Green Pools - and other nonsense - In Florida

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She responded the same day:

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

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

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

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

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

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

She responded:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t you?

How To Use This Blog

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

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

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

How Salt Systems Don’t Work

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

I didn’t go.

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Salt system conducting electricity on handrails

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


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

Pool salt system conducting electricity

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

Stray electric current salt water pools

Zinc anode skimmer basket does it work

“Chlorine generator” “copper pipes”

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

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

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

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

From Day One.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck with that.

Why I Do What I Do...

Yeah, I know. I said I was gonna talk about stone next. But this is a blog, right? Short for weblog and defined as a person’s inner dialogue splashed across the internet for all to see.

Something about a blog that most folks who visit them don’t realize is that, just as it paints a portrait of who I am for you, it can, in some instances, give me a snapshot of who my visitors are. Or more accurately, what it was they were looking for when they showed up on my doorstep, and ultimately, what information, and hence what impressions, they left here with.

Now, whether they left here thinking about salt and salt systems a bit more critically, I can’t tell. But I can tell by what they read and by the links they click on what I’ve exposed them to. And when it comes to salt systems, this is The Only Place On Planet Earth that they’re going to be exposed to that information. Period.

Kinda sad, huh? I mean, think about it. Of all the hype out there talking up how great salt is, there’s only one place in the whole world that serves as a repository for the Other Side Of The Story, which turns out to be very well documented and TRUE.

Case In Point:

I had a visitor yesterday who got here from a Google search.

They Googled black stain, salt cell. Gee, I wonder why anybody would be Googling for that? Try it and see what you get.

The first hit is The Pool Biz and the excerpt reads like this: “Now, think about your salt cell. What we’re doing is literally jumping .... Black Stains Around the Pool Light The in-line zinc anode is attached to the ...”

The next hit is “Histology learning systems Appendix A”. A couple hits down from that is “Nitric Oxide: NO-dependent photo-toxicity...” Then after that; “The human endothelial cell in tissue culture”.

Gosh... I wonder which reference they clicked on first?

Coming into the blog from that Google search brought them into this piece:

Stray Currents Are Dissolving Your Swimming Pool


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

Pretty much sets the right tone, wouldn’t you say?

They read down until they got to these links and explored them both:

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

http://www.pooltoolco.com/catalog3.html

These are the links that take you out to The Pool Tool Company’s online catalog and describe some Hot Items that are just flying off the shelves these days; Sacrificial Anodes for your skimmer baskets, in-line plumbing, and to bolt on to your metal ladders and rails. Now, this is a Swimming Pool Tool manufacturing company that sells these items to protect your plaster from staining due to electrolysis. In theory, electrolysis itself isn’t a problem. If you have 100% conduction from cell plate to cell plate, and no stray currents, then you can’t get any black staining. You know, like the black stains this person is trying to find out about that they suspect is caused by their salt cell. But, obviously, there ARE stray currents with most, if not all, of these salt system installations, resulting in a phenomena known as Stray Current Corrosion, and metal stains appearing on plaster is just the tip of the iceberg. As PoolToolCo says:

A Must For Salt Pools

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

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding! We have a winner! Salt Pools Black Stains... Very close to the original search term, no?

So, anyway, here’s a company that every Pool Guy knows about, and probably owns one or two of their specialty tools - because they’re the only ones who know and make the tools we really need for those special applications - and they say point blank; salt systems damage the heck out of pools. So much so that you better be doing something proactive to protect your plaster, your heater, your other metals - like ladders, handrails, light rings and the metal niches they bolt to - from discoloration, erosion, general damage and staining.

Gosh, I’ve read every salt system owner’s manual in existence, even the ones from Canada and France - believe it, I have - and oddly, they don’t mention any of these phenomena. I wonder why?

Getting back to My Guest; after they read those pages, they watched the video linked as WFAA Report On How Much Salt Sucks - pssst... the link’s on the right side top of this page, under the heading Why Salt Is Eating Up Your Pool.

Then they read the link right under that; The Science Behind Why Salt is Eating Up Your Pool’s Hardscape, which explains how crystallization expansion pressure damages your stone from within through a little thing called sub-florescence. Then they went and read up on the Santa Clarita, California Salt Pool Ban, and then finished up by clicking on the Current Posts icon and spending another 28 minutes reading, probably to the bottom of this page. That exposed them to the warnings from the manufacturers not to use Potassium Chloride in place of Sodium Chloride, about SR Smith’s efforts to create a hardier equipment line to stand up better to the ravages of chloride corrosion, AND the fact that every once in a while, salt cells go BOOM.

Total Elapsed Time spent finding out WAY MORE than why they’re getting black stains in their pool; 50 minutes, 7 seconds. I hope I was of some help.

Now, that visitor was from Florida. Which is funny, because there was a comment left a few posts back saying that all the corrosion I gripe about is just a Texas phenomenon. Seems we don’t know how to bond a pool here in Texas. Here’s an excerpt from those comments:

“Your corrosion issues that you describe are also few and far between here [Florida] probably because we are one of the toughest states with California and Maryland (of all places) to build a pool from the standpoint of inspections and enforcement of proper building practices. Metal connections corrode when current flows over them. Current can't flow over them if the electrical potential is the same between them. There has to a difference in potential for current to flow. How do you know that of all the corrosion issues you have seen, all of them had intact bonding grids with properly made connections to the steel, in the light niches, to the handrails, etc. Salt doesn't create stray current in a pool, it magnifies the problem which is that you have stray current in the pool. As you may know, it provides a more conductive solution for it to move around in. But, in a pool that is PROPERLY bonded, and according to the principle of the Farraday cage, that current won't flow in the cage[,] only out to the ground.”

And while those may sound like very well founded points grounded in firm logic and science, I'd like to contrast it with excerpts from an e-mail I received shortly after I started this blog last year;

"I read your material with great interest and wish to encourage you to keep up the fight. I run a reasonably large pool company here in... Florida that has been building pools... for [lots and lots of] years. We started using salt systems about 15 years ago when they were in their infancy (we tend to be front runners on pool issues). We started with units like the [manufacturer's name withheld] and other arcane units. My initial position with the company was to run the service department. At that time, almost every pool we built (about 200 a year) had a salt system on it. My indoctrination was in the form of countless service calls for staining, 'shocking', and a host of other 'unrelated' issues. When I started here, I spent a year tracking the complaints, making voltage checks, resistance checks, breaking down different units into its components and so forth. What I found was exactly what I expected given the construction of this sytem in the form of a battery. What I could not understand was the industry manufacturers with their (what I understand now to be) scripted answers to my problems. As you say, it ranged from 'grounding issues', improper materials, low grade stainless, and on and on. Especially frustrating was that we all knew how long we had been in the business and that the only common denominator was the salt system. By the time I had amassed my data, based on the soil type and condition of an install, I was able to tell the manufacturer of the last generator we were using what the 'stray' voltage amount would be and how long before the stains and corrosion would appear. Like I said, we tried [every salt system on the market]. In the end, we decided that there was insufficient profit in pursuing what was clearly a damaging component. Over the years, we have dealt with all manner of product that has one or more detrimental effects on a pool. But not until these salt systems had we encountered a unit that deals a blow to the entire pool. I think the biggest single factor was the propensity to negatively effect the grounding system around the pool. The stray current in the system created an environment where the grounding lugs would corrode off and leave large portions of the pool disconnected and very prone to shocking our customers. [Emphasis mine] Whether it was hand rails or coping sections, it made the whole pool experience less inviting."

So that's pretty much in sharp friggin' contrast to what that first guy was saying. It's also in sharp contrast to what I learn by seeing who visits the blog and where they come from and what they want to know.

And that’s the thing about reading my little Site Meter. I really get a sense of what problems people are having with their salt systems, instead of just burying my head in the sand and assuring myself that it can’t be happening and if it is happening then it’s God’s Will or Somebody Else’s Fault, like some people do.

To give you an example, of the last one hundred people who visited this blog, here’s just a few samples of the Google searches that got them here:

Travertine around pools with salt generator (these folks are from Charlotte, North Carolina. So, we can add North Carolina to the list of places where they’re seeing problems with salt eroding travertine pavers and coping.)

Using salt system pool water for irrigation (this person ended up HERE,which is an article I linked to about a proposed California rule to ban salt discharge into waste water. ALL salt discharge into ALL wastewater. Now they know that it’s not the best thing to irrigate with.)

Seal flagstone salt pool (this person lives in Mountain View, California. They followed the link, The Science Behind Why Salt Disintegrates Your Pool’s Hardscape. Now they know why they have flagstone issues. SOMETHING ELSE THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE TO KNOW BEFORE THEY BOUGHT THEIR SALT SYSTEM...)

Salt water pool damage grass (this guest got here through Google Australia. Gosh, I thought that salt pool’s weren’t having any problems Down Under. Could that be just marketing hype? Because we’re always told that the Aussie’s ground water is so saline that they hardly notice the difference in their salt pools. Sorry, mate. Guess you missed that memo.)

Flagstone and salt pool problems (this visitor is from Souther California. Everybody always says the flagstone issues are only occurring in Arizona and Texas. Hmmm... Could everybody be wrong? Or just lying to prop up the sales of a failed technology?)

Pool stray currents (this visitor is from Hollywood, Florida. Oh, no! Another improperly bonded pool in Florida. This week...)

Salt chlorinators and effects on brick coping (these folks are from Leesburg, Florida. If you go to all the forums, they say that Florida’s not having any problems with salt and coping because they get lots of summer rains that flush all the salt out of the coping. I wonder why so many people from Florida and California - both Northern and Southern CA - keep looking for information about problems with salt pools when EVERYBODY KNOWS that they’re not having these problems? It’s only happening in AZ and TX. Right?)

That’s 7 of the last hundred visitors. Google provides me with 17% of the traffic to this site. Thats only 17 of every hundred visitors. So, that means that 41% of the people who get here through Google are searching for answers to problems they’re having with salt chlorine generators, and they are from Maine to Florida, Southern California to Washington State, from Canada to Malaysia to Bahrain to Australia to Sweden... Pretty much all over the world.

I remember last year I was talking to a reporter from one of the trade magazines about my little Site Meter and the insights it gave me. They were working on a story about salt damage to pool coping and decks, and they said, Gosh, that's a story all by itself. They never did a story on it, though. In fact, most everyone's done everything they can to look the other way since then.

And that’s why I Do What I Do.

UPDATE

My New Year's Resolution is to reorganize the blog. I've started by adding a heading here titled Why Salt Is Eating Up Your Pool. I moved the YouTube clip from the news report here in Dallas about how salt is damaging pools here, and I have put in a link to a technical manual for the preservation of stone buildings and monuments that explains in terrific detail how salt invades and destroys the hardscape around your pool. They're not talking about your pool. They're talking about buildings and such. But limestone is limestone, whether it's used for a building, a sculpture or for pool coping. And as you read about crystallization damage in stone, you see that salt damage is salt damage, whether it's coming from the salt in ground water, ocean spray, or even the trace amounts in the humidity of the air that settles on stone, seeps in and does it's damage, or gets splashed out of your pool and onto the stone by your kids playing.

I hope to expand that section to include more documentation about these processes of destruction, and even more importantly, what steps you can take to arrest the damage that the salt's doing to your pool hardscape. I'm looking hard at stone right now, so bear with me if the next few blog entries seem to be overly stone-centric. After that, I'll tackle the other issues, like galvanic and stray current corrosion, and environmental issues associated with using salt in your pool, and try to give each of those areas a heading and a group of linked reference material, as well.

It just feels like I've done the smart-ass, shooting from the lip thing long enough. No matter how right I am about salt, no matter how cute and funny I say it, and no matter how many references I provide in the text of my rants to prove it, I think that because the references aren't grouped into easily accessible areas, what I say is more easily disputed by the Fast Buck Artists who still want to sell you salt. I'm hoping to make this blog more of a jumping off point for folks trying to prove to themselves that it's not worth trading soft water for tens of thousands of dollars of damage to their pool. Maybe putting the reference material in groups will help accomplish that.

Funny thing... Speaking of smart-ass remarks. I just can't resist here. I only had eight visitors to the blog on Christmas Day. I was surprised that I had that many, being as it was Christmas and all. And one of those eight was a Salt Rep, signing on from his home IP address. It does my heart good to see that they can't even get through Christmas with the family without stopping to see what The Pool Guy is gonna say next about salt.

Like Old Lodge Skins used to say, "My heart soars like a hawk".

Happy Holidays.

THIS JUST IN: “SALT APPROVED” EQUIPMENT NOT WARRANTIED AGAINST SALT CORROSION.
FILM AT 11…




Yeah, I knew it was too good to be true. I didn’t read the Fine Print. I pointed out in the last blog entry that SR Smith had developed a line of “Salt Friendly” equipment, and even come up with a snazzy SALT APPROVED logo. Then someone wrote to me and pointed out that if you dig a little further, like here:

http://www.srsmith.com/warranty.php

you’ll see that their warranty “specifically excludes… rust or corrosion of any metallic parts”.

And it’s really tempting to take a shot here. I mean, I’m The Pool Guy! I’m supposed to point out when the Emperor Has No Clothes and be really funny and snarky about it.

But I can’t, in good conscience, take that shot. First of all, they’re hardly the Muggers here. In fact, they’re the ones who Got Mugged. Then, when you roam around their website and look at all they’ve done to try to make the stuff they sell more salt resistant, it makes it even harder to take that Cheap & Easy Shot.

If you ask me it’s a miracle that anybody in the ladder/rail/slide/diving board business is still in business after standing warranty these last five years on all this salt damage. If it had been me, I’d have Cried Uncle years ago, and either closed up shop or just come out and said, “no warranty on pools with chloride levels above 2500 ppm”, which pretty much means salt pools.

But they didn’t. Instead, they did what they could to weather the salt storm while developing a product line that is at least an effort to make their stuff more salt resistant. THEN they threw up their hands and said, in effect, no more warranty on salt damage. They just left the word salt out of it, referring to it broadly as “rust or corrosion”.

I don’t blame them one bit.

There are other companies in that business who are still providing Unconditional Warranties against rust and corrosion, and I hope that keeps working for them. Truth is, I see them all as Victims of the Greed of the Big Three, who continue to flog the Dead Horse of Electrolyzed Salt Technology.

And you may be saying to yourself, “But my (fill-in-the-blank-with-your-Favorite-Full-Line-Greedhead-Manufacturer) stood warranty on one of my customer’s (fill-in-the-blank-with-your-Most-Frequently-Ocurring-Salt-Damaged-Equipment; heater, cleaner, etc.) without any questions or problems, so what’s the big deal about these ladder and diving board guys stepping up and standing warranty on their stuff?”

Well, just look behind the curtain and you’ll notice that the Full Line Manufacturer in question also sells a Salt System, and even if it’s not his Salt System hanging on the wall that caused all the damage, it’s a Salt System nonetheless, and it would be a hypocrisy that even a starry eyed Pool Guy who just thinks that the Sales & Tech Reps are the Coolest Guys On Earth (like I did when I was younger and more easily awestruck) would see through and point out that they ought not to try to Seek Shelter from The Rain that They Made.

Moving On…

I get Hate Mail. Imagine that. Hate Mail. If that’s too strong, then let’s at least call it Intense Dislike Mail. Now, don’t get me wrong. I know I’m a smart ass. And I’m a snarky S O B to boot. But if left to my own devices the only THING that I’m trashing is salt chlorine generators. Clearly, I take a dim view of the people who sell and defend that technology, as well. But, a lot of people write to me and, on their way to disagreeing with me, start in calling me names and casting aspersions on my integrity. Now, disagreement is at the heart of all healthy arguments. Name calling takes us to a different place; a place that I’m more than equipped to go. And so, when people’s rants drift into that arena, I admit I take particular delight in sniffing out their weaknesses and letting them know that I know what they are. That is usually when they stop writing to me.

But the thing that gets me is this; except for one Salt Rep - who no one has really been able to figure out why he rants around the internet like he does - everybody I’ve crossed keyboards with in that way has been someone who works in the swimming pool service industry. My own Brothers, so to speak. And every time they write to me, you’d think by their tone that I’d been talking about their mother instead of talking about making chlorine through the process of electrolyzing a saline solution. It’s as if I’m attacking some knowledge that they hold sacred by contradicting what they’ve been taught by the industry about how great and trouble free - and obviously liability free - chlorination through salt systems is supposed to be.

I can’t really explain their reaction. Even after all the evidence that’s piled up these last couple of years that proves beyond even a shadow of a doubt that Salt Systems are hard on swimming pools, they continue to hold onto these myths and outright falsehoods that they’ve been taught so they don’t have to feel guilty for having participated in screwing their customers by selling them a salt system. It’s like that circle of good old boys, sitting around the garage, drinking beer and farting and reassuring each other that, “Hey, salt’s great. Keep selling it… Here. Pull my finger again.”

I’m reminded of something Baboosa wrote in the Comments Section of one of the blog entries back in November of last year: “There are a number of … ‘technical’ people making erroneous statements because they heard something from someone. Then they give a presentation in front of a group and repeat what they heard as though it was their own verified experience or fact. Then the people that went there to learn go away and disseminate this garbage to everyone they meet. So another great myth is born. That's just my experience... not some BS someone told me.”

Which brings me to my point. In the latest installment of Hate Mail, a long time reader tells me that I strike him “as one of those guys who even though they know that they are wrong about [a] random topic, can't just say ‘got it, I made a mistake, I'll move on from it, and not do it again’”.

Further down in his rant, after displaying a fair knowledge of pool bonding, he goes on to posit that we should all “just use Potassium chloride instead. Would that please you since it isn't salt[?] You can make chlorine just the same and it is a doctor recommended alternative for people who use water softeners and also have hypertension. I use it in my pool because I have no deck[,] just artificial rock with grass planted right up to the edge. I didn't need a manufacturer's rep to tell me that salt is no good for the grass when water splashes out. Jeez, I figured that out from Sunday school when I was a kid. It's been a while but aren't there references to salting the soil.[sic] Maybe not, who cares, it's common sense anyway.”

Since I published his comments, it ends up making me feel responsible for someone who might read them and run off and pour potassium chloride in their pool. So I went off and looked up why we don’t use potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride.

First, I turned to the folks who manufacture salt systems. I called their tech lines and said, “Hi. This is The Pool Guy and I was wondering… Hello?... Hello?...”. After that, I turned to their owner’s manuals. I have them all as PDF files, so I just searched for Potassium Chloride and Sodium Chloride, and this is what I found:

The Ecomatic User’s Guide, page 16 says, “be sure to use sodium chloride and not potassium chloride”.

The Jandy AquaPure manual, on page 18, paragraph 4.7.1 says, “Use sodium chloride only”.

The Pentair IntelliChlor manual, page 13 says, “Use salt that is at least 99.8% pure NaCl”. Later in that paragraph, it also states, “Use sodium chloride only”.

The Zodiac Clearwater LM2, LM3 & Duo Clear manuals all says, “Only 99.5% pure refined salt (sodium chloride) should be used with a [Clearwater or Duo Clear] chlorinator”.

Even the Chlorine Factory R40B manual says, “Use clean, kiln dried 99.6% (or purer) coarse rock salt”.

So, there’s that.

It’s that spacing thing again. See? But anyway, that really didn’t explain why we shouldn’t use potassium instead of sodium chloride. So, I kept looking. I went to ScienceLab.com and read their Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for both. Under potential chronic health effects, it says of potassium chloride that the “substance may be toxic to blood, cardiovascular system. Repeated or prolonged exposure to the substance can produce target organs damage.” The same spot on the sodium chloride MSDS says, “Repeated or prolonged exposure is not known to aggravate medical condition”.

So, there’s that, too.

Then, there was the implication of his statement that somehow switching to potassium chloride, KCl, would alleviate all of our problems with masonry damage from salt, which is NaCl. Hmmm… Gee, golly… Gosh, how to explain here, er, uh… Salt is just a shorthand way of referring to NaCl, the most common of the “salts”, Potassium chloride is still “a salt”. And as far as lessening the damage to masonry, you can go HERE and look at Table 7.1, whose title is “Salts that have been known to damage stone masonry and their sources”. Potassium chloride is the seventh one listed there. Potassium carbonate, potassium sulphate and potassium nitrate also made the list, as well as four different sodium compounds.

Now this reference here is the greatest thing since sliced bread. And the reason why is because it comes from Google Books. Google Books is putting everything it can, while respecting copyright laws, on line for us to read. Isn’t that great? Because now anyone with even a modicum of curiosity about something can look it up in authoritative texts like "Conservation of Building and Decorative Stone", by John Ashurst and Francis G. Dimes, instead of just eavesdropping on the finger pulling contest of “people making erroneous statements because they heard something from someone”, and then go “away and disseminate this garbage to everyone they meet”. That way, you won’t end up with a pool full of potassium chloride, a warranty voided by the manufacturer, and that God-I-am-so-Dumb look on your face.

Now, I still don’t know specifically why the manufacturers don’t want you to use potassium chloride in your Salt Pool. Maybe because it would be harder to sell the idea of a Potassium Pool, seeing as how potassium chloride is also one of the key ingredients in the Lethal Injection cocktail that’s about to get banned by the Supreme Court. It just doesn’t have that soothing ring to it. Know what I mean?

It MAY have something to do with its conductivity. PERHAPS it’s less conductive, which would make the cells work harder and wear out faster. I don’t know so I don’t want to state that as fact.

I do know this; potassium chloride is $11.38 for a 40 lbs. bag at Lowe’s. Salt pellets and salt crystals range from $4.73 to $4.99, which is about a one hundred and forty percent upcharge to possibly void your warranty.

And I know this, too: I’m sure the guy who wrote in recommending the use of potassium chloride will write to me and say, “got it, I made a mistake, I'll move on from it, and not do it again”.

Now, just as important as making this guy feel small and stupid, I want to emphasize that reference book that I got from Google Books. Go back and read the text that follows that table we were looking at. It says pretty much everything I’ve ever said in this blog about how and why salts damage different stones. It talks about the wetting and drying cycle. It talks about the porosity of the different stones. It talks about the hygroscopic nature of salts, how they can go through the wetting and drying cycle and the subsequent re-crystallization cycle that does all the damage just from changes in humidity of the air around the stone. So, you see, that’s why we get the pattern of excessive and rapid deterioration in the splash zones, fading to more subtle but still present damage as we move away from those splash areas. In fact, I posted a picture a while back of some limestone coping directly ABOVE a sheer descent, and you could see an apron of wear on that stone that displays this phenomenon exactly, where the humidity of the air directly above the sheer descent is higher due to the ever-so-slight aeration of the water by the sheer descent. Here’s that photo again. You can click on it to enlarge it.




So, keep them cards and letters coming, folks. I promise I’ll answer them all.

Boom Goes The Dynamite, Part Trois


It’s good to have this blog. It helps me stay centered. You see, I subscribe to the usual industry magazines, and every time I read one, I set it down feeling like I haven’t lived up to all I could have done to be successful in the pool business.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not crying. I’m very happy with all that I have. It’s exactly what I always wanted; enough pools to keep me busy but not too busy and just enough money to let me and my wife enjoy our lives without pinching pennies. But we’ll never be rich - unless our investment portfolio in lottery tickets finally pays off.

But when I read those magazines and see all those young, fresh scrubbed faces just tearing it up out there and getting promoted to this CEO position, or showcased as that Builder with Something Extra, I tend to kick at what I have and ask myself why my phone doesn’t ring with those kinds of offers.

And then in a blinding flash it comes to me: It’s because you’re such an ass, Pool Guy. Hell, even your wife says so. I mean, let’s face it, with a blog like this and the attitude of belligerence and irreverence from which it was born, what did you expect?

And then I grin and toss that industry magazine in the recycle bin and go back to being Critical Bill, in all the ways that Bill was Critical. (hint: Things to do in Denver when you’re Dead. Great movie. Dark and Brooding, yes, but Great, especially Bill.)

Because the truth is, in twenty-five years of doing pools, there’s nothing I have enjoyed more than tweaking the nose of the Powers That Be by pointing out that the Emperor of Salt Has No Clothes.

At first, I was nervous about it. I knew what I was seeing – ruined coping and decks, rusted diving boards and handrails, disintegrating heaters, odd discolorations in plaster – and everything I read and researched said it was salt and electrolysis and stray current corrosion and galvanic corrosion that was doing it. But every time I asked someone in the industry - some of those self same folks who get their pictures and bio’s in the industry magazines - they’d tell me I was crazy, or that I was seeing things, and they’d remind me of all that acid I did in the sixties, and… anyway. But I went ahead and posted everything I was seeing to this blog.

And, boy, did I hit a chord. Turns out the Good Guys in this industry – and there are some. Not as many as I had hoped, but some pretty Heavy Hitters, whose hearts, it turns out, are in the right place, even if they are muzzled somewhat by their success – these Good Guys started writing to me and encouraging me to keep it up, to keep the bastard’s Feet to the Fire. So I did.

I suppose that, after a fashion, it did get me into the trade magazines. Quoted as “an anonymous blogger”, the dust I kicked up and the pictures I sent in made grist for a few articles and got everybody talking a little more openly and honestly about the destruction of pools and decks and equipment by salt systems. But only after a fashion. Because for everybody who reached inside their jeans and rummaged around and found that they still had a pair and admitted that they were seeing the same problems I was seeing, there were legions of naysayers who called me a liar and a troublemaker and worse. Those were pretty much the salt manufacturers and their reps.

Imagine that.

And then there was that great, vast middle who said nothing. If you find yourself getting a little red in the face as you read that last line, then, yeah, I’m talking to you.

You sat there and you said nothing. You watched pools fall apart. You watched people get hyped and pressured into buying those hunk of junk salt systems. You listened to those people rant and rave about how soft their water felt when you knew that their pools were going to fall apart in a year or two.

And you said nothing.

Now, I’m not talking to those of you who were actually selling these systems to your customers after the truth started coming out. You guys are just crooks. You’re what gives our business its well earned Rep. The sooner you all find a new hustle and move on and out of the Pool Biz, the better. But, of course you won’t. I mean, you all obfuscated for all this time about salt systems, hid the truth and kept selling and selling and made piles of money doing it, and then pretty much walked away from all the liability. As easy as that was, you’ll probably all sign up to sell ionizers next. And get away with that, too, I suspect.

No, I’m talking to that vast middle right now. There’s an e-mail I got the other day that I want you to read:

“Pool Guy:

Just got finished reading your blog postings concerning SWG’s and wow, you the man! We switched to a salt system two years ago and have noticed corrosion of our Texas flagstone over the last year. I keep seeing light pink dust/sandy particles and blamed my sons for NOT cleaning the pool good enough. The tile line is also flagstone, and it is gritty/dusty. Our pool is ten years old, and am getting estimates to resurface. Wanna know something interesting, more pathetic now that I have read your blogs, only one acknowledge a problem w/SWG and flagstone and suggested I seal it before replastering. Can’t guarantee the sealer though and I wonder why!
Others are clueless. I still have the normal chlorinator intact, so will make a switch FAST.

So, Pool Guy, before I invest more $$ into this, can you advise me please on this remodel? I did not read anything on your blog about ‘what to do if you have corrosion’. Know any reputable pool renovators and pool service companies in the Houston area? Needless to say, I am frustrated with this whole issue and want to start from scratch. So for a $1500 salt water system, I am estimating am now going to have shell out close to $10,000 to renovate this 25,000 gallon pool! Maybe less if can get the flagstone back to normal. You are right, one born everyday; two years ago was my day, and don’t plan to have another one any time in the near future!

Thanks for your input and being so forthcoming. It was refreshing to read your articles.”

And this is exactly what I’ve been talking about for the last fourteen months. Here’s a pool owner who bought into THE INDUSTRY HYPE just two short years ago and went with salt. Now, she’s seeing her stone deteriorate and when she asks The Remodel Contractors Who Are Supposed To Know About These Things, Especially Since We As An Industry Have Been Talking About It In Earnest For The Last Year, all but one of them say they haven’t heard anything about it.

But it’s really not that they haven’t heard about it. The truth is that everybody’s still afraid to say, “Yeah, whoever sold you that salt system ought to be on the hook for all this salt damaged stone. And hey, didn’t the Owner’s Manual or the Installation Instructions have any warnings about salt maybe not being compatible with certain types of stone? Well, maybe you should talk to your salt system manufacturer about their liability in all of this. Of course, you’ll want to take a shower after you get off the phone…”

Now, if you turn about six pages into your most recent issue of Pool & Spa News, you’ll see that Deck O Seal, the name we’ve all known and trusted since we first started driving around with a pole sticking out of the back of our truck now has a product called Deck O Shield, and their ad asks, “Is your deck too salty for your taste?” Further down, they say, “protects against salt and stains by limiting salt penetration.”

Then, on page 140, there’s a big ad from SR Smith introducing their salt friendly rails and slides and diving boards, with a really cool “Salt Pool Approved” logo. Go to www.saltfriendly.com for more information.

So, if a guy who’s Remodeling Pools For A Living – you know, Feeding His Family With The Proceeds Of His Work In The Pool Industry – if he took, say, thirty minutes a month to thumb through a magazine, then he would know what we’re talking about… Wouldn’t You Say?

Otherwise, you’d just have to assume he knows about it and is such a gutless turd that he doesn’t want to “throw the other guy under the bus”, which as I’ve said before is the same as holding the door open for the bank robbers so that they’ll like you later.

And this customer in Houston is stuck with thousands of dollars of stone damage because we, as an industry, didn’t know enough about what we were selling to warn her that this would happen, and since we’ve all admitted that, hell, yes, this is happening, nobody-I-mean-nobody is stepping up and doing the John Wayne thing and saying, “Hu-yeah, that’s our fault. We’ll make good on that for ya, little lady.”

Multiply her damages times every pool with a salt system and any of the myriad items that it’s incompatible with and tell me how many million dollars this Industry Wide Black Eye is going to cost our customers.

Just ask yourself, how many thousand copper heaters are failing in silence?

So, how did we make the leap from rumblings out in the field about salt issues to a few articles about how bad salt was with certain types of stone to a shift in the industry where we openly sell products to prevent damage from salt and products guaranteed to be salt resistant? What happened to the Go Back And Clean Up The Mess We Made And Are Still Making On All Those Pools That Are Falling Apart Around Their Salt System?

I mean, how do you advertise cupro nickel heat exchangers as being the answer to the problem of salt eating up copper heat exchangers and not at least send a one paragraph letter to folks with copper heaters and salt systems and warn them that their heaters are at risk?

How do you talk about the benefits of cupro nickel, which implies the unsuitability of copper, and not at least put a note in your installation instructions not to install a salt system on copper plumbed pools?

Seriously, I want to know. How does a guy who’s rep’ing for one of the larger full line companies stand at a showbooth and talk about salt resistant materials in his heater and then deny that those same materials are necessary when he turns around and tries to talk someone into backfitting all of his service pools with salt?

Or, how, when more and more of The Entire World is concerned with the viability of our drinking water do you use the words “all natural and environmentally friendly” when you’re talking about adding a pollutant to water?

The EPA’s Drinking Water Candidate Contaminant List.

Or, has anybody read the recent articles that now have a second federal agency, the FDA, gunning for salt?

Business Week's Take On It

The NY Times Take On It


Or, how about the fact that salt systems still explode. Like this:

This is from a recent explosion in France. It’s documented on a POOL FORUM HERE

Unless you speak French, you’ll need to cut and paste the text HERE (Google Translate) to get an approximate translation. What I find just hilarious in this whole thread about the exploding chlorinator is that everybody in the thread seems quite content because the E Bay seller stood good on the warranty for a new salt cell. Think about it. These folks probably had a hydrogen gas explosion in their back yard, scattering shards of plastic everywhere, like shrapnel from a grenade, and everybody’s happy because they have a new salt cell for free that, hopefully, won’t blow up like the last one.

Huh?

But the funniest part of these last fourteen months to me, and what should be the most instructive to you, is that nobody’s ever done anything to try to make me Cease and Desist. And while I blog anonymously as The Pool Guy, it’s pretty much an open secret who I am to those who took the time to find out. And yet, nothing earth shattering has happened to me. And believe it or not, none of my customers have held it against me for telling them the truth. Which is exactly why no one’s done anything to stop me; because I’m not lying

So, the next time you’re faced with some new bullshit gadget that Our Industry wants you to ram down the throats of your customers, Just Say No.

Then go blog about it.

The Tower Of Google


I got this Site Meter. It tells me how many people come to the blog each day. It tells me how long they stay. It tells me how many pages they view, and how long they view those pages. It’s a neat little gadget, and if I was a really savvy internet whiz, I’d figure some way to crunch all those numbers and squeeze some bucks out of it. Or, if I worked for the government, I’d figure out how to use the info to better surveil you.

Pretty much, all I use it for is to see how many people read the blog this week and to see where they’re from. Where they’re from in broad, general terms, mind you. It doesn’t tell me much beyond what city someone is from. And actually, not even that. It tells me what city their internet provider is from. But that’s usually pretty close to home, so I get a good idea of where most of the hits are coming from.

Like I said, it’s a neat gadget, and I like fiddling with it. One thing I really hate about it, though, is that if a visitor never clicks off the main page to any other pages in my blog, it records their visit length as 0:00. In other words, it doesn’t start counting the time of your visit until you look at something besides the main page. So, I never know if a 0:00 visit was someone who just opened and closed the page, or someone who sat and read all the way down to the bottom of the displayed blog, which right now goes all the way back to the first part of August. That part is frustrating.

The one thing I love about the Site Meter is that same Visit Length column. Especially when I open up the Recent Visits by Visit Details and see that of the twenty most recent visits, four or five people spent anywhere from ten to thirty minutes reading my blog. I gotta confess, that feels good. That makes it all worthwhile. That makes every Sunday morning with my wife standing over my shoulder stamping her foot and waiting for me to take her to brunch while I polish just one more sentence before clicking Publish New Entry worth the risk of enduring the Wrath of Khan over omelets and coffee. I do, of curse, smell the coffee before drinking it. Arsenic smells like garlic, right?

I tend to dwell on those Visit Details where someone spent so much time reading my blog. Like, I want to know, did they really spend all that time reading my blog, or did they just open the window and then get distracted and end up mowing the lawn or something. And I can tell by the Visitor Path whether they did or not. Like if they spent 32 minutes & 33 seconds at the blog (1,953 seconds) and they spent all 1,953 of them on one of the pictures they clicked on, then I pretty much know they got distracted and didn’t really read much. Maybe his wife was stamping her foot, too.

But if the Visitor Path shows that they spent 1224 seconds on one page and 535 on another and 194 on another and then exited to one of the links on the Honor Roll, then I know that they really did read my stuff.

And that makes it all worthwhile.

For example, of the last twenty visits, 6 people made it off the main page, and those six people spent a total of 75 minutes and 45 seconds reading the blog. That’s like 12 and a half minutes each. You know, I have subscriptions to pool industry magazines that I read in less than 12 and a half minutes each month.

In the last 40 visits, one visitor spent an hour and 14 minutes and 14 seconds and viewed 33 pages of my blog. Seeing things like that make what I do here worth every minute that I spend doing it.

So, where do all these people come from, anyway? What surprises me is that 76% of you don’t come from search engines. You got here through word of mouth or you’re a regular. And even of the 24% of you who got here from a search engine, the biggest chunk of you Googlers were Googling The Pool Guy, or The Pool Biz, or The Pool Guy Blog, or something like that. So, still, word of mouth.

Of the 20% of you who were looking for something else – most probably information about salt systems – the next most frequent search term was Lectronator. So, I’m glad I could help you there. After that, it’s Swimpure, then Intex, then Goldline, Aquarite, Zodiac, in that order. Then the search terms start being more specific to problems, like; Stone Coping Salt Damage, or Travertine Coping Salt, or Stray Current In Salt Pool. Then there’s my absolute favorite: Why Does My Salt Swimming Pool Shock Me When I Touch the Handrail? I think it’s neat that people ask Google questions in complete sentences, like it was some kind of Oracle or something.

The things that you folks are searching for has been the biggest indicator that what I’m doing here has value. I mean, when I see that there’s lots of folks looking for information about why their limestone or travertine coping and deck is dissolving under their feet, then I know I’m on the right track by shining a light on a pretty sleazy corner of our industry. Even still, when you go to any of the manufacturer’s websites, you won’t find a single word about the problems that people are encountering with salt systems. It’s left up to people like me to try to get the information out there. Because if you take a hard look at it, the pool industry has been horribly lax in self governing the problems with salt systems out of existence. Everybody’s afraid of stepping on the other guy’s toes. Afraid of making an enemy. To me, it’s sort of like holding the door for the bank robbers when they’re fleeing the scene because you want them to like you later.

But hey, I’m a Pessimist, right? And all of my rants are just a bunch of Hyperbole. Isn’t that what a lot of you say? And the Glass is really Half Full and Not Half Empty like I always say. Right? Sure, there’s some truth to what The Pool Guy says, but it’s really not as bad as all that. Right? I mean, these Salt Guys, they didn’t screw the Pool Owning Public on purpose. If Only They Had Known… Right?

Okay, fine. Then Get a Load of This:

http://bodyfatindex.org/2007/10/25/straight-talk-about-safe-swimming-pools/

“Straight Talk About Safe Swimming Pools

As a fund diligence expert of some existence I am constantly amazed at the misinformation and outright fraud perpetrated by inventors, manufacturers and cheat artists on fund owners. tidy fund water is an absolute requisite for any fund and promoting pseudo-smurder under the outfit of shelter or ecological concerns is no pretext for bad and potentially damaging information.”

That came off a Google Blog Alert for “Chlorine Generator”

You see, the term chlorine generator is buried further down in this gobble-de-goop of text, so that it pops up on a Google Blog Alert Search, thereby diluting the effectiveness of being able to set an Alert and keeping your finger on the pulse of what’s being said about Chlorine Generators, whether you’re a Hyperbolist like me, or a Consumer looking for the opinion of other’s before making a purchasing decision, or a Salt Pool Owner looking for help with any of the myriad problems that come along with owning one of these Albatrosses.

Oh? You think this is just more hyperbole?

Then Go Here to this Google Blog Search Results for Chlorine Generator:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&tab=wb&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=chlorine+generator&btnG=Search+Blogs

Look at all of those pages and pages of bogus returns. Read the excerpted text:

“... generator briggs and stratton stand by generator gnerator spa king ozone generator baldor generators stepped-tone generator salt chlorine generator swimming pool list old wartsila generator sets d&d name generator military generator …”

“…Aqua Rite® Chlorine Generator - Cheap Pool Products chlorine generator,pool chlorine generator,electronic chlorine generator,swimming pool chlorinator,aquarite chlorine … Also check out the Aqua Logic ® … Click for Installation Manual. ...”

“…There it breathes a lot of knowledge on Haywards Aquarite Electronic Pool Chlorine Generator in the large resource. This is a homepage with synthetic link on raw exposure gas. If you next change from Haywards Aquarite Electronic Pool ...”

“... parts intex chlorinator intex chlorine intex chlorine generator intex chlorine generator and filter pump combo intex chlorine generator chlorinator intex chlorine generator information intex chlorine generator stltwaterpool system ...”

When you click on any of those blogs, you find that Google has locked them up for violations of the Terms of Service, as well they should. But the Search Engine is still affected. They still show up in the Search Results and dilute your effort to get at The Truth.

But then, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? This, ladies and gentlemen, is The Other Side of The Argument. They couldn’t dispute what people like me were saying, so they just started throwing crap on the walls, seeing what the Search Engines will let stick.

They’ve even found a way to get around the blogs being locked up for the violation of the Terms of Service. If you scroll to page 7 of those Blog Search Results, you’ll see this:

By: atlantis chlorine generator
Nice site. Thanks. Chlorine generator handbook.
Patrick.net comments – http://patrick.net/wp

What they did there was to go out and find blogs with unrestricted Comments Sections and place a little “chlorine generator” flag. You see, that way the WordBots will still tag this entry as applicable to any searches for chlorine generators, even though Patrick.net is a guy’s blog, a guy who rails against many of the injustices of the world, one of which is that most advertising is spam.

It makes you wonder who pays for all that. Doesn’t it? I mean, the flow of all this garbage into the Blogosphere has to be coming from someone, or some group of someone’s, for some reason. There must be a buck in it somehow. It would be interesting to know whose buck it was in the beginning.

Could it have been yours? You know, from the bank robbery… I mean, from the purchase of your salt system.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that salt manufacturers are the only people scummy enough to have sunk this low as to flood the internet with false information to hide their misdeeds. This is probably just the Tip of the Iceberg. Which reminds me. I have to get another expression for that because soon enough people will respond by asking, “What’s an Iceberg?” But the Good News is that when all the Icebergs are Gone, the Glass won’t be Half Empty anymore. It will be Overfilled.

It sure would be nice, though, to know who’s destroying your ability to find The Truth and replacing Google with another Tower of Babble.

There Is No Free Lunch


I received an e-mail this week. I thought I would share it and my response with you. I changed his name for reasons of privacy.

You seem extremely knowledgeable and have extensive experience with pools. I’m building a pool here in Austin (bad soils – I’m nuts!) and I’d like to talk to you for 5 minutes if you could please make the time. I’ve narrowed my selection to two bids. One with Salt Water and one with Ozone (Delzone) and chlorine. I’d like to discuss your experience with salt water and get some feedback on Sand Versus Cartridge filters. I have a lot of trees in my yard and I’ll be hammered with leaves and debris. I love the idea of cartridge but everyone says I need DE or sand. Thoughts…

FYI: I’ve owned a pool before, I hate DE, I love the salt water concept but I keep hearing the horror stories, the salt water guy has installed 30+ salt water pools and swears that by selecting the right materials (no limestone) and properly sealing those materials I should be fine (His customers love him – hard to argue) and I have no idea which filter I should choose. I think I love Jandy but I’m not sure. I’ve owned a Polaris but this Hayward Phantom looks interesting. Is it any good? Trying to decide the Jandy PDA is worth the expense…

Sorry to ramble but I’ve spent the past 6 hours researching pool stuff and I’m about to have a brain freeze. I found it interesting that your blog had more data than any of the previous 50+ sites I visited before I reached yours. NICE! At the end of the day, NO ONE knows more about stuff than the people who service and maintain that stuff.

Lastly I’d like to get some feedback on what you think about the expansive soils in Dallas. I’m building in the same crappy Del Rio clay that you guys suffer in North and Central Dallas. Do you have any advice? Pray…

Would you be open to a quick phone call?

Thanks in advance for ANY and ALL help!!!!!!!! Your website alone is a great service!!!!

John from Austin!

John,

Thanks for the Kudos. I like you already. Your e-mail touched on so many of my favorite subjects, I couldn’t wait to sit down and write back to you.

First and foremost, I’d like to point out that a guy who’s installed “30+” salt pools isn’t a guy who’s installed A LOT of salt pools. Granted, one is too many, but with the average custom builder building anywhere from 30 to 150 pools a year and still being able to work out of his home – if he prefers – and given that salt’s been selling like hotcakes for the last five or so years, then this guy’s only selling about six salt pools a year, or he’s only been building pools for a couple of years. Neither situation is a rousing endorsement for salt. Either he’s not really seeing enough salt pools (six a year) for his phone to be ringing off the hook with disgruntled customers complaining about their pool deterioration issues in the harsh salt environment, or if it’s the latter and he’s only been out there on his own for a few years, then it hasn’t been long enough for his customers to be calling with the salt related complaints that start about midway through year two. You see, he’s avoiding the use of limestone and he probably learned not to sell diving boards with his salt pools, so the complaints typical of the first six months to a year aren’t happening to him. You need to factor in, too, that those customers he’s introduced you to who “just love him” may not represent 100% of his customer base. I know of builders who pay people to call their customers, pretending to be a prospective client, to hear what kind of referrals his customers give. The Good Ones go on the Referral List. The Not So Good Ones never see the light of day. It is, after all, Sales & Marketing.

But the point about the salt is that it will eventually damage all stone and concrete. Sooner or later. It’s just science. Higher chloride levels in the water result in supersaturation of the stone or cementious material and eventually the re-crystallization of the salt inside the stone will cause accelerated deterioration. People who argue that that’s not true are just Fast Buck Artists who want to ignore science so they can screw you out of the money you’re going to spend on their salt system. You can get into the loop of sealing and resealing your stone and concrete to try to prevent this from occurring, but why spend that money?

You also have all the metals to think about. Every metal in your pool that touches the electrolyte that you’ve turned your pool water into will deteriorate faster than it would if the salt weren’t present. Once again, it’s just science. To argue otherwise is just to argue for the sake of making a sale. Your heater, the metal parts of your auto cleaner – which should be a Polaris, by the way. The only thing intriguing about the Phantom is that there are still people who buy it - are all going to deteriorate on a much faster track than if your water had much, much lower choride levels (i.e., no salt). Period. It’s not a topic that needs further discussion. It Is Simply The Way Things Are.

You see, what you have to do is take a step back from the whole situation and take another perspective. And here is that perspective that’s vitally important that you see. About five or so years ago, the Manufacturer Reps came to the builders and told them, “I’ve got a New Gadget for your Sales Wheel. It’s going to put anywhere from $500 to an extra $1,000 in your pocket – that’s net, mind you, on the $1,500 to $2,000 Salt System sale – on every pool you build. And that’s going to boost your annual sales with us and you’re going to get even more money back at the end of the year because you spent an extra $1,000 with us on each pool you built. You’re going to love it.”

And they did, until the complaints started rolling in. So, now, they’re backing away from salt because they’re tired of paying for all that stone and concrete work. But they got used to that extra spot on the Sales Wheel, and without Salt, it’s empty. So, up jumps Ozone to fill the void. Why? Because the builders got used to the extra $1,000 a pool. If a guy’s doing a hundred pools a year, that’s a lot of profit to just walk away from.

So now, everybody’s selling Ozone. One little problem. In the Friday, September 28th issue of the Los Angeles Times, Section B, page B1, there was this little headline that read, “State bans home Ozone air purifiers”. The first paragraph of the article says, “The California Air Resources Board on Thursday banned popular in-home ozone air-purifiers, saying studies have found that they can worsen conditions such as asthma that marketers claim they help to prevent.”

Now, when I read that, it occurred to me how many times I’ve had my breath taken away when I popped the lid off a portable spa that was on and filtering and had an ozone generator – usually a UV ozonator. I had always attributed it to the chlorine or bromine. But California’s action here in dealing a blow to the Air Purifier industry makes me wonder if Ozonators for pools and especially for spas isn’t going to be next. I bring this up to point out that if you’re building a pool/spa combo, you’re going to be sitting in your spa with the ozonator running at max output, breathing the ozone (O3) that bubbles to the surface of the water. Don’t get me wrong; ozone is a great sanitizer. It is also an air pollutant. With the in-home air purifiers that California is banning, there “are reports of ozone being generated in someone’s living room… at levels equivalent to having a stage one smog alert right in your own house” (from the LA Times article) How is the ozone that bubbles up and is concentrated at the surface of your spa any different?

Google ozone and asthma and see how many and what quality of hits you get.

Like this:

http://www.epa.gov/03healthtraining/effects.html

Or this: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/asthma/AN00443

Now, those links represent the EPA and the Mayo Clinic, who both say that ozone exacerbates asthma, but I’m sure your pool builder will tell you “don’t worry, I’m sure they’re wrong”. That’s what they said about salt.

The bottom line is they were just looking for something to plug into the sales wheel where salt used to be, and ozone was standing there looking harmless and without any of the damaging structural side effects of salt, and so they’ve started selling it. They would no more take five minutes to Google any potential health risks associated with ozone exposure than they would fly to the moon.

So, once you’ve ungadgetized their bids, what you have left is running your pool on chlorine. Which will be just fine. We’ve been doing it for centuries. And granted, even chlorine comes with baggage. Google trihalomethanes and read up on their now proven link to cancer.

Like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trihalomethane

Read the definition and then click on “3 Water Pollutants” in the Contents box.

Moving On… You should love DE. It’s the best filter media. But if you’re not willing to give DE another shot, then go with the cartridge filter. Get a big one, over 500 square feet. You’ll be cleaning it less often. And the cartridges are probably down around 20 microns, although they claim that they’ll filter down to 10 microns. For comparison, a DE is as low as 5 microns when properly coated. A sand filter is a waste of money. A properly laid sand bed is about a 30 to 50 micron filter. Algae particles can be a lot smaller than that and blow right through a sand filter.

Another problem with sand; to keep up with summer water temps and debris here in Texas, you pretty much have to run a sand filter 24 hours a day. Cartridges and DE, about half that much time or even less. That's at least a 50% energy savings on running that filter pump, which if it's a single speed, high horsepower pump to filter the water AND run those spa jets, is probably costing you about $120.00 a month with DE or cartridge filters. Double that for sand. Every month. Forever. If you bring this up with your builder, he'll take that opportunity to sell you on the new variable speed pumps that are out. They're brand new. The only thing I know after twenty-five years in the Pool Biz is; Never Be The Guinea Pig. You buy it, you own it, whether it works out or not.

All of the current crop of cartridge filters have their drawbacks. Jandy is famous for cracked manifolds and flaky, special order – read expensive - air relief assemblies. Lots of Haywards blow through the little equalization screen attached to the manifold and blow debris back into the pool. And you need to wear long sleeves when dealing with a Pentair tank after the first couple of years. It seems to decompose a bit and flake off fiberglass – or whatever it is – all over you. And their drain plugs tend to crack and weep, too.

I don’t know a lot about the Jandy PDA’s. I like wireless better than wired, but I don’t see the installation savings in not having to wire all the way from the equipment pad to the house and to the spa side being passed on to the homeowner. They just tend to charge more for the wireless systems, which honestly cost more, but they make even more with the reduced installation costs.

As far as the soil… Just try to keep the ground around your pool irrigated so that it doesn’t have a chance to dry out and contract away from the structure. Water more often during droughts and less often when it rains, and choose a builder who guarantees his structure against leaking for as long as you own the pool. That’s pretty standard stuff.

As far as the Horns, most of my friends are Horns fans, so I’m happy to see them happy when the Horns win. But me, I'm an NFL guy. A Raider Fan lost in Cowboy Country. It's a vile habit I picked up when I lived Out West, harder to kick than black tar heroin, but RIGHT NOW and until the end of the day Sunday, the Raiders are in first place in their Division, which is so NOT what all the experts predicted just a few short weeks ago, now is it? If you remember, it was supposed to be the Chargers. Objectively speaking, the Chargers had a good team and they had Marty Schottenheimer, who has very few shortcomings and was getting them closer and closer. But they fired him and hired Norv Turner, who is 59 and 85 as a head coach. He's had four winning seasons in his 9 going on 10 years of coaching, and 3 of those 4 were nothing more than one or two games above .500 ball. His worst seasons have been split equally among the Redskins and the Raiders, posting records like 3 & 13 and 4 & 12. And the guy the Chargers fired, Marty, was 14 & 2 last year with a 200 & 126 lifetime coaching record. Hell, even Art Shell has a better record than Norv Turner (56 & 52).God-That-Was-Such-A-Stupid-Move-I-Cant-Believe-It...

But what’s that got to do with pools, huh? Last but not least, if after all my heartfelt advise to STAY AWAY FROM SALT, you choose it anyway, make sure you bank every penny you’re supposedly saving on chlorine, because three years of running your pump like you’re going to run it to keep up with all those leaves and debris, you’re going to be popping for a new Salt Cell, which can cost as much as $600.

Because no matter what They say, There Is No Free Lunch.

Good Luck With Your Pool.