hate him. But just a few years ago he made a little movie that said that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq and that our soldiers, returning from honorable duty in a dishonorable war, were being treated even more dishonorably at Walter Reed Hospital. He even showed video footage of the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.
And everybody looked at that video footage, evidence of our wounded soldiers suffering in obscure silence, and said he was a crackpot…
Three years later, everybody knows that intelligence about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq was falsified, and now after three years, there’s finally been a Congressional Investigation into the horrible conditions our wounded troops have had to endure at Walter Reed Hospital.
So, everybody will keep hating him, and then, as more and more of what he documents proves to be true – re: Roger and Me, Fahrenheit 9/11, etc. – then he’ll be viewed more and more like Twain.
But history shows us that while the Truth Tellers are Telling the Truth, we listen to the Fast Buck Artists instead. We listen to the same Corporate America that’s screwed us more times than we can count, and we listen to the government that does as little as possible to regulate them.
And I think a lot of it is because they’re really just telling us what we want to hear. Corporate America sells us a Cool Gadget and tells us there’s no Down Side, and we want to believe they’re telling the truth because we just love this Gadget. The government doesn’t really have a dog in the fight as long as the consumer appears to be happy taking their screwing, and even when the evidence starts to mount up, the Glacier’s Pace of government proceedings ensures that the Corporate Guys will be able to keep the consumer bent over out behind the barn for quite a while longer. Throw in some off-election year apathy, some on-election year campaign contributions and you’ve got a near endless cycle of never quite getting around to dealing with the problem. Usually, people just stop using the Cool Gadget because it turns out to suck so much that it gets classified as Totally Uncool, and by then, Corporate America has moved on to the next indispensable Cool Gadget.
Remember polybutylene plumbing?
Remember that spray-in foam insulator that was all the rage for older, uninsulated homes back in the seventies that later turned out to gas off CFC’s and formaldehyde fumes into your home, making it pretty much uninhabitable instead of just cold?
Remember the Radium Girls? Hundreds of women who painted the luminescence on the numbers at the US Radium Corporation clock factory in Orange, New Jersey? This wasn’t some third world barrio that could be easily ignored. This is Tony Soprano Land were talking about.
The glow-in-the-dark luminescence these women painted on the clock faces was called Undark. “They were required to paint delicate lines with fine-tipped brushes, applying the Undark to the tiny numbers and indicator hands of wristwatches. After a few strokes a brush tended to lose its shape, so the women's managers encouraged them to use their lips and tongues to keep the tips of the camel hair brushes sharp and clean. The glowing paint was completely flavorless, and the supervisors assured them that rosy cheeks would be the only physical side effect to swallowing the radium-laced pigment.”
They all died. Their children, and children’s children all had related health issues. The first woman who suspected that her problems might have been from radium exposure sought professional help. A “specialist from Columbia University named Frederick Flynn asked to examine her. Flynn declared her to be in fine health. It would be some time before anyone discovered that Flynn was not a doctor, nor was he licensed to practice medicine, rather he was a toxicologist on the US Radium payroll. A ‘colleague’ who had been present during the examination– and who had confirmed the healthy diagnosis– turned out to be one of the vice-presidents of US Radium.”
Remember when Sears – the name you trust – got busted by the state of California for systematically and routinely performing unnecessary auto repairs? The California report stated that there was every indication that the fraud extended beyond the borders of their state and was endemic in the Sears auto repair system.
Remember Enron? They were billed at the Smartest Guys In The Room wherever they went. And they were. All but a few of them kept most of the money they stole.
You don’t really need a link for Enron, do you? I mean, there’s no one who wants to dispute that those Enron cowboys should have been shot and then hanged, is there?
But we’re not talking about a major plumbing manufacturer, or the radium company that still does business with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission today after changing names and owners enough times to throw off the legal responsibility for the two toxic Superfund sites it’s created over the years.
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/commission/secys/1999/secy1999-269/1999-269scy.html Go to BACKGROUND and read the 3rd and 4th paragraphs down.
And we’re not talking about a household name like Sears, or a major Energy Company like Enron, one who routinely advised the Executive Branch of our government on our National Energy Policy.
No. We’re talking about Salt Reps selling Salt Boxes in the Swimming Pool Business.
Don’t you feel better now? Of course nothing’s wrong with your salt system. People Making Money in the Pool Biz Have Never Been Wrong Before…
I mean, come on. You’re paying as much as $2,000 for technology that you can get for $145 from Cabela’s.
And you don’t think there’s something up? You don’t think you’re being screwed like a stump-tied goat?
Okay fine…
So, my advice to all you folks who already own one of those two thousand dollar salt system and are bothered by what I say; stop reading my blog. Why aggravate yourself? If you like the way the water feels and you think your salt rep is just a swell guy, then drink up. Enjoy the Kool Aid. If it doesn’t work out and you start to notice that things are beginning to fall apart, then you can come back and read through the archives. Whatever problem you’re having I’ve probably talked about it, or will talk about as salt problems continue to present themselves.
And to all you Salties out there, all you folks whose job it is to try to keep your foot on the throat of guys like me; I admit to the failing of hubris in thinking that I could come onto your turf and talk sense in a place that allows the posting of nonsense in response, or that I could find a level playing field in a place that touts a discount on salt systems as a “member benefit”. I realized I was in the wrong place when I found myself stooping to answer the question; if salt systems are destroying swimming pools, then as a pool serviceman, why am I not happy with that?
Because I don’t work at Sears. That’s why.
One of my favorite authors is Mark Twain. He was truly a great American and a great American writer. And just as much as he is probably our greatest writer, he was one of our greatest social commentators and satirists. It is probably that vein of irreverence for convention, shot through everything he wrote, that makes me love his writing so much. He, like most great Americans, was very critical of the America that he saw, because in his heart, he envisioned the America that could be.
It is easy to understand why he was so critical of his world. He grew up in the age of slavery. He ran away out West to avoid fighting in the Civil War. He lived through the assassination of the President, and the awful Reconstruction period that followed. He watched the Gilded Age flourish, where a few families – like JP Morgan and the Rockefellers – amassed the greatest fortunes ever seen on the planet through the devices of sweat shop labor and overpowering financial manipulations. So, it is no small wonder that, in his later years, when he began to tour and lecture, he joked incessantly about the smallness of great men and the crookedness of their most forthright pronouncements.
He had no great love for politicians and big business. The love he had left was for humanity and for his country and for the unachieved potential that he saw for it to do more than make the rich richer.
He died poor. That is usually the way of it, though. There’s hardly ever a buck in telling the Truth, or even pointing people in the general direction of the Truth. Because the Truth is kind of like taking medicine. It’s not always pleasant. It’s not always something you’re going to want to do, or see, or hear. You see, people will build a million constructs in their mind for denying the Truth if it even looks like medicine, or if it means that they have to surrender even one of their guilty pleasures.
Like people who smoke. Those of us who don’t smoke know that they’re not only killing themselves but they’re killing us too with their second hand smoke. I can hear the collective mouse click as 21% of you – the smokers out there – close this window. Some of you – those of you who still smoke in your homes – are killing your children, too.
But they still smoke. They don’t want to swallow the medicine of Truth that says that smoking causes cancer and a boatload of other diseases for them and for the people around them.
With smokers, at least they have an excuse, They’re addicted to a drug, and so when they defend their Right To Smoke it’s not really them talking. It’s the Drug. It’s like that Crackhead begging change in traffic with the Will Work For Food sign and all those good reasons why he can’t give up The Rock today. The next time you’re stuck at the light listening to his jibberish, nodding your head and trying to roll up your window, think about the arguments your friends give you for why they still smoke.
Except for the shabby clothes and that you smelled him coming, there’s really not a lot of difference, is there? Wait a minute. Not a good comparison. I can smell cigarette smokers coming, too. That’s something else I don’t think smokers are aware of; how much they positively reek when they’ve just stubbed out a cigarette. Cigarette smokers always stink. But, man, right after they’ve put one out. Whew!
Or like people who drive V-8 powered, third and fourth row seating SUV’s. Yes. I know. Another huge mouse click just occurred. But seriously, unless you’re an unreformed Mormon (another, albeit smaller, mouse click), with three wives and 12 kids, I don’t get mega-row seating. I don’t get the need to be that environmentally unconscious just so you can take your 2.3 kids to McDonalds.
I don’t think it would bother me so much if those of you who do it would just say, “I do it because I want to and because I don’t care about the US being a nation dependent on oil from regions that are often hostile to the US, and I don’t care about the ever increasing gasoline prices, and I don’t care that all the legislation from the 1970’s that put safety bumpers on autos is for naught because every one of those cars fits UNDER my SUV come crash time and I know that I’m gypping everybody by taking the Heavy Equipment tax deduction on my luxury laden, $75,000 pimped out SUV. I just don’t care. I want my SUV”, instead of saying, “I feel safer and I think that global warming is a myth”.
Because then you’re starting to sound like the Crackhead with 35 Very Good Reasons Why I Can’t Quit Today.
And those of you who see The Truth in what I’m saying know that you can’t reason with them. Not with any of them. It doesn’t matter what proofs you show them. It doesn’t matter how much evidence you amass. It doesn’t matter how many people are saying the same thing you are.
Because you’re screwing with their Comfort Zone. Once someone’s adopted a toy or a gadget and likes the way it looks, feels, smells, tastes, works, etc., you might as well hang up having a rational conversation with them about The Side Effects.
Like with SUV’s. One side effect is we may have to send some of our children, as they’re just leaving their teen years and before we invest any real money or effort in educating or training them, to fight and possibly die in some far away country that just happens to be strategically located over one of the world’s largest remaining oil reserves. You may not like the way that sounds, but it’s a pretty fair summation of how our society fights it’s wars, and, generally speaking, who fights them, and why they’re fought. You can jump down my throat with all kinds of arguments about the security of our nation and defending freedom and democracy and such, but before you know it, you’re sounding a lot like our friends who smoke cigarettes.
Getting back to cigarettes for a minute. We’ve all seen the movies with Russell Crow and Al Pacino and that new one with Aaron Eckhert, Thank You For Smoking. We all know now that the tobacco companies lied about the link from cigarette smoking to cancer for about 40 or 50 years. We just laughed our asses off at a comedy movie portraying that very fact. According to the World Health Organization, “worldwide, some 5 million persons die from tobacco related illnesses every year”. We all know that corporate America lied to us and as a result, millions and millions of people have died.
And I know that some of you out there who read this blog regularly are thinking, “Oh, God, the Pool Guy’s really flipped. He’s going to compare salt systems to the Cigarette Death Merchants.”
Not at all. But I want to point out that when it comes to your best interest, there’s no one that’s going to legislate your toys. Nobody’s watching. The government isn’t in the business of protecting you. If they were, the CEO’s of the major cigarette manufacturers would have been prosecuted as accomplices in the deaths of all of those people for all of the years that the cigarette companies sat on that data.
But nothing happened. All of their stocks are still a Good Investment. My Country Tis of Thee, huh?
So, empirically and historically, there’s more evidence to support my argument that salt systems are bad for your pool and that they’re lying to you when they say that I’m a crackpot than there is that corporate America is fully disclosing everything they know about the long term damage that salt and the electrolysis process will do to your pool.
Call me crazy. Go ahead.
It is the craziest thing to me that we venerate the Truth Tellers many years later after we can no longer deny that they were, in fact, Telling the Truth.
Like Mark Twain. In his day, lots of people thought Mark Twain was a smart-aleck who was bad for business. It turns out he was a smart-aleck who was bad for business and he was Right. Being Right, and funny, is why we admire him now.
Here’s a real polarizing example that’ll get a lot of mouses clicking:
Michael Moore. So many people hate him. But just a few years ago he made a little movie that said that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq and that our soldiers, returning from honorable duty in a dishonorable war, were being treated even more dishonorably at Walter Reed Hospital. He even showed video footage of the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.
And everybody looked at that video footage, evidence of our wounded soldiers suffering in obscure silence, and said he was a crackpot…
Three years later, everybody knows that intelligence about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq was falsified, and now after three years, there’s finally been a Congressional Investigation into the horrible conditions our wounded troops have had to endure at Walter Reed Hospital.
So, everybody will keep hating him, and then, as more and more of what he documents proves to be true – re: Roger and Me, Fahrenheit 9/11, etc. – then he’ll be viewed more and more like Twain.
But history shows us that while the Truth Tellers are Telling the Truth, we listen to the Fast Buck Artists instead. We listen to the same Corporate America that’s screwed us more times than we can count, and we listen to the government that does as little as possible to regulate them.
And I think a lot of it is because they’re really just telling us what we want to hear. Corporate America sells us a Cool Gadget and tells us there’s no Down Side, and we want to believe they’re telling the truth because we just love this Gadget. The government doesn’t really have a dog in the fight as long as the consumer appears to be happy taking their screwing, and even when the evidence starts to mount up, the Glacier’s Pace of government proceedings ensures that the Corporate Guys will be able to keep the consumer bent over out behind the barn for quite a while longer. Throw in some off-election year apathy, some on-election year campaign contributions and you’ve got a near endless cycle of never quite getting around to dealing with the problem. Usually, people just stop using the Cool Gadget because it turns out to suck so much that it gets classified as Totally Uncool, and by then, Corporate America has moved on to the next indispensable Cool Gadget.
Remember polybutylene plumbing?
Remember that spray-in foam insulator that was all the rage for older, uninsulated homes back in the seventies that later turned out to gas off CFC’s and formaldehyde fumes into your home, making it pretty much uninhabitable instead of just cold?
Remember the Radium Girls? Hundreds of women who painted the luminescence on the numbers at the US Radium Corporation clock factory in Orange, New Jersey? This wasn’t some third world barrio that could be easily ignored. This is Tony Soprano Land were talking about.
The glow-in-the-dark luminescence these women painted on the clock faces was called Undark. “They were required to paint delicate lines with fine-tipped brushes, applying the Undark to the tiny numbers and indicator hands of wristwatches. After a few strokes a brush tended to lose its shape, so the women's managers encouraged them to use their lips and tongues to keep the tips of the camel hair brushes sharp and clean. The glowing paint was completely flavorless, and the supervisors assured them that rosy cheeks would be the only physical side effect to swallowing the radium-laced pigment.”
They all died. Their children, and children’s children all had related health issues. The first woman who suspected that her problems might have been from radium exposure sought professional help. A “specialist from Columbia University named Frederick Flynn asked to examine her. Flynn declared her to be in fine health. It would be some time before anyone discovered that Flynn was not a doctor, nor was he licensed to practice medicine, rather he was a toxicologist on the US Radium payroll. A ‘colleague’ who had been present during the examination– and who had confirmed the healthy diagnosis– turned out to be one of the vice-presidents of US Radium.”
Remember when Sears – the name you trust – got busted by the state of California for systematically and routinely performing unnecessary auto repairs? The California report stated that there was every indication that the fraud extended beyond the borders of their state and was endemic in the Sears auto repair system.
Remember Enron? They were billed at the Smartest Guys In The Room wherever they went. And they were. All but a few of them kept most of the money they stole.
You don’t really need a link for Enron, do you? I mean, there’s no one who wants to dispute that those Enron cowboys should have been shot and then hanged, is there?
But we’re not talking about a major plumbing manufacturer, or the radium company that still does business with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission today after changing names and owners enough times to throw off the legal responsibility for the two toxic Superfund sites it’s created over the years.
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/commission/secys/1999/secy1999-269/1999-269scy.html Go to BACKGROUND and read the 3rd and 4th paragraphs down.
And we’re not talking about a household name like Sears, or a major Energy Company like Enron, one who routinely advised the Executive Branch of our government on our National Energy Policy.
No. We’re talking about Salt Reps selling Salt Boxes in the Swimming Pool Business.
Don’t you feel better now? Of course nothing’s wrong with your salt system. People Making Money in the Pool Biz Have Never Been Wrong Before…
I mean, come on. You’re paying as much as $2,000 for technology that you can get for $145 from Cabela’s.
And you don’t think there’s something up? You don’t think you’re being screwed like a stump-tied goat?
Okay fine…
So, my advice to all you folks who already own one of those two thousand dollar salt system and are bothered by what I say; stop reading my blog. Why aggravate yourself? If you like the way the water feels and you think your salt rep is just a swell guy, then drink up. Enjoy the Kool Aid. If it doesn’t work out and you start to notice that things are beginning to fall apart, then you can come back and read through the archives. Whatever problem you’re having I’ve probably talked about it, or will talk about as salt problems continue to present themselves.
And to all you Salties out there, all you folks whose job it is to try to keep your foot on the throat of guys like me; I admit to the failing of hubris in thinking that I could come onto your turf and talk sense in a place that allows the posting of nonsense in response, or that I could find a level playing field in a place that touts a discount on salt systems as a “member benefit”. I realized I was in the wrong place when I found myself stooping to answer the question; if salt systems are destroying swimming pools, then as a pool serviceman, why am I not happy with that?
Because I don’t work at Sears. That’s why.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Rain, Rain, Go Away…
You probably heard that we’re getting a bit of rain here in Dallas. Thirty-six inches so far this year, most of it in the past couple of months. Our average is thirty-four for the whole year. So, we’re pretty tired of seeing the five day forecast of rain, followed by rain, then some rain, and more rain, and then even more on top of that. For me, it’s not so much the getting wet that bugs me.
It’s buying all that salt and stabilizer for my pools.
Let me give you an example. Let’s take a 16,000 gallon lap pool / play pool. You know, the kind that are about five and a half, maybe six feet at the main drains at the center of the pool, sloping up to three feet at either end. Lots of folks call them Volleyball Pools. I call them easy to clean and less water to sanitize. They’re my favorite. So, let’s take that type as our example. It’s got an average depth of between four and four and a quarter feet.
Now, put thirty-six inches of rain on top of it, and add a tile line drain, a pretty common feature these days on newer pools, to keep that water level right smack at the middle of the tile.
If you have a salt system that needs around 3200 ppm to operate, you’ve added an extra 300 lbs. of salt and an extra 6 lbs of stabilizer to your pool so far this year here in Dallas.
If you have a salt system that needs 4000 ppm, you’ve added an extra 375 lbs. of salt and 8 lbs. of stabilizer to your pool.
That may not sound like a huge burden to you, but I have about 50 of these puppies on service. We’ve humped an extra 17,500 lbs of salt from our trucks to our pools so far this year. At wholesale prices, that’s an extra $2,187.50 I’ve spent on salt and an extra $400 I’ve spent on stabilizer. And like I said, that’s rock bottom wholesale pricing.
Why not just wait until the rains are all over with and then top off the pools? Well, the Zodiac LM-2 manual on pdf page 14 says it best; “Note: Operating the LM-2 at reduced salt levels may shorten the life of the cell”, and then again on pdf page 17; “The salt concentration should normally be around 4000 ppm, but should never be allowed to fall below 3000 ppm, as this can reduce the life of the cell electrodes.”
And too, it says; “Adding fresh water or rainfall to the pool dilutes the salt concentration.” [emphasis mine]
But wait! What about these reports all over the internet, all these guys posting in all these forums, swearing up and down that they never, ever add salt to their pools? They swear that once they load that first 15 or so bags to get to optimum salt level, that they maybe add one or two bags a year, tops. And what about all those sales brochures that talk about how the salt “never goes away”?
Perhaps their being less than forthcoming, shall we say. Or perhaps those forums are overrun with Salt Reps parading as happy salt pool owners. Because it just ain't true. Take it from the guy who humps the salt.
Unless, of course, these people making these claims all live in Los Angeles. They’ve only had three inches of rain there in the last twelve months. That would make these fantastic claims of never adding salt nearly true.
So, that’s a good rule of thumb. Salt systems are cheaper and should be encouraged for use in drought stricken regions of the world. That’s exactly what you need in drought stricken countries; 16,000 gallon reservoirs of undrinkable water.
But for contrast, let’s take the wettest place in the world; Mawslynram, in Meghalaya State, India. It gets 467 ½ inches per annum. To run a Zodiac at optimum levels, you’d need to add an extra 4,977 lbs of salt and an extra 98.1 lbs of stabilizer each year. If they’re buying the salt at Home Depot and the stabilizer at Leslie’s, that’s an extra $622 in salt and $441.50 in stabilizer.
I wonder if they have Home Depot and Leslie’s in Mawslynram? Well, they must have Wal Marts. Knock 20% off and we’ll call it even.
Here in the US, Wynooches, Oxbow, Washington once got 184.56 inches of rain in 1931. If they’d had salt systems back then, it would have meant an extra 1,964 lbs. of salt and an extra 39 lbs. of stabilizer.
But let’s get real. Let’s talk about present day average rainfalls in present day average American cities.
Mobile, Alabama, at 67 inches average annual rainfall would mean an extra 713 lbs. of salt and an extra 14 lbs. of stabilizer just to keep up with the runoff.
Pensacola, Florida, at 65 inches average annual rainfall would need 692 lbs. of salt and 13.6 lbs. of stabilizer.
West Palm Beach, Florida, at 63 inches average annual rainfall would need 670 lbs. of salt.
Port Arthur, Texas, at 61 inches average annual rainfall, would need 650 lbs of salt, just to keep up with the rain.
Even Tuscon, Arizona – pretty much the holder of the title of Driest State in the US for More Centuries than We’ve Been Here – is going to need an extra 128 lbs. each year to stay ahead of their skimpy 12 inches of annual rainfall.
And these totals don’t include splash-out or backwash. Remember, too, that they’re all based on that little old 16,000 volleyball pool. If you’re feeding a 30,000 gallon deep diver, your mileage may vary.
But let’s get wild here. Let’s say you’ve got that volleyball pool right here in Dallas, Texas, with our paltry thirty-four inches a year, and your builder sold you on that Mineral Springs system. You know, the Aqua Rite private labeled for Bio Guard? And let’s say you drink the marketing Kool-Aid and never ask a single question and always buy your salt – I mean, your proprietary blend of minerals – from your local Bio Guard dealer to keep the salt – I mean the mineral level – up to snuff. At $34.99 for a thirty pound bag, and one bag required per 1,000 gallons of water, and 10,660 gallons of runoff from the rain, you’re going to spend an extra $373.00 on “minerals” for your pool. Move that pool to Mobile, Alabama, and the price, like the annual rainfall, nearly doubles.
But, so what? Everybody still likes the way the water feels and they’re going to keep using them darn salt boxes no matter how much it rains. Right?
And therein lies the moral of this story: If the average modern pool, equipped with a tile line drain to help maintain proper water level in the pool, is getting 10,000 gallons a year of runoff, and if there are 7.5 million residential pools in the US, and if what they say is true and 4 out of 10 pools being built these days are salt pools, then when the salt market zeniths, we’ll have 3 million salt pools dumping 30 billion gallons of 3,200 ppm water into our ground water, our storm drains, our sewer systems, our creeks, our rivers and our reservoirs. Diluting 30 billion gallons of salt water to below the level of taste (250 ppm) will create 384 billion gallons of water right at the level of taste, before any other salt contamination is taken into account. Salt contamination like water softeners, road salt, manufacturing processes, etc.
The average person ought to drink 8, 8 ounce glasses of water a day. That’s a half a gallon of water. That’s 182.5 gallons a year. 30 billion gallons of water represents enough to provide drinking water for 164,438,356 people a year. But if it’s salty, they can’t drink it.
Now all those numbers are only if the number of salt pools keeps growing at the rate of 4 out of 10. If the Salt Guys have their way, and more success, it’ll be higher, and all these numbers will go up.
There’s tons of studies that show ground water chloride contamination from the use of road salts in Canada and the northern US. Just Google it and you’ll see that what I’m saying is true.
When you read those reports you’ll come across this term that the pointy head guv guys who write these environmental studies use when referring very matter-of-factly to the area for several hundred yards on either side of the road bed on those salted roads. They call it the “Salt Kill Zone”.
That’s because it often kills the native plants and they have to be replaced by “salt resistant” species. But even then, you can see that we need to use the salt in that application. Even though it’s creating these dead zones and destroying the road beds and infrastructure – road salt causes about $3,940,000,000 a year in road and infrastructure damage here in the US – if we don’t use it we won’t be able to get around. Commerce will come to a screeching halt every time there’s ice on the road. But salt pools…
Oh, yeah, I remember. It’s so your kids won’t get red eyes.
What truly blows me away is how virulently opposed to this idea of salt contamination of the ground and groundwater is to otherwise normal, intelligent people. I ran into one comment at a forum that read, “Our deck-o-drain drains out to the side of our [sic] directly into a small flower bed. Out of all our new plants, it is probably doing the best, so you'd be hard pressed to convince me that a little low salinity water is bad for plants - let alone ‘toxic waste’”. This comment is from a very bright, able guy and even though everything ever published in the history of mankind says that salt’s not good for plants, he goes by the anecdotal evidence in his back yard.
How does that old wive's tail go about how do you kill a tree? Drill holes in the roots and pack the holes with salt. Right?
Or another comment; “Can't drain it out to the perfectly landscaped property, killed trees, TOXIC WASTE???? All from Salt?? Come on… Someone should probably delete [this] post as to not cloud a newbie's judgment with this load.....”
People want their toys and they don’t want to hear anything that might have to make them feel bad about enjoying them.
You guys go ahead. Enjoy those salt pools. And don’t worry about The Bill.
Like most things these days, your kids can pay for it later.
You probably heard that we’re getting a bit of rain here in Dallas. Thirty-six inches so far this year, most of it in the past couple of months. Our average is thirty-four for the whole year. So, we’re pretty tired of seeing the five day forecast of rain, followed by rain, then some rain, and more rain, and then even more on top of that. For me, it’s not so much the getting wet that bugs me.
It’s buying all that salt and stabilizer for my pools.
Let me give you an example. Let’s take a 16,000 gallon lap pool / play pool. You know, the kind that are about five and a half, maybe six feet at the main drains at the center of the pool, sloping up to three feet at either end. Lots of folks call them Volleyball Pools. I call them easy to clean and less water to sanitize. They’re my favorite. So, let’s take that type as our example. It’s got an average depth of between four and four and a quarter feet.
Now, put thirty-six inches of rain on top of it, and add a tile line drain, a pretty common feature these days on newer pools, to keep that water level right smack at the middle of the tile.
If you have a salt system that needs around 3200 ppm to operate, you’ve added an extra 300 lbs. of salt and an extra 6 lbs of stabilizer to your pool so far this year here in Dallas.
If you have a salt system that needs 4000 ppm, you’ve added an extra 375 lbs. of salt and 8 lbs. of stabilizer to your pool.
That may not sound like a huge burden to you, but I have about 50 of these puppies on service. We’ve humped an extra 17,500 lbs of salt from our trucks to our pools so far this year. At wholesale prices, that’s an extra $2,187.50 I’ve spent on salt and an extra $400 I’ve spent on stabilizer. And like I said, that’s rock bottom wholesale pricing.
Why not just wait until the rains are all over with and then top off the pools? Well, the Zodiac LM-2 manual on pdf page 14 says it best; “Note: Operating the LM-2 at reduced salt levels may shorten the life of the cell”, and then again on pdf page 17; “The salt concentration should normally be around 4000 ppm, but should never be allowed to fall below 3000 ppm, as this can reduce the life of the cell electrodes.”
And too, it says; “Adding fresh water or rainfall to the pool dilutes the salt concentration.” [emphasis mine]
But wait! What about these reports all over the internet, all these guys posting in all these forums, swearing up and down that they never, ever add salt to their pools? They swear that once they load that first 15 or so bags to get to optimum salt level, that they maybe add one or two bags a year, tops. And what about all those sales brochures that talk about how the salt “never goes away”?
Perhaps their being less than forthcoming, shall we say. Or perhaps those forums are overrun with Salt Reps parading as happy salt pool owners. Because it just ain't true. Take it from the guy who humps the salt.
Unless, of course, these people making these claims all live in Los Angeles. They’ve only had three inches of rain there in the last twelve months. That would make these fantastic claims of never adding salt nearly true.
So, that’s a good rule of thumb. Salt systems are cheaper and should be encouraged for use in drought stricken regions of the world. That’s exactly what you need in drought stricken countries; 16,000 gallon reservoirs of undrinkable water.
But for contrast, let’s take the wettest place in the world; Mawslynram, in Meghalaya State, India. It gets 467 ½ inches per annum. To run a Zodiac at optimum levels, you’d need to add an extra 4,977 lbs of salt and an extra 98.1 lbs of stabilizer each year. If they’re buying the salt at Home Depot and the stabilizer at Leslie’s, that’s an extra $622 in salt and $441.50 in stabilizer.
I wonder if they have Home Depot and Leslie’s in Mawslynram? Well, they must have Wal Marts. Knock 20% off and we’ll call it even.
Here in the US, Wynooches, Oxbow, Washington once got 184.56 inches of rain in 1931. If they’d had salt systems back then, it would have meant an extra 1,964 lbs. of salt and an extra 39 lbs. of stabilizer.
But let’s get real. Let’s talk about present day average rainfalls in present day average American cities.
Mobile, Alabama, at 67 inches average annual rainfall would mean an extra 713 lbs. of salt and an extra 14 lbs. of stabilizer just to keep up with the runoff.
Pensacola, Florida, at 65 inches average annual rainfall would need 692 lbs. of salt and 13.6 lbs. of stabilizer.
West Palm Beach, Florida, at 63 inches average annual rainfall would need 670 lbs. of salt.
Port Arthur, Texas, at 61 inches average annual rainfall, would need 650 lbs of salt, just to keep up with the rain.
Even Tuscon, Arizona – pretty much the holder of the title of Driest State in the US for More Centuries than We’ve Been Here – is going to need an extra 128 lbs. each year to stay ahead of their skimpy 12 inches of annual rainfall.
And these totals don’t include splash-out or backwash. Remember, too, that they’re all based on that little old 16,000 volleyball pool. If you’re feeding a 30,000 gallon deep diver, your mileage may vary.
But let’s get wild here. Let’s say you’ve got that volleyball pool right here in Dallas, Texas, with our paltry thirty-four inches a year, and your builder sold you on that Mineral Springs system. You know, the Aqua Rite private labeled for Bio Guard? And let’s say you drink the marketing Kool-Aid and never ask a single question and always buy your salt – I mean, your proprietary blend of minerals – from your local Bio Guard dealer to keep the salt – I mean the mineral level – up to snuff. At $34.99 for a thirty pound bag, and one bag required per 1,000 gallons of water, and 10,660 gallons of runoff from the rain, you’re going to spend an extra $373.00 on “minerals” for your pool. Move that pool to Mobile, Alabama, and the price, like the annual rainfall, nearly doubles.
But, so what? Everybody still likes the way the water feels and they’re going to keep using them darn salt boxes no matter how much it rains. Right?
And therein lies the moral of this story: If the average modern pool, equipped with a tile line drain to help maintain proper water level in the pool, is getting 10,000 gallons a year of runoff, and if there are 7.5 million residential pools in the US, and if what they say is true and 4 out of 10 pools being built these days are salt pools, then when the salt market zeniths, we’ll have 3 million salt pools dumping 30 billion gallons of 3,200 ppm water into our ground water, our storm drains, our sewer systems, our creeks, our rivers and our reservoirs. Diluting 30 billion gallons of salt water to below the level of taste (250 ppm) will create 384 billion gallons of water right at the level of taste, before any other salt contamination is taken into account. Salt contamination like water softeners, road salt, manufacturing processes, etc.
The average person ought to drink 8, 8 ounce glasses of water a day. That’s a half a gallon of water. That’s 182.5 gallons a year. 30 billion gallons of water represents enough to provide drinking water for 164,438,356 people a year. But if it’s salty, they can’t drink it.
Now all those numbers are only if the number of salt pools keeps growing at the rate of 4 out of 10. If the Salt Guys have their way, and more success, it’ll be higher, and all these numbers will go up.
There’s tons of studies that show ground water chloride contamination from the use of road salts in Canada and the northern US. Just Google it and you’ll see that what I’m saying is true.
When you read those reports you’ll come across this term that the pointy head guv guys who write these environmental studies use when referring very matter-of-factly to the area for several hundred yards on either side of the road bed on those salted roads. They call it the “Salt Kill Zone”.
That’s because it often kills the native plants and they have to be replaced by “salt resistant” species. But even then, you can see that we need to use the salt in that application. Even though it’s creating these dead zones and destroying the road beds and infrastructure – road salt causes about $3,940,000,000 a year in road and infrastructure damage here in the US – if we don’t use it we won’t be able to get around. Commerce will come to a screeching halt every time there’s ice on the road. But salt pools…
Oh, yeah, I remember. It’s so your kids won’t get red eyes.
What truly blows me away is how virulently opposed to this idea of salt contamination of the ground and groundwater is to otherwise normal, intelligent people. I ran into one comment at a forum that read, “Our deck-o-drain drains out to the side of our [sic] directly into a small flower bed. Out of all our new plants, it is probably doing the best, so you'd be hard pressed to convince me that a little low salinity water is bad for plants - let alone ‘toxic waste’”. This comment is from a very bright, able guy and even though everything ever published in the history of mankind says that salt’s not good for plants, he goes by the anecdotal evidence in his back yard.
How does that old wive's tail go about how do you kill a tree? Drill holes in the roots and pack the holes with salt. Right?
Or another comment; “Can't drain it out to the perfectly landscaped property, killed trees, TOXIC WASTE???? All from Salt?? Come on… Someone should probably delete [this] post as to not cloud a newbie's judgment with this load.....”
People want their toys and they don’t want to hear anything that might have to make them feel bad about enjoying them.
You guys go ahead. Enjoy those salt pools. And don’t worry about The Bill.
Like most things these days, your kids can pay for it later.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Victory Lap?
I’ve really enjoyed this last week. You know, being right and being vindicated and all that. It kind of puts a spring in your step to see that a few people armed with nothing but The Truth and a Free Blog can make a difference in an industry.
I have no proof that salt sales are going down. And the sales reps don’t leave me e-mails crying on my shoulder how they’re late on their boat payments ever since we started pointing out that the Emperor was Naked as a Jaybird.
It’s all in the details. Like this detail: I talked to a customer who said she saw the WFAA report - which you can find here, by the way:
http://www.wfaa.com/video/wfaageneral-index.html?nvid=143354
and here’s the print version:
http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/wfaa/latestnews/stories/wfaa070511_lj_pools.5c53d476.html
and she Tivo’d it to show to a friend of hers who works for the INSERT REALLY BIG, VERY HIGH END DALLAS REAL ESTATE FIRM HERE and that her friend had passed the word to everyone during a sales meeting to WATCH OUT when they’re representing homes with salt pools, and More Importantly, to WATCH OUT when their clients are buying homes with salt pools. Turns out lots of the people at the meeting had seen the report too, and corroborated what was being said.
So, there’s about 75 or 100 real estate agents that’ll be looking at the coping and decks every time they show a house. It’ll start getting mentioned in the inspection report - Salt Damage to Coping and Decks... Ladders and Rails Corroding... Light Ring Tarnished Due to Salt - and then other realtors at other agencies will start to notice that they’re negotiating salt damage costs more and more when they’re trying to sell a house. And the next thing you know, when someone lists their house for sale and the realtor shows up for the appraisal, the first thing they’ll say is, "Oh, my God! Get rid of that salt system or we’ll never be able to sell your home!"
The Salt Box is proving to be just another gadget who’s time has come. It’s fifteen minutes are up. The Sales Reps can talk all day long about "the reality of adjusting to this new salt environment" until they’re blue in the face - or more bluish green actually, the color of the tarnish that salt causes on stainless steel and copper - but it’s all just talk.
And their bosses back at the plant can go ahead and upgrade their heaters to cupro nickel and do away with brass wells and brass thermistors, and maybe they’ll even force all the ladder and rail manufacturers to offer a higher grade stainless option for awhile - not to say that there was anything wrong with the stainless steel that they were using for the one hundred years before the advent of salt - but it’s all just a tempest in a teapot.
All of their grand plans of reshaping the industry from inside their Ivory Towers - the same Ivory Towers where they created the problem by pouring salt into pools and now sit around and atavistically try to find ways to repair that damage - are going to be flushed away by the same thing that they swear drove the salt craze to begin with; Consumer Demand. Except now the Consumer will be Demanding that you get that Damn Salt Box out of their back yard.
But this whole salt fiasco has been a great learning experience for me. I’ve learned that Sales Reps can actually drive an entire industry with Empty Phrases.
Empty phrases like these:
"The difference with the resurgence of salt technology is that this time the demand is coming from the consumer."
No, it really wasn’t. It came from the salt system manufacturers making a much harder push with the builders and retailers to create another profit center. And you can’t blame the front line guys for looking for another profit center. Let’s see, a guy’s building 150 pools a year, and the Salt Rep says he can make an extra 500 bucks a pool... That’s Three Kids In College kind of money. So much bigger than Polaris Cruise kind of money. Before long, it was included in the menu of options of every builder’s sales wheel and every store had salt system displays front and center. And the Consumer Demand that was created by these efforts lasted about as long as Feeling Slippery and No Red Eyes could last against Thousands of Dollars in Stone & Metal Damage, which started showing up en masse about one year ago. In a few years, only the Stupidly, Irresponsibly Rich will be still be saying I Love Salt. Like, you just know that Paris Hilton will still have a salt swimming pool five years from now.
And my Other Favorite Empty Phrase is:
"Everybody just needs to adjust to the fact that salt is here to stay."
No it’s not. I remember years ago when the Sales Reps were blathering on at the shows that "Ionizers are here to stay!" Yeah, right...
You know, the consumer took the hit on Lo NOX heaters here in Texas and out in California because they had to. The state governments made them. The upcharge was inescapable. But what’s going to rise out of the ashes of this Salt Debacle is a group of sharp builders who are going to put together a sales package that’s going to show that they can bring a pool bid in for a lot less and offer a much wider range of building materials if the owner will just opt out of salt. And this will happen once all the dirty little secrets about salt damage are common knowledge - which started last week when Goldine threw in the towel on stone damage. Read about it here:
http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/wfaa/latestnews/stories/wfaa070511_lj_pools.5c53d476.html
and click on the "Goldline Controls Full Statement to WFAA" in the "Also Online" box.
For Example, a builder will be able to say:
"I can save you money on your heater if we stick with a copper heat exchanger instead of the cupro nickel marine grade heat exchanger."
"I can save you money on your ladders and rails if we stick with standard grade instead of marine grade stainless."
"We can use softer stones like limestone and Oklahoma flagstone and it won’t turn to mush if we don’t use salt."
"I can save you all the money you’re going to spend on masonry sealer with salt. If you use salt, you’ll have to seal everything every XXX months. If you don’t use salt, you don’t have to use sealer BECAUSE WE NEVER DID BEFORE SALT AND SO WHY WOULD WE NOW?"
"I can save you $800 three years from now when you don’t have to replace your salt cell."
And then there’s My Personal Favorite in this era of Save The Planet Let’s Everybody Go Green: "You know, the wastewater treatment issue is a big one with a salt pool. They’re looking at slapping surcharges on folks with water softeners because of their chloride pollution. Salt swimming pools can’t be far behind."
Not to mention how much harder a sell salt’s going to become when everybody on the building end is insisting that the customer sign a Release of Liability from Salt Damage waiver.
All of this will take a little more time to come to pass because our industry really bit hard on this salt bait. Like the other day I went into a pool store to get some borate test strips to test the pools where some of my homeowners are using Twenty Mule Team Borax from Home Depot at $2.95 for a 4 lbs. box to soften their water and get rid of the red eyes thing. If you want to learn more about doing that, go here:
http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=4712
I saw that this pool store is so ate up with salt that they now sell bags of salt with sodium tetraborate pentahydrate in it - which is wholly different than Twenty Mule Team Borax sodium tetraborate decahydrate; five water molecules different to be exact (penta... deca... get it?). Except, of course, in California where they can’t sell sodium tetraborate for swimming pools at all.
I meant to ask the clerk how much they were getting for a bag of this stuff, but I was laughing so hard I was beginning to hyperventilate and so I stumbled outside to catch my breath.
Once the market for that kind of stuff winnows down to that narrow group of consumers I like to call The Ones Who Will Buy Anything, it will naturally cancel out that last Empty Phrase that makes me want to open a vein every time I hear it;
"Just look at the cost savings with salt..."
And when I look at this industry that I do love so much, it looks more and more, the longer I look and the more I try to look Behind The Curtain at the Guys Pretending to be The Wizards of Our Oz, that we’re intentionally trying to screw our customers like stump-tied goats.
Is it stupidity, expediency or just plain old dishonesty that ever made us say, "just look at the cost savings with salt"? Because in addition to all the physical damage that salt has wrought on our pools, I can walk into a pool store in California and probably pay five or six times the going price of what Loews or Home Depot would charge me for a plastic bag that’s 95 to 98% salt. The only difference between it and Home Depot’s salt is that someone’s added 1 to 2% cyanuric acid so they can call it Better and charge that price for it. Less than one pound of stabilizer somehow makes this bag of salt worth all that much more? $1.75 to $3.50 worth of stabilizer - using average pool store highest price per pound pricing - adds that much bang to forty pounds of this stuff?
And how do I know all this? Because I read the Material Safety Data Sheets instead of the Sales Brochure. The Sales Brochure calls it a "proprietary blend of elements and stable minerals". The MSDS calls it "Inorganic Salt", 95 to 98% by weight, and "cyanuric acid", 1 to 2% by weight.
Which is why you should always look Behind The Curtain before Drinking the Kool-Aid.
And another thing. Do the math. There’s up to 3% of the bag that’s unaccounted for. If you ask the people who bag salt for a living, they’ll tell you it’s for the sand and other impurities that are part and parcel of the air drying process of granular salt.
Which only goes to show you that salt pellets are actually cleaner than granular salt, unless that granular salt is Food Grade, in which case it’s 99.9% NaCl (sodium chloride).
But wait. I started out celebrating a victory of Truth Over Bullshit and now it turns out there’s yet another rock to turn over and shine a light under. Not to mention that I heard a very reasonable explanation the other night for why Texas and Arizona are the most hard hit by salt damage, and it's better than the old stand-by; "it's the poolman's fault". But that’ll have to wait until next week. It’s nearly summer and I’ve got a business to run.
Sunday, December 24, 2006
WE WISH YOU A MERRY CHIRSTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR
I hope that everyone is home with family and friends this weekend and the only professional phone calls you get are from customers telling you where they stashed your Christmas bonus.
I'm taking the weekend off from the blog to celebrate. But I have been busy this week. I found a new forum, called the Garden Web. I posted a few comments there and the Salt System Cheerleading Squad called me names and threw sticks at me and told me my mother dresses me funny. In my usual polite and affable way, I wished them all the best with their pool degenerators.
But I did meet two very interesting folks while there. The first is a fellow from Australia named David. He has a pool forum that he's just getting off the ground. I hope everybody will take some time out and go visit his forum and take some time to post your questions and comments there. I have been chatting with him via e-mail about the differences between the US and Australian salt system markets and my next post to the blog will be a very illuminating explanation of why it works so well there and not so well here. I couldn't have done this without David's help and I hope all of you who read this blog on any kind of regular basis will return his courtesy to us and visit his forum and help him make it a success.
Find his forum at: http://poolindustrysecrets.aceboard.com/
If you don't visit it now, I know you will after you read the next blog piece about what he has to say about his market and about ours. This is a fellow you are going to want to know. Especially when the Reps start feeding you their BS about how "this is exactly the way they do it in Australia". You'll be able to call BS. Not to mention the phenomena's related to salt that he's talking to me about that we're struggling with every day and they just take for granted and work around Down Under because they've been doing it for so long.
The other fellow I met goes by the screen name Chem Geek. He's made several comments on the piece I did back in October, titled Why Salt Sucks. Read his comments and my answers by going here:
http://thepoolbiz.blogspot.com/2006/10/why-salt-sucks-so-do-i-have-your.html
He mainly posts at the Pool Forum. He has even started a thread about our little blog here. You can access it by going here:
http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=6352
Even though he's just a pool owner, and even though he had the nerve to refer to me as "just a pool cleanup guy who doesn't know science", I like him, and if I get the chance to meet him some day, I probably won't kick his ass. You know, being a knuckle dragging pool cleanup guy, that's the first thing that crossed my mind. But I'm trying to be big about it and let the Christmas spirit fill my heart with forgiveness. Besides, he's wicked smart and I think he's going to be able to answer a lot of our questions about the problems we're seeing with salt systems. And if you have any questions about just how wicked smart this guy is, I'm going to reprint his explanation of why we ought to run lower TA's on salt pools and why we see a rise in pH with salt systems instead of the pH neutral horse manure story the Reps give us. Here is his explanation in italics.
Good luck.
I just wanted to correct what you said technically because what you said was not exactly true and I don't want the main point of running with lower TA helping to reduce the pH rise get lost because of technical inaccuracies. The salt cell has the following two primary reactions:
2Cl- --> Cl2(g) + 2e-
2H+ + 2e- --> H2(g)
---------------------
2H+ + 2Cl- --> Cl2(g) + H2(g)
The chlorine gas almost immediately dissolves in the water with the following reaction to have a net reaction as shown:
Cl2(g) + H2O --> HOCl + H+ + Cl-
--------------------------------
H+ + Cl- + H2O --> HOCl + H2(g)
Because water dissociates, the above reaction is normally written with a net reaction as follows:
H2O --> H+ + OH-
----------------------------------------------
2H2O + Cl- --> HOCl + OH- + H2(g)
So the bottom line net reaction with the generation of chlorine in a salt cell (ignoring side reactions) is that water and chloride ion (from salt) combine to form hypochlorous acid (HOCl) plus hydroxyl ion (which is basic or alkaline) and hydrogen gas. Since hypochlorous acid is a weak acid, this net reaction is weakly basic (alkaline). This is where most SWG manufacturers (at least their salespeople) believe that the rise in pH comes from, but they are wrong (keep reading to find out why).
This is pretty much exactly the same thing that happens when you add chlorinating liquid or bleach to a pool as follows:
NaOCl --> Na+ + OCl-
OCl- + H+ --> HOCl
H2O --> H+ + OH-
--------------------
NaOCl --> Na+ + HOCl + OH-
except that you get some sodium ion as well (plus some extra salt, NaCl, that is in sodium hypochlorite solutions due to how they are made) and you don't get the hydrogen gas.
Now we need to look at what happens to chlorine (regardless of source) when it gets used up. Most chlorine in pools gets broken down by sunlight and even though Cyanuric Acid (CYA) combines with chlorine to form a chemical compound that slows down this process (and is not an effective disinfectant or oxidizer), it still happens as follows:
2HOCl --> O2(g) + 2H+ + 2Cl-
The next most common thing that happens to chlorine is that it combines with ammonia or related compounds such as urea from sweat as follows where I show the reaction going all the way to "breakpoint" assuming that shocking occurs (which it usually does if you have sufficient chlorine in your pool and especially when exposed to sunlight which helps the breakpoint process). I'm not going to show what happens when chlorine combines with organics, but the process is somewhat similar (carbon dioxide is produced if the organic is fully oxidized, but more typically intermediate compounds are produced that don't breakdown quickly).
2NH3 + 3HOCl --> N2(g) + 3H+ + 3Cl- + 3H2O
So, even though the generation of chlorine resulted in hydroxyl ions, the usage of chlorine results in hydrogen ions and these cancel out forming water:
OH- + H+ --> H2O
So the bottom line in an SWG pool is the following reactions:
4H2O + 2Cl- --> 2HOCl + 2OH- + 2H2(g)
2HOCl --> O2(g) + 2H+ + 2Cl-
---------------------------------
2H2O --> 2H2(g) + O2(g)
6H2O + 3Cl- --> 3HOCl + 3OH- + 3H2(g)
2NH3 + 3HOCl --> N2(g) + 3H+ + 3Cl- + 3H2O
------------------------------------------
2NH3 --> 3H2(g) + N2(g)
So the bottom, bottom line is that the net result in an SWG pool from the creation and usage of chlorine is that water is split to produce hydrogen gas and oxygen gas or that ammonia (urea) in the water is broken down (oxidized or "burned" in some sense) to produce hydrogen gas and nitrogen gas. These net, net reactions, as you can see, are neutral.
At this point, you can now talk about the source of rising pH being the outgassing of carbon dioxide from the pool. You should explain that pools are in essence intentionally over-carbonated, similar to a lovely tasty carbonated beverage! This is done when you initially added baking soda or sodium bicarbonate to your pool (it also happens when you add some pH Up products that have sodium carbonate). The purpose of having extra carbonate in your pool is to act as a pH buffer and to provide carbonate ion that, along with the calcium you added to your pool with calcium chloride, saturate the water with calcium carbonate so that this compound does not get dissolved out of plaster/gunite/concrete/grout. If too saturated, scaling would occur essentially precipitating calcium carbonate on to pool surfaces. Also, the calcium carbonate tends to form a thin film layer on metal surfaces that help reduce corrosion, though pH is a much more important factor for metal corrosion. Pool water chemical balance attempts to keep a balance between corrosion and scaling.
The downside of having a pool over-carbonated is that there is more carbon dioxide in the pool than in the air so there is a tendency for it to outgas. When this occurs, the pH rises while for technical reasons I won't get into here, the Total Alkalinity (TA) remains the same. If you then add acid to restore the pH, you lower both the pH and the TA with the net result of having TA get lowered -- which makes sense since TA is partly a measure of the amount of bicarbonate in your pool. The carbon dioxide outgassing, and therefore the rise in pH, is increased when the TA is higher, when the starting pH is lower, and when there is more aeration. So the easiest ways of reducing this rise in pH are to lower the TA, keep the pH higher, and reduce aeration (waterfalls, spillovers, etc.) including using a pool cover.
For an SWG pool there is another way, in addition to lowering TA, that can help reduce the pH rise. That is to add an additional buffering system to the pool that is also an algicide that will cut down chlorine consumption. Adding 50 ppm Borates (from Borax, the 50 ppm technically being Boron) to your pool will add additional pH buffering capability so that you can keep the carbonate part of the buffer lower. To compensate for water balance, you need to keep either your calcium level or your pH higher (or both). The algicidal properties of the borates lower the consumption of chlorine which will let you lower the output of your SWG which lowers hydrogen gas production so less aeration so less carbon dioxide outgassing and less pH rise. Whew!
I told ya. Ain't he wicked smart?
All joking aside, I really appreciate the Chem Geek's contributions to this blog and I appreciate his posts over at the Garden Web and especially the Pool Forum.
Meeting these two fellows has made me feel very optimistic that in the weeks to come, we'll be able to put out some truly pertinent and highly accurate information about these salt systems.
Stay tuned!
I'm taking the weekend off from the blog to celebrate. But I have been busy this week. I found a new forum, called the Garden Web. I posted a few comments there and the Salt System Cheerleading Squad called me names and threw sticks at me and told me my mother dresses me funny. In my usual polite and affable way, I wished them all the best with their pool degenerators.
But I did meet two very interesting folks while there. The first is a fellow from Australia named David. He has a pool forum that he's just getting off the ground. I hope everybody will take some time out and go visit his forum and take some time to post your questions and comments there. I have been chatting with him via e-mail about the differences between the US and Australian salt system markets and my next post to the blog will be a very illuminating explanation of why it works so well there and not so well here. I couldn't have done this without David's help and I hope all of you who read this blog on any kind of regular basis will return his courtesy to us and visit his forum and help him make it a success.
Find his forum at: http://poolindustrysecrets.aceboard.com/
If you don't visit it now, I know you will after you read the next blog piece about what he has to say about his market and about ours. This is a fellow you are going to want to know. Especially when the Reps start feeding you their BS about how "this is exactly the way they do it in Australia". You'll be able to call BS. Not to mention the phenomena's related to salt that he's talking to me about that we're struggling with every day and they just take for granted and work around Down Under because they've been doing it for so long.
The other fellow I met goes by the screen name Chem Geek. He's made several comments on the piece I did back in October, titled Why Salt Sucks. Read his comments and my answers by going here:
http://thepoolbiz.blogspot.com/2006/10/why-salt-sucks-so-do-i-have-your.html
He mainly posts at the Pool Forum. He has even started a thread about our little blog here. You can access it by going here:
http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthread.php?t=6352
Even though he's just a pool owner, and even though he had the nerve to refer to me as "just a pool cleanup guy who doesn't know science", I like him, and if I get the chance to meet him some day, I probably won't kick his ass. You know, being a knuckle dragging pool cleanup guy, that's the first thing that crossed my mind. But I'm trying to be big about it and let the Christmas spirit fill my heart with forgiveness. Besides, he's wicked smart and I think he's going to be able to answer a lot of our questions about the problems we're seeing with salt systems. And if you have any questions about just how wicked smart this guy is, I'm going to reprint his explanation of why we ought to run lower TA's on salt pools and why we see a rise in pH with salt systems instead of the pH neutral horse manure story the Reps give us. Here is his explanation in italics.
Good luck.
I just wanted to correct what you said technically because what you said was not exactly true and I don't want the main point of running with lower TA helping to reduce the pH rise get lost because of technical inaccuracies. The salt cell has the following two primary reactions:
2Cl- --> Cl2(g) + 2e-
2H+ + 2e- --> H2(g)
---------------------
2H+ + 2Cl- --> Cl2(g) + H2(g)
The chlorine gas almost immediately dissolves in the water with the following reaction to have a net reaction as shown:
Cl2(g) + H2O --> HOCl + H+ + Cl-
--------------------------------
H+ + Cl- + H2O --> HOCl + H2(g)
Because water dissociates, the above reaction is normally written with a net reaction as follows:
H2O --> H+ + OH-
----------------------------------------------
2H2O + Cl- --> HOCl + OH- + H2(g)
So the bottom line net reaction with the generation of chlorine in a salt cell (ignoring side reactions) is that water and chloride ion (from salt) combine to form hypochlorous acid (HOCl) plus hydroxyl ion (which is basic or alkaline) and hydrogen gas. Since hypochlorous acid is a weak acid, this net reaction is weakly basic (alkaline). This is where most SWG manufacturers (at least their salespeople) believe that the rise in pH comes from, but they are wrong (keep reading to find out why).
This is pretty much exactly the same thing that happens when you add chlorinating liquid or bleach to a pool as follows:
NaOCl --> Na+ + OCl-
OCl- + H+ --> HOCl
H2O --> H+ + OH-
--------------------
NaOCl --> Na+ + HOCl + OH-
except that you get some sodium ion as well (plus some extra salt, NaCl, that is in sodium hypochlorite solutions due to how they are made) and you don't get the hydrogen gas.
Now we need to look at what happens to chlorine (regardless of source) when it gets used up. Most chlorine in pools gets broken down by sunlight and even though Cyanuric Acid (CYA) combines with chlorine to form a chemical compound that slows down this process (and is not an effective disinfectant or oxidizer), it still happens as follows:
2HOCl --> O2(g) + 2H+ + 2Cl-
The next most common thing that happens to chlorine is that it combines with ammonia or related compounds such as urea from sweat as follows where I show the reaction going all the way to "breakpoint" assuming that shocking occurs (which it usually does if you have sufficient chlorine in your pool and especially when exposed to sunlight which helps the breakpoint process). I'm not going to show what happens when chlorine combines with organics, but the process is somewhat similar (carbon dioxide is produced if the organic is fully oxidized, but more typically intermediate compounds are produced that don't breakdown quickly).
2NH3 + 3HOCl --> N2(g) + 3H+ + 3Cl- + 3H2O
So, even though the generation of chlorine resulted in hydroxyl ions, the usage of chlorine results in hydrogen ions and these cancel out forming water:
OH- + H+ --> H2O
So the bottom line in an SWG pool is the following reactions:
4H2O + 2Cl- --> 2HOCl + 2OH- + 2H2(g)
2HOCl --> O2(g) + 2H+ + 2Cl-
---------------------------------
2H2O --> 2H2(g) + O2(g)
6H2O + 3Cl- --> 3HOCl + 3OH- + 3H2(g)
2NH3 + 3HOCl --> N2(g) + 3H+ + 3Cl- + 3H2O
------------------------------------------
2NH3 --> 3H2(g) + N2(g)
So the bottom, bottom line is that the net result in an SWG pool from the creation and usage of chlorine is that water is split to produce hydrogen gas and oxygen gas or that ammonia (urea) in the water is broken down (oxidized or "burned" in some sense) to produce hydrogen gas and nitrogen gas. These net, net reactions, as you can see, are neutral.
At this point, you can now talk about the source of rising pH being the outgassing of carbon dioxide from the pool. You should explain that pools are in essence intentionally over-carbonated, similar to a lovely tasty carbonated beverage! This is done when you initially added baking soda or sodium bicarbonate to your pool (it also happens when you add some pH Up products that have sodium carbonate). The purpose of having extra carbonate in your pool is to act as a pH buffer and to provide carbonate ion that, along with the calcium you added to your pool with calcium chloride, saturate the water with calcium carbonate so that this compound does not get dissolved out of plaster/gunite/concrete/grout. If too saturated, scaling would occur essentially precipitating calcium carbonate on to pool surfaces. Also, the calcium carbonate tends to form a thin film layer on metal surfaces that help reduce corrosion, though pH is a much more important factor for metal corrosion. Pool water chemical balance attempts to keep a balance between corrosion and scaling.
The downside of having a pool over-carbonated is that there is more carbon dioxide in the pool than in the air so there is a tendency for it to outgas. When this occurs, the pH rises while for technical reasons I won't get into here, the Total Alkalinity (TA) remains the same. If you then add acid to restore the pH, you lower both the pH and the TA with the net result of having TA get lowered -- which makes sense since TA is partly a measure of the amount of bicarbonate in your pool. The carbon dioxide outgassing, and therefore the rise in pH, is increased when the TA is higher, when the starting pH is lower, and when there is more aeration. So the easiest ways of reducing this rise in pH are to lower the TA, keep the pH higher, and reduce aeration (waterfalls, spillovers, etc.) including using a pool cover.
For an SWG pool there is another way, in addition to lowering TA, that can help reduce the pH rise. That is to add an additional buffering system to the pool that is also an algicide that will cut down chlorine consumption. Adding 50 ppm Borates (from Borax, the 50 ppm technically being Boron) to your pool will add additional pH buffering capability so that you can keep the carbonate part of the buffer lower. To compensate for water balance, you need to keep either your calcium level or your pH higher (or both). The algicidal properties of the borates lower the consumption of chlorine which will let you lower the output of your SWG which lowers hydrogen gas production so less aeration so less carbon dioxide outgassing and less pH rise. Whew!
I told ya. Ain't he wicked smart?
All joking aside, I really appreciate the Chem Geek's contributions to this blog and I appreciate his posts over at the Garden Web and especially the Pool Forum.
Meeting these two fellows has made me feel very optimistic that in the weeks to come, we'll be able to put out some truly pertinent and highly accurate information about these salt systems.
Stay tuned!
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