The Trouble With Heaters, Take III (Updated 5/15/10)

I don’t know if many of you watched The Daily Show last night. Jim Cramer, that bald headed liar from Mad Money went on Jon Stewart’s show and did everything but crawl across hot coals on his hands and knees to plead his mea culpa for all the years he spent manipulating markets for a Fast Buck as a hedge fund manager, followed by his recent stint on TV where he and his ilk have led the Average Investor to the Slaughter for Big Business.

Stewart gave him Hell, and all Cramer did was sit there and grin like an idiot and take it, nod and shrug his agreement with everything Jon said, which included that some of Cramer’s pronouncements of how to manipulate stock prices bordered on the criminal.

It was Great! And it dovetails nicely with another bit of news I came across this past week. Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE and world renowned Corporate Cutthroat has repented. Here’s a link to a recent Financial Times article where the managerial guru now says, “"On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world… Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy . . . Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.

You see, there’s been a culture for many years in this country, a global culture, actually, a culture that was lionized by the success of Jack Welch in particular, to drive shareholder value as your only guiding principal. Everything was subordinate to that. Everything was based on how it affected shareholder value, which was a combination of stock price and dividends returned to the shareholder.

Now, the Man Who Made It Famous has recanted. He has seen the errors of his way and prostrated himself before the international financial press and acknowledged his errors.

You know, you can see the ripple effect of that philosophy in our industry, especially with our swimming pool heaters. A quick study of heater warranties over the last 8 or so years yields all you need to know of how our manufacturers were infected by the Shareholder Value phenomenon. You see, since the advent of salt systems, heater warranties have plummeted from a typical 5 years for most everything in the box, except for a 2 year warranty on a short list of items that included the heat exchangers, to a one year limited warranty. Under the old warranty, the headers, the devices on either end of the heat exchanger that hold it together, were traditionally warranted for 5 years.

It’s a Cause and Effect kind of a thing. Salt comes along, heater problems skyrocket – I’ll cite particulars to back up that claim in a minute – and the result is a scramble to protect shareholder value by paring down the warranty to an innocuous one year, leaving their customers twisting in the wind.

That’s been our culture for many years. You Go Along to Get Along. If Hayward dumps a dog of a cleaner on the market - and they did - the worst thing anybody says is Nothing. If Jandy marries up a heater to a salt system on a pool and the salt causes the heater to have a failure mode that is absolutely beyond doubt the problem of the salt, unless Jandy makes note of it in a tech bulletin, you Say Nothing.

Until recently, all of this has been a successful model for driving shareholder value. Let’s look at the effects of this by taking a closer look at heater warranties.

The standard warranty on, for example, the Jandy LT/LX heater is one year, and when you read the warranty on the last page of the Owner’s Manual, it lists several exclusions, and #3 on that list of exclusions is:

“Not maintaining a proper chemical balance in your pool and/or spa [pH level between 7.2 and 7.8, Total Alkalinity (TA) between 80 to 120 ppm, Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) less than 2000].”

With Hayward, their warranty is also one year, and as restrictive as Jandy's (see Hayward Onwer's Manual page 14). Under Exceptions, they state: Leakage substantially contributed to by sediment, lime precipitate and/or higher than normal dissolved solids (pH above 7.8) in the tank, copper tubes or waterways".

Higher than normal dissolved solids (pH above 7.8) leaves a lot to the interpretation of whoever shows up to field your complaint. Most salt pools will have constant excursions into the range of 7.8 and above. That's the nature of the beast. So, it's hard to say what they intend with this exclusion.

In their warranty information, Raypak provides a one year warranty, and excludes the situation of "not maintaining a proper chemical balance (PH level must be between 7.4 and 7.8 and total alkalinity between 100 and 150 PPM. Total dissolved solids (TDS) must be no greater than 3000 PPM)".

Pentair has the worst availability for warranty information. They don't post any warranty information anywhere in the public domain. They just say that the warranty info is included on a card that's inside the box when you buy the heater. I don't particularly feel like buying a heater to complete this blog piece.

I have several Pentair and Teledyne Laars (now Jandy) heater Owner’s Manual from as recently as 2003 and in it they specified the industry standard, at the time, 5 year/2 year warranty that I discussed earlier.

What’s particularly tricky here is navigating the water chemistry parameters in light of the addition of salt to as much as 35% of the pools out there. They’ve stuck with their pre-salt water chemistry parameters for TDS. Jandy is less than 2,000 ppm, Raypak is less than 3,000 ppm, Hayward is “higher than normal” and Pentair is unknown. In fact, Jandy makes a point in there 2003/04 LX/LT Owner’s Manual of pointing out that their water chemistry concentration levels are taken from Basic Pool & Spa Technology published by NSPI. NSPI doesn’t exist today. The Association of Pool & Spa Professionals (APSP) has taken their place as the industry recognized advisors on water chemistry standards.

APSP’s thinking on TDS has evolved quite a bit since salt came along. They used to say 3,000 ppm was the upper limit for TDS. Then, they decided that didn’t give enough allowance for the minimum 3,500 ppm salt (TDS) required for those systems. So they amended it to be 1,500 ppm above Start Up level. In other words, if you had 400 ppm TDS tap water, and you added 3,500 ppm salt (more TDS) to it, then your Start UP level would be 3,900 ppm. So your upper limit for that pool would be 5,400 ppm TDS. That’s what APSP and RWQ (Recreational Water Quality) folks say. And they are the industry recognized experts.

Read all about APSP's take on TDS & salty water HERE

But swimming pool heater manufacturers have stuck with 2,000 and 3,000 ppm TDS limits. Salt is definitely part of TDS, so it's hard to imagine that any of these heaters would be covered for any warranty issues related to high TDS. But that’s okay, because they’ve reduced the length of the warranty from the old 5/2 year warranty to one year only.

Do you see the pattern emerging here? They’ve done a brilliant job of protecting shareholder value at the expense of the reputation of their products and at the expense of their customers.

The thing that feeds into this, the Smoking Gun, as it were, comes from the heater manufacturers themselves, when they started offering cupro nickel heat exchanger upgrades on some of their swimming pool heaters right in the middle of the Salt Storm. You see, heat exchangers have turned out to be the most expensive failure items with salt. That and a few other components I’ll talk about later. The heat exchangers fail mainly through the mechanisms of impingement corrosion and erosion corrosion.

I would say that in Texas – at least in the Dallas/Fort Worth area – more than 90% of the pools are built with a heater. Mostly those heaters are 400,000 BTU gas fired heaters. They last anywhere from 7 to 10 years – unless of course it’s a Hayward H400 or a Pentair Mini Max Lo NOX TSI. If you have one of those, your mileage will definitely vary, if-ya-know-what-I-mean. But then, after many years of faithful, or not so faithful service, your heater breaks and the Repair Pool Guy tells you it’s going to be “about $1,000” to get it back in shape. That’s when you have to decide whether you want to be the proud owner of a well maintained Classic Heater, or you buy a new one or – and we hate it when you go this way – you decide you can live without a heater.

If it’s a pool only, then it’s usually live without. If it’s a pool/spa with a computer, then you might be the kind of folks who use your spa enough to cough up the $3,000 for a new heater, installed.

I wrote a blog piece back HERE about a pool owner who uses his pool every day, and that means that with our Dallas weather, he’s using his heater about 6 months of the year. Since he has a salt system, he goes through heaters about every three years, instead of the 7 to 10 years that non-salt pool owners get out of theirs. But he loves that salt. And we love selling him heaters, and we did advise him that he could make them last longer if he just got rid of that salt – commonly referred to as Due Diligence, something often lacking in this, and most other industries – but, like I said, he loves that salt. So, it’s a match made in heaven.

So, three of the heater manufacturers (Raypak, Hayward & Pentair) have added the option to upgrade to a cupro nickel heat exchanger to combat the Impingement/Erosion Corrosion. The heat exchanger is the part of the heater that the water actually flows through. You heat up the finned metal tubing that constitutes the heat exchanger with an open flame, and that makes the water hot. Used to be they were all made of copper. Inexpensive, long lasting copper. Not so much any more.

The reason they’re offering cupro nickel is that a standard copper heat exchanger isn’t designed to stand up to the flow rate of water that has 3,500 ppm salt plus background TDS (Total Dissolved Solids). By that, I mean everything else that’s in the water; calcium, manganese, stabilizer, etc. That’s what I was saying earlier about how the heater manufacturers haven’t amended their position on TDS, even though all of those manufacturers except Raypak also sell a line of salt chlorine generators.

About a year ago, I was communicating with someone who has been a frequent contributor - on background – to this blog. I asked him what he knew about Impingement/Erosion corrosion, the type of corrosion your heater suffers from when the TDS of the water goes too high for your flow rate. And this is what he said then, quoting from the text of a water chemistry seminar he had attended:

“The actual text… is ‘Erosion itself is not corrosion. However, even mildly abrasive conditions may remove a corrosion film from a surface which is protective of a substrate, thus exposing a fresh metal to corrode and thereby accelerate damage. In fresh water pools it is known that flow-rates above 7 to 8 ft/sec will erode copper piping and may remove a protective film from the substrate's surface exposing fresh metal to corrode, accelerating the damage… TDS will accelerate both the galvanic and erosion deterioration processes. High TDS will allow more electric currents to be conducted and will cause copper piping to erode at flow rates in excess of 2.3 ft/sec.’ ”

You see, a certain amount of corrosion can be a good thing. Take copper, for instance. We’ve all seen how a copper portico will weather and turn green with age. That green is a form of corrosion, a tarnish that develops and seals the surface, protecting the underlying strata from any further corrosion. Or like the black tarnish that shows up on silver. That’s oxidation. And what are other names for oxidation? Rust. Corrosion. That’s why ships at sea will use a lot of brass. Because the brass will get that same green tarnish that copper gets – because brass is mostly copper – and that tarnish protects it. On commercial vessels, that’s why they don’t polish their brass. I remember in the Navy we used to polish the brass all the time. “Work it May, Shine it Must” was what they used to tell us. All that effort defeated the purpose of why brass was chosen in the first place. Yet another reason why the term Naval Intelligence in an oxymoron.

So, when you’ve got a 2 horsepower pump pushing 5,000 ppm TDS water through a copper heat exchanger at velocities in excess of 2.3 ft/sec, you start stripping off that protective coating. The result, over time, is a failed copper heat exchanger.

The other thing that is going on is Galvanic Corrosion, also known as Stray Current Corrosion, which I’ve talked about ad nauseam elsewhere in this blog (see the Label Stray Current Corrosion to your right).

So, it’s better for your salt pool if you make sure that the next heater you buy has a cupro nickel heat exchanger. That will make it more resistant to the effects of impingement, or erosion, corrosion.

Another factor, and in fact A Very Big Factor, is your style of heat exchanger. There are two types out there.

The first, and most common type is where a bundle of parallel tubes sits over the burner tray. The water shoots straight down the first tube, makes a 180 degree turn and shoots straight back up the next tube, another 180 degree turn and etc, usually for nine tubes.

The second type is where a coil of copper or cupro nickel tubing is wrapped around a burner tray, with the water navigating a constant curve through the heat exchanger.

The second type is better. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s a link to the ASM Handbook where they talk about these forms of corrosion.

In here they say that most impingement or erosion corrosion damage “occurs first at locations where directions of flow changes, such as elbows or U-bends. Large radius bends are less susceptible to such damage”.

So, here are the heaters that offer the second type of heat exchanger, the one without the 180 degree U-bends, the ones with the coiled tubing around the burner tray, also known as the “large radius bends”:

Sta Rite Max E Therm & Pentair Master Temp.

That’s it. They are, in fact, the same heater. I’m not saying that Pentair bought Sta Rite just so they could get their hands on the Sta Rite heater and put it in a crème colored box, but Pentair bought Sta Rite just so they could get their hands on the Sta Rite heater and put it in a crème colored box.

A Very Good Move.

They’re both great heaters. I have heard of heat exchanger failures with these heaters at the inlet/outlet plate with salt pools, and I heard that from someone who's reputation is sterling in relating data to me about frequent and common failures in pool equipment, but that’s not been my direct experience with the heater.

But, once again, referring to the ASM Handbook, page 999: "When impingement attack occurs in heat exchangers... it is usually confined to a short distance on the inlet end of the tube where the fluid flow is turbulent". That's exactly what my source with the sterling reputation has been telling me.

And now this heater comes with a cupro-nickel upgrade. Your pool professional may not even know about it yet. It's not yet stocked at the wholesale distributors. It's the Catch-22 of distribution; in order for them to regularly stock something, they have to have a history of orders for it. But for you to get something they don't normally stock you have to pay freight from the manufacturer. Add the extra cost of the cupro-nickel heat exchanger and you are probably talking several hundred dollars more. But it's worth every penny.

The Sta Rite Max E Therm & Pentair Master Temp heaters are the best, most reliable heaters on the market. Hands down. And now, with the cupro-nickel heat exchanger upgrade, they earn the first ever Pool Guy Seal of Approval.

Anybody who reads this blog regularly knows that I've never said many nice things about any pool equipment manufacturer's stuff, so this really is a big deal.

I love this heater. And with cupro-nickel, I recommend it.

EDIT 5/15/10: Since I wrote this, yet another Master Temp has failed on one of my salt pools. First the thermostat failed, then the heat exchanger. All within the first year. They had a salt system that required 3,000 ppm. So, then, I took a hard look at everything we were doing on this pool to see what it could be that was contributing to the problem. The local Pentair guy told my heater repairman that he had seen that a lot of companies were running chlorine tabs in the skimmers during the winter and he thought it was probably this. But I take the tablets away from my guys in the winter. It's a real easy way for me to get the stabilizer level down to normal on my tab pools. The guys don't have tabs to use anywhere, so the result is that by spring, after the rains, I have pretty normal stabilizer levels going into summer. During the winter we just add a little cal hypo each week. Our water here is soft (120 ppm calcium from the tap on average), so the extra calcium is usually not an issue.

The reason the Rep thought that guys might be using tabs in the winter is that, when the pool water gets down to 50 or 55 degrees, the systems stop making chlorine. You see, they measure the conductivity of the water to determine the salinity level of the pool, and when the water gets cold, it changes that value enough that at 55 and below, the conductivity measurement is so far out of bed that it can't be used. And the water's so cold that the pool hardly needs chlorine anyway, so it's not a bad thing that it shuts off. But since it does, it requires that small amounts of any other chlorine product be used to keep the chlorine level up. I guess some guys out there drop a tab in the skimmer. But we don't, for the reason I stated.

Then, I got a call from a friend of mine asking me to talk with another pool service company owner here in Dallas about a Master Temp that he's put several heat exchangers on, the last one the cupro nickel that I was so high on last year. The cupro nickel lasted two years. All of the copper ones before that (four in all) lasted a year or less - just like what I saw. I talked to the pool company owner for awhile and we kicked around the idea that the only thing we didn't know in these situations and the only part of all of this that was really out of our control was stray current corrosion.

It reminded me of something I'd read online at an APSP forum, a post by Rod Ogilve:

"...I have an interesting story. First let me tell you a little back ground, we have a water table average of 4' to 5' deep. Virtually every pool has well points. OK, this problem started 9 or so months ago. A customer called to tell me their salt pool has a problem with stray voltage. Whenever they touch the hand rail, they get a little shock. I did not build the pool, but I know the electrician and know the bonding was done correctly. I first checked the obvious to no avail. Eventually, I took up the deck and found the bonding wire to be OK. I installed a copper mat under the deck to increase the grid. This did not help. I had the power company come out and tested everything. They could not find a problem. We drained the pool to get rid of the salt, and the problem was reduced 90% but not perfect. The owners gave up and decided that is life. I have always ran this through my head as to why we could not find the cause. Two weeks ago I drove by just to check, and while I was there, a man drove up and asked if I knew anything about submersible well pumps. I asked him where he lived, and he was about 1/2 mile away. I went over to his house and pulled the pump out of the well casing and noticed the wires at the pump were exposed to the water. I told him to call and get another pump and have it installed. The pool customer called the next day to ask how I fixed the problem on the pool. Would you believe the stray voltage was traveling 1/2 mile and manifesting itself at the pool. I found out today the power company had a faulty ground on a pole, so the voltage was going the pool because it was the best ground in the area due to the faulty power company ground. Well, the pool now is full of salt again, and the customer is happy (at least for now :) "

Rod Ogilve is a very well respected pool builder. He's APSP CPB (Association of Pool & Spa Professionals Certified Pool Builder) and so, as far as pool experts go, he's about as good as it gets.

Here's a link to the whole thread. It's mostly pool builders like Rod who have posted to it. The majority consensus is that salt sucks. There are some great horror show photos of salt damage to stone and slate that rival anything I ever posted in this blog. You ought to take a look:

Link To APSP thread on salt systems

So, getting back to the Master Temp heaters. I still like the Master Temp for any application but salt. I no longer have a recommendation for a heater with a salt system. I strongly believe that there are too many other variables - like the bonding grid throughout a neighborhood and the opportunity for stray currents to be amplified by the more conductive salt water - that you can't control.

Another Flash Bulletin: All of Hayward's heaters now have a Cupro Nickel heat exchanger. You can no longer buy a Hayward heater with a copper heat exchanger. But still, if you ask any Big 3 Rep if salt has an adverse effect on heat exchangers, they will tell you no. And if you come to a Rep with a heat exchanger problem due to salt, he'll tell you he doesn't have this problem with any other installer, it's all your fault, something you're doing or something your guys are doing, like putting tabs in the skimmers.

And the most incredible thing to me is that they do all of this with a straight face. They tell us there's no problem with salt WHILE THEY UPGRADE THEIR HEATERS TO A MORE SALT RESISTANT METAL.

Okay, fine... Back to the blog post:

A new heat exchanger installed is over $1,000.00, and I’ve been noticing a lot of people that got to this blog by Googling for “damaged heat exchanger salt pool”, or variations on that theme. So, it is a worthy investment.

And here’s the Smoking Gun I was talking about. In December, 2006, Hayward had a brochure on their H400 heaters that read: “Cupro nickel is a supremely resilient material that provides product durability and longevity. Cupro nickel aligns well with today’s popular salt -based systems and offers outstanding corrosion resistance".

Yet their warranty as of today is that “higher than normal dissolved solids (pH above 7.8)” will void your one year limited warranty.

These are all things that, once again, dovetail nicely into protecting shareholder value. But over time, as all major corporations are learning the shortcomings of shareholder values as a strategy, it has adversely affected the reputation of their products and the patience of their customers.

Here are some of the real tragedies that have arisen out of Heaters with Salt:

The Jandy LT & LX heaters have a dry well for the high limit switches. The way it works is that these brass dry wells are set into the plastic inlet/outlet header and the high limit switches are pressed against that brass surface. That way, as the water rushes through the header, it’s heat will be transferred to these switches via the brass dry well. That keeps the high limit switch dry so that it won’t become corroded while still allowing it to accurately sense the water temperature. This is how we avoid a runaway heater. If the temperature of the water gets up to 135 degrees, then the first switch will turn off the heater. And if that part fails, then the second high limit will turn it off when it reaches 150 degrees. It’s a great system and all heaters have similar safety devices.

If you look in the Jandy LX/LT Owner’s Manual, you won’t find any mention of the brass wells. On the parts diagram, they show an exploded view of the inlet/outlet header, and they picture the high limit switch assembly. But no brass wells. So, why is all this important?

Because if you put this heater on a pool with a salt system, especially the salt system that Zodiac makes because it uses 4,000 ppm salt, which is even more corrosive than the 3,500 ppm that most of the others use, my experience is that within a year or two, you’ll have your first high limit failure. The threads of the brass well fail and allow water, salty water, to enter into the dry well and corrode the high limit switches. Not a big deal, right? Just replace the high limits and you’re back in business. Problem is, the next time it happens is sooner than the last time. And the next time is sooner than that, etc. You see, the corrosion on the threads gets worse and worse.

So, what’s a mother to do? Well, if you talk to Jandy, at first they tell you to replace the header. But when you price it out and figure that with labor you’re looking at somewhere near $1,000.00 for the job, you call them back and tell them that you’ll recommend your customer buy a different heater before you do that. Then they tell you about this little kit they have, called the LX/LT Sensor Stud Assembly Replacement Kit, Part Number R0383200. It’s carded for easy display. How funny is that? A part that’s not even detailed in the Owner’s Manual, but they had enough call for it that they carded it for wall display.

You order the kit and go take the heater apart, and I mean take it completely apart to get to this thing, and you put the new brass dry well in and you replace the corroded high limits, too, and you’re done for around $350 to $450, depending on how fast you work and what your labor rates are.

Then, in a year or two you get to do it again.

That’s why I strongly recommend against installing a Jandy LT or LX heater anywhere you have a salt system installed.

Now, people will say, “Hey, Pool Guy. Where do you get off badmouthing a perfectly good heater because someone told you they saw something happen on a pool somewhere?”

Allow me to retort: I have 16 pools on service with LT heaters. 13 of them have salt systems and the other three have tablet feeders. I got all those pools on service when they were brand new. Since I put them on service, 11 of the salt pools have had high limit failures, most of them numerous times. None of the pools with tablet feeders have had high limit failures. Fortunately, most of the failures occurred during the three year extended warranty that comes with a new pool when all the equipment is from a single manufacturer. But now they’re all out of warranty and the homeowners are facing these annual repair bills, with no end in sight. Their options are about $150 to $185 per occurrence for high limit switch failures, $350 to $450 per occurrence for dry well & high limit switch replacement, or about $1,000 for inlet/outlet header replacement, or about $3,000 to buy a new heater that doesn’t have this problem.

Now, I’m just a pool cleaner. And my ethic has always been to never sell anything to a customer that isn’t going to work out for them, and if I inadvertently do, go back and clean up my mess. Because just as Jack Welch and Jim Cramer and all the guys at Bear Stearns and AIG et al are finally starting to understand, your main constituencies are your customers and your products.

You see, these are the things that irritated me the most about the Salt Revolution; how cavalierly they threw salt water at pool heaters. It was good for quarterly profitability and for Hitting the Numbers. But, it turns out, not good for much else.

The Great Thing About History...

I  love history. I read all the time, and four out of five times, the book you'll catch me reading is a history book. I think history is important. I think history teaches us all we need to know about the present. It's like the old saying, "those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it".

And, yes, I'm talking about Salt. You knew it was coming, right? Well, this blog - and my customer base -  are now old enough to start making some cyclic observations about Salt Damage.

I posted a photo a long time ago, when I first started talking about salt damage to the automatic cleaners - Polaris in particular, because that's what most of my customers have. The picture showed a rusty, chewed to the nub drive shaft on a Polaris 280 Black Max. Here it is again.

Here's what I said the first time I posted about it: "I pulled this Polaris 280 out of a pool on 2/11/06. It came out of a 30,000 gallon pebble finish pool with Oklahoma flagstone coping and decks and waterfall. This pool was brand new and fresh filled on 02/16/04. This pool also has a Zodiac Clearwater LM2-40 salt system. I had to replace the wheel bearings and the wheels when I replaced that drive shaft. At the time, this wasn’t happening to my other two year old Polaris cleaners, so I figured it was a combination of the bumpiness of the pebble finish, in conjunction with the salt, that caused that Stainless Steel Drive Shaft to last about as long as the plastic teeth on the wheel it was meshing with."

So now, just nearly three years later, I had to rebuild that cleaner again, and, you guessed it, the drive shaft was worn down. Here's the photo:

You can see how, once again, the teeth on the drive shaft are worn down to nubs. But notice anything different? Right. There's no rust. Now, the history of this part is that when it failed, I called Polaris and told them the story, how it was only a two year old cleaner and what a bone job it was that my customer was going to have to pay for that part. So, Polaris took a look at the photo I e-mailed them and put a part in the mail to me, even though it was a full year past the one year warranty on parts other than the frame. And I'm assuming that between the time that Polaris 280 was manufactured in the early part of 2004 and when they shipped that replacement drive shaft to me in 2006, they spec'd a higher grade stainless for their drive shaft.

Golly, I wonder why they would do that? I wonder, what was going on about that time that might have prompted them to go out looking for a higher grade stainless for their drive shafts? Oh, yeah, I remember! Salt! It was making a big splash - pun intended - back about that time.

Funny thing is, in 2006 all of the salt system manufacturers were telling you that guys like me were crazy and that what we were seeing we weren't really seeing, and if we were seeing it, it Wasn't Their Fault, or it was God's Will (commonly known as the Bible Belt Defense).

So, bottom line is that the higher grade stainless steel lasted almost exactly a year longer than the first drive shaft. But in the end, the chattering ass-whipping it took from the pebble finish on this pool did it in. But that's not bad. A 50% increase in the life of the part, in probably the most adverse conditions a pool cleaner can be put in; salt, a rough, bumpy surface, and water temps that range from 90 in the summer down to about 45 in the winter.

But notice in that picture there is still a patina of rust back toward the plastic turbine. Here's a picture of the other side of the drive shaft turbine:


You can see that all the rust is emanating from the pin in the drive shaft turbine assembly. I showed a lot of pics of that back in the first post I did about rust damage to auto cleaners. And Polaris paid attention to history there, too. Here's a pic of side by side drive shafts from that post in April 2007, a year after they sent me that first warranty drive shaft:

Conspicuous by it's absence is the pin in the turbine. Polaris gave up on the galvanic cell dissimilar metals thing and just started molding the turbine to the drive shaft, somewhere around the time that this picture was taken.

So, see? Here's a pool manufacturer doing what it can to re-engineer it's product to meet the demands of the harsher salt environment.

Now, if they could just figure out a way to get rid of the brass frame inserts that the stainless axle screws thread into, we'd be all set. Here's a repost of the pics I took back in April 2007 when I first started seeing frame insert failures:

You can see in the top pic how the inserts are just shards. The bottom pic shows where those shards came from. They just pulled right out of the frame, and the wheel - axle and all - came off. But, to their credit, Polaris has a 5 year frame warranty and every time I've called them with a frame failure they've stood behind their frame and sent me a new one, with exchange, free of charge.

Even outside of the five year warranty, the frame price is under $100.00 retail.

In sharp contrast, Letro cleaners have a 1 year warranty on every part, including the frame. Which isn't a big deal until the brass frame inserts pull out, which recently (October 2008) happened to one of my customer's Letro Legend Platinum Grey models. We've been taking care of that pool since it was new, too. It filled in June 2005. So, the frame inserts lasted 3 years and 4 months on a smooth plaster surface. Imagine my surprise when I looked up the cost of a new frame for that cleaner and found that it was 140% of the cost of a whole new Letro Legend Platinum Grey cleaner with hose. That's right; 140% of the cost of a whole cleaner.

Letro is owned by Pentair, and Pentair makes a salt system, too. So, you'd think they would know there are issues with these brass inserts and stainless steel screws. And you'd think that, like Polaris, they'd step up and take care of frame failures due to deterioration of the brass inserts. I mean, the brass inserts are the only way I can imagine the frame failing, short of stripping the cleaner down and taking a ball peen hammer to it. So, you'd think they'd be extending a little more of a helping hand than, in essence, saying, "Sorry about that, but thank you for playing Beat The One Year Warranty".

On the other hand, there's lots of things about Pentair that I like. When I have to replace a pump, most times I'll sell my customers the Pentair Challenger. It's been around forever, and except for those darned tabs on the pump basket handle, it's the best, longest lasting, easiest to fix pump on the market. And I could rave all day about the Sta Rite Max-E-Therm & Pentair Master Temp heaters. If you have a heater, it ought to be one of those.

But that's why - in my continuing series of Making Salt Work for your pool - I recommend that if you have a return side cleaner, you're WAY better off, and will receive a whole lot more support from the manufacturer, if that cleaner is a Polaris.

Making Salt Work

Did I say that? No, it can't be. Can it? 

Has the Pool Guy flipped his lid? Has he gone over to the Dark Side? The truth is, neither. But, contrary to industry opinion, I am a realist. And after all these years of fighting the Good Fight, I think it's time to admit that Salt Is Here To Stay.

I didn't say that was a Good Thing. I said it was A Reality. A Sad Reality. But A Reality nonetheless.

So, after a long hiatus, I'm back with suggestions on how to make your salt system work for you. I still think you ought to remove it from your pool. But if you're sold on your salt system and you just Gotta Have It, then stay tuned to The Pool Biz for articles on how to make it's integration work for you.

In that vein, some time ago, I wrote to the folks at the one of the Diving Board manufacturers - Interfab - and asked them if, in light of all that's gone down with salt over these last several years, they had developed any products that would be more salt compatible. Diving Board folks in general took about the biggest hit on any of the manufacturers that were affected by the salt craze. Imagine being them; three or four years of covering warranty in an environment you never foresaw - the 3500 ppm salt environment - and just when you're getting your feet back under you from that, with a new line of products designed to weather the salt storm, you wake up to the worst economy since 1932. Some days it doesn't pay to get out of bed.

But, when I asked them, toward the end of last summer, which were definitely rosier times, this is what they said:

"We DO in fact have products that are more salt friendly than others and would certainly mitigate rust in a salt pool environment. Products that we would promote for use in a salt pool environment include the following products:

Edge Diving System (NEW)
T7 Diving System
X-Stream Slide
G-Force Slide
Sacrificial Zinc Anode (NEW)
Powder Coated Rail Goods

As always, we’d have to stress to customers that there is no guarantee against rust or corrosion in a salt pool environment. By taking steps to ensure proper pool water/salt chemistry, that any return jets are pointed away from any in-pool rail goods, and that any necessary product maintenance is performed, you can certainly help diminish the risk of rust.

The diving set up that you saw in our counter brochure is called the Edge Diving System™. [Ed. note: I had written and asked about that system in particular. You should take a look at it. It's a unique approach to keeping the salt from corroding the diving board base]  It was specifically designed to replace all of the rusting steel Techni-Spring diving bases, and our competitor’s product equal, that are out in the field. The Edge Diving System is comprised of composite materials and fits the same 12” on center jig as the steel Techni-Spring base. I have attached both a photo of a rusty steel Techni-Spring base and an Edge Diving System for reference."

Now, take a look at the second photo, of the Techni-Spring base. It beats the salt by not attaching the base fasteners where the salt water can pool and lay and work it's corrosive magic on the threads. I mean, let's face it, if your jig is buried in the cement of your deck, with the fastening studs projecting up out of that, and the threads of those fastening studs are down at deck level where they can be compromised by the corrosion wrought by salty water, then you're looking at breaking up that deck to replace that jig. So, if you attach the base to those fastening studs about 10 or 12 inches above deck level, then you've put those threads somewhere that it's impossible for the salty water to pool around. It's hard to see where those bolts attach in that photo, you can click on it to enlarge it. Then, look where the spring is attached to the composite base. You'll see the rubber nut caps. That's where it fastens.

Here's a link to the T7 install PDF. Page 9 shows a very good photo of a cutaway of the base and the fasteners. See how they've moved all the attaching hardware off of deck level? Brilliant in it's simplicity.

They go on to say: "The T7 Diving System, X-Stream Slide and G-Force Slide are all upgraded products that are comprised of composite materials and very suitable for salt pools.... This year [2008], we started offering a sacrificial zinc anode, which we designed specifically to fit most residential pool ladders and rails. (1.90” OD) We recommend the use of the anode on any pool rail that comes in contact with the pool water. (Deck to stair rails, pool ladders, etc.) The anode is installed below the waterline and is in direct contact with the metal that it will protect. Generally, only one anode is required, however, if a pool ladder has plastic treads, you will need an anode for each 'arm' of the ladder since the plastic tread will not maintain the current flow. I have attached a PDF copy of the bag card that comes with the anode, along with a couple of photos of an actual anode."

They make a very important point there; if a pool ladder has plastic treads, you will need an anode for each arm of the ladder since the plastic tread will not maintain the current flow. What's interesting about this is how much we've all had to learn in order to deal with adding salt to pool water. These are engineering concerns that didn't need to be addressed before salt came along. Now they're part of ladder design, for example. Each action like this drives the cost of engineering, of the end product and, in the end, the final price tag for the whole pool. And we haven't even talked yet about maintenance, which will be in upcoming blog pieces.

Still think your salt system is cheaper than conventional chlorine? Read on:

"Lastly, powder coated rails offer yet another layer of protection against rust and corrosion for pool rails. The layer of powder coat paint acts as a barrier between the elements and the stainless steel rail. One thing to mention is that if a powder coated pool rail is winterized and continually pulled in and out of the anchor sockets, the risk of paint chips and scratches increases which expands the risk of rust at those damaged paint areas. For optimum rail protection, a powder coated rail in conjunction with a sacrificial zinc anode is the best way to go."

Powder coated rails. They're very effective, and they're beautiful, too. But they are not inexpensive, and you need to consider those costs as part of the price of maintaining your pool when a salt system is installed.

So, as you can see, I'm not selling out here. I'm not saying Salt's Great and I'm not shilling for a ladder manufacturer - although I think these folks have the best idea so far about how to keep that salty water away from their hardware.

Bottom line is I'm still against the idea of you putting salt in your pool. But if you do, do it right, and spend the money you need to spend so that a year from now you don't have a rusty mess on your hands.

It's Still The Environment, Stupid, Part II

I just wanted to add a little to what I said a couple of weeks ago. I've been doing some light reading. It's pretty interesting stuff. California Assembly Bill 2270, better known as AB2270. It has the whole Water Quality industry in an uproar.

Here's the part they take exception to: "This bill would authorize any local agency that maintains a community sewer system to take action to control residential salinity inputs, including those from water softeners, to protect the quality of the waters of the state, if the appropriate regional board makes a finding that the control of residential salinity input will contribute to the achievement of water quality objectives."

They're really upset about the water softener thing. Because the WQA, or Water Quality Association represents the interests of salt based water softeners lots more than they represent the interests of water quality. If you think I exaggerate, Google AB2270.

See? Every return is some internet snippet about how to go about OPPOSING AB2270. Initially, I Googled AB2270 thinking to read the assembly bill. But the internet is so cluttered with opposition to AB2270 that you can't find it that way. I had to Google California State Assembly and then enter the bill number and get it that way. Oddly, it passed 27-12 on the Senate floor and 53-19 on the Assembly floor.

So, how is it that the opposition can have so much rhetoric on the internet and so little popular support in the government? Too, this bill will cost the State money. They're allotting some bucks in there for reimbursement to people who have to unhook their salt based water softeners. So, it's taking business out of the State and it's going to cost the State money to unhook the systems. Why would they vote for that?

Because they mandated a goal of recycling 1,000,000 acre-feet of USEABLE waste water by the year 2010. As in the 2010 that's two years from now. One year, 3 months to be exact. And that's 1,000,000 acre-feet, which is 326 BILLION gallons of water.

Along the way, they found out that people and plants don't like salty water. So, this bill helps them to get to their goal by allowing the local water authorities to "control residential salinity inputs". Because they want better Water Quality. Then, along comes the Water Quality Association and opposes it.

Odd. Wouldn't you say?

Anyway, with my new found desire to be FOR things, instead of just AGAINST them, I want to announce that I am FOR AB2270. Not that I can vote in California or anything. But then, I don't imagine that many of the folks at WQA really live in California, either. They clearly spend a lot of money lobbying in California. But live there? Not so much.

After all these years, It still stuns me when I run up against a group of people who can't see that what they're FOR is BAD for everybody else. It's only GOOD for their particular pocketbooks. Color me incredibly naive, but I still believe that if they outlawed swimming pools, I'd spend my meager savings on figuring out a New Gig, instead of blowing my reserves trying to hold back the Hands of The Clock.

Which segue's nicely to talking about How Much Salt Pools Suck. I feel pretty certain that the reason AB2270 didn't have any provisions for Salt Pools is because it's not a code requirement that they hook up backwash lines to the sewer in California. Even still, there's the Santa Clarita ban on Salt Pools. But my point is, that once other states start taking a look at what California has done with AB2270, they'll cut and paste it onto their legislative agendas. And if, in those states, it's code for swimming pools to backwash to the sewer, then they'll add that Santa 

Clarita addendum to the whole package, and Viola! No More Salt Pools.

PS: I added new links to 2 industry articles about the ravages of salt systems on swimming pools. Click on them to your right under the heading Why Salt Is Eating Up Your Pool. Bon Appetit...

It's Still The Environment, Stupid

I was looking at my site meter the other day and noticed that one of my biggest fans had been visiting the blog nearly every day. So I dropped him an e-mail to ask if he’d like an alert when I published something new, and he answered back that he was “just visiting your blog to kill time… to see if there was anything new”. It made me realize it’s been awhile since I’ve posted. A lot’s happened in Salt World since my last post.

As a fer instance, Pool & Spa News came out as definitely in the Salt Camp (see Pool & Spa News, July 31, 2008). Hmmm... maybe that's why they quit corresponding with me. You think?

They even titled the whole issue Salt Service Solutions. It has some information that will actually help people stuck taking care of salt pools. But, like all good marketing pieces, it passes that information with a lilt in the author’s voice and skip in his step. Sort of like Snow White doing the housework with the help of chipmunks and bluebirds set to Roger’s & Hammerstein. But when you chase out the critters and cut the music, you see that taking care of salt pools is still just Doing The Dirty Work.

As another fer’instance:

Governor Charlie Crist is going to sign A BILL passed unanimously by both houses of the Florida legislature that will shut down the discharge of something like 300 million gallons of treated waste into the Atlantic Ocean each day. They’re stopping for myriad reasons, one of which is that the discharge is killing the corral reefs. If you’re wondering what that’s got to do with salt systems, it’s what’s going to happen when those municipalities start trying to recycle that wastewater and run up against high salinity levels and the expense of desalinization and start looking for ways to reduce the salinity, and like other municipalities, start restricting chloride discharge into the waste stream, like HERE. Then later, they’ll get around to your salt pool, like HERE and HERE

It goes kind of hand-in-hand with a STORY at the Tampa Tribune Online, about how Pasco County wants to expand a treated waste water program to eventually include 30,000 cusotmers, who will use treated wastewater for their lawns. And that’s where I feel like I’ve “been there, done that”. SCOTTSDALE did the same thing a while ago. Then, within a few years, the golf courses using the treated effluent started yapping that their greens weren’t green anymore, and the culprit was high chloride levels in the treated wastewater. If you read the letter from the Environmental Manager in Thousand Oaks, CA that I LINKED TO about a paragraph back, you know that salinity, chloride in particular, is a pass-through pollutant. In other words, it’s not normally filtered out of wastewater.

That was one of the hinky things about the Pool & Spa article, Grains Of Wisdom. On page 37, in the box titled Salt Select, they quote Bob Harper as saying that it’s okay to use potassium chloride. I quote; “In areas where salt going into the water system is not desirable, it does provide an alternative”.

By the way, his company, Goldline, is the only one who says that. Ecomatic, Jandy, Pentair, Zodiac, Autopilot and The Chlorine Factory all say to use Sodium Chloride Only. Ecomatic, in fact, says, “be sure to use sodium chloride and not potassium chloride.”

Besides, Bob should know better than that. He’s been The Man at Goldline since November 2006. So, he should know that sodium chloride dissociates immediately when it hits the water into sodium and chloride, and potassium chloride does the same thing. HERE'S a quote from Water Technology Magazine about using potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride (remember, these are the folks trying to put a positive spin on water softeners): "potassium chloride is a viable alternative to sodium chloride... when the application requires a... low sodium waste brine". Notice they didn't say Low Chloride. And if you ever notice, when water treatment folks are complaining about this stuff, they always refer to the “elevated chloride levels” in the wastewater stream. Like that pesky Santa Clarita, California Salt Pool Ban, which in the introduction says, "The purpose of this website is to educate the community about the Santa Clara River's high chloride (salt) levels, and the reasons and options for reducing chloride levels", [emphasis mine]. In fact, they don't use the words sodium or potassium anywhere in their introduction.

So, like I was saying, when the potassium hits the water, it turns into potassium and chloride. When it’s pumped out of your pool and onto the ground or into the sewer, it doesn’t resociate and become potassium chloride again. So, the chloride ends up adding to the chloride level of the wastewater stream. It may later combine with potassium and form potassium chloride again. Then again, it may combine with sodium and form sodium chloride, or calcium and form calcium chloride. But as long as it stays in water, it’s just chloride. If it wasn’t dissociated, you couldn’t create chlorine from the chloride ions that result from pitching sodium or potassium chloride in your pool. Get it?

And you may say, “Well, Bob’s degree is in marketing, so why would he know all that?”

My point exactly. But then, it was Pool & Spa News who asked him the question. Not me.

One other note on potassium chloride; it sells for $18.97 a 40 lbs. bag at Lowe’s. Home Depot’s about the same. Sodium chloride runs about five or six bucks a bag.

Another point about that same inset box, they show you a picture of Coarse Solar Salt, Kiln Dried. It is classified as a Water Softener salt by the manufacturer, and on their website, they say it’s “99.5 pure salt”, and “contains small amounts of insoluble particles from the environment”. That would be the 0.5% that’s not-salt.

IMPORTANT PARAGRAPH AHEAD. IF YOU’RE SCANNING AND NOT READING, MAKE SURE TO READ THIS:

What we found here in Dallas, by having similar grade salts from a different manufacturer analyzed by a metallurgist, is that the solid residue was “0.427% of the salt sample, by weight”. Pretty close to 0.5%. These solids split into about a 50/50 mix of gray and red particles, and the “red particle was silica sand (SiO2) containing alumina and iron oxide (red rust)”, hence the reddish stains we were seeing.

You see, we were running into issues of staining as a result of pouring 500 or 600 lbs. of salt on pool start up (after waiting the 30 days, of course) and ending up with stains where the salt laid and dissolved. Some service companies had started noticing less pronounced but still noticeable stains from just adding one or two bags of salt. One company even started to add all salt through the skimmers as a result of the staining problem. So, salt grade became pretty important to us. And, it turned out, important to our supplier, who did The Right Thing and decided to step up their game and only sell Food Grade salt, less the 0.5% insoluble environmental particles.

In fact, Pool & Spa News has been selling ad space to folks selling food grade salt since shortly after this all went down. Coincidence?

I mention this for all the people who like to be dismissive of me by saying “it’s easy to be against something. Why don’t you try being FOR something?” So, there you go. I’m FOR not staining pools by using contaminated salt.

All it took to be FOR that was $5.00 for the bag of salt, about $150.00 for the metallurgist’s analysis and the desire to Right a Wrong. Now, ask yourself, what have YOU done to bring about a positive change in our industry lately? Oh, yeah, let me qualify that; a change that didn’t end up putting money in your pocket.

It’s a Small Club, isn’t it?

Another reason to be a little careful about the salt you select is that if you choose, say, Diamond Crystal salt pellets with Softener Care, you’ll be adding phosphates along with the salt pellets, and Oh-Dear-Lord-In-Heaven-Above, don’t get the Snake Oil… I mean, the Phosphate Remover Guys all riled up about putting phosphates in your pools. You see, the Softener Care additive is sodium hexametahosphate. Each bag is 0.03%. Doesn't sound like a lot, but for a 20,000 gallon pool, 550 lbs. of salt will add 2.6 ounces, by weight, pure sodium hexametaphosphate. 3.2 ounces if you’re running a Zodiac, because they require 670 lbs. for the same size pool.

On the same page in the article, right above the Salt Select box, is a box labeled Mixing metals. It’s nice to see The Industry finally talking about it. I started talking about it on October 14th of 2006, right after Baboosa put me on to the term and I looked it up. I’ve written 10 more pieces to go along with that, because I think it’s that important (see Salt and Metal Parts tag). P&SN gave about 6 column inches to it, and that included their whole discussion of TDS as well. Salt systems nearly sunk two ladder and rail manufacturers, took a huge toll on pool heaters and copper plumbed pools, and just about every other piece of metal that comes in contact with your pool, and Galvanic Corrosion got six column inches. Oh, well.

But enough about that. Let’s go back to the opening paragraph of this article. By the way, that guy pouring the salt in the pool is either photoshopped in or he’s about 8 feet tall. His feet dwarf that brick coping. And he casts no shadow. Hmm… Vampire? No, that’s no reflection in a mirror. Anyway…

“The systems…are dummy-proof,” says Scott Ford of Tropical Aquatics. And using that as an opening statement, P&SN takes up four pages explaining how different and special and destructive salt pools can be.

For example, this article recommends that you maintain salt pools at a 7.2 pH. That is destined to lead people to read that and think that there’s a new standard for salt pools, set around 7.2 instead of 7.5, and so anything from 6.9 to 7.5 will be okay. Huh?

I’m looking at my old NSPI guidelines and it says here that Ideal pH is 7.4 to 7.6. That’s pretty much what’s been taught at every water chemistry seminar that everybody in our industry has ever attended and is pretty much what everybody in our industry lives by. Well, everybody except for the Hamilton Index crowd, or the Tin Foil Hat Brigade, as I like to call them.



Oddly, though, I agree with 7.2. Not as the new center of our scale, but as the lowest allowable for a salt pool, as the target to shoot for each week during service because the one thing you know with a salt pool is the pH is going to rise.

The issue here isn’t whether I agree with a deviation of 0.3 on the pH scale (7.2 vs 7.5), which is still a lot, pH being an exponential scale and all. 7.2 represents water that is 4 times more acidic, hence four times more etching, than 7.5.

The issue is that SOMEONE BESIDES A MAGAZINE needs to go on record as saying that salt pools are different chemically and they need their own well researched and well documented, not to mention well publicized, water chemistry parameters. AJ Wilson, who they’re quoting here, is a sharp guy. He knows his stuff and he’s right about this 7.2 thing.

What he’s getting at is that if you have a salt pool, you’re going to see a rise in pH from week to week. So, if you start at 7.2, maybe you’ll end up at 7.8 by your next visit, instead of starting at 7.5 and ending up at 8.2 by your next visit. 8.2 and any Total Alkalinity between the APSP recommended 80 to 120 ppm will cause lots of scaling with that high calcium San Diego water AJ is dealing with. Not so much here in Dallas, where our tap water is 70 to 120 ppm and we have to add calcium after startup.

So, I agree with what AJ’s saying. But where’s the test pools to prove it? Where's the industry sanctioned research behind these conclusions? The current APSP standards weren't written over dinner and drinks at some pool show, you know. Research went into determining those parameters.

But since we're fiddling with pH, why not fiddle with TA, too? Won’t lowering TA a little, perhaps outside of the biblical 80 to 120 ppm we preach, have a similar effect on this issue? Of course it will. But then we’re right back where we started, aren’t we? It’s just a bunch of pool guys trying to pass on helpful information to other pool guys, and the end result is more likely to be that you’ll get hung out to dry if something goes wrong and you tell your customer or, even worse, the builder, “oh, this magazine I read said to ignore the APSP guidelines for water chemistry, so I’ve been running it acidic the last couple of years”.

This all goes back to when Salt Reps were standing up in front of whole rooms full of pool guys, at association meetings and such, and when we would tell them about the inherent rise in pH of their systems, they would say, “That’s impossible. Salt systems produce pH neutral chlorine.” That was the whole answer. End of discussion. Move on. And while some of them may have since amended their story and admitted that, well, maybe there sorta coulda might be a rise in pH with a salt system, they haven’t done anything to go back and do any real research to come up with water chemistry guidelines unique to salt pools.

Instead, they leave it to guys like AJ Wilson and guys like me to take the liability on our shoulders. Read the owner’s manuals. That’s what they’ll be waving at you in court.

For example, Goldine’s owner’s manual says to follow APSP guidelines and then tells you keep pH between 7.2 to 7.6.

APSP guidelines are 7.4 to 7.6. So, which is it? APSP guidelines or 7.2? Remember, a 0.2 difference is three times as acidic. If 0.1 is twice as acidic, then 0.2 is three times as acidic.

Jandy Aquapure’s owner’s manual says with their system, the “pH produced is close to Neutral pH and tends to stabilize at approximately 7.8.” (You thought I was making it up about the Reps saying that Neutral thing, didn’t you?)

Well, once again, which is it? Neutral or 7.8. Because 7.8 is a long, long way from Neutral. It’s 0.8, in fact, and if you were shaking your head over Goldline’s contradiction about just a few tenths on the pH scale, now we’re talking about water 8 times more scaling than Neutral pH.

Ecomatic recommends 7.2 to 7.8 and then goes into an explanation almost as long as this blog piece about why that, and your TA level might not work for you, and how it’s all sorta…ya’ know… Whhhhhppppp… hold it… hold it…. Phhewwww… Out There, Maaa-a-n, and you’ll know when you have it right because your pH will stop fluctuating – which is true, but their explanation needs about 8 hours of water chemistry classroom training to fill in the gaps. Remember too, we're talking about the Owner’s Manual, geared for everybody down to the pool owner who, going in, knows nothing about balancing water.

Then, Zodiac, who has the highest salt requirement of any mainstream salt system available in the US, recommends 7.4 to 7.6, just like APSP.

Autopilot says 7.2 to 7.8, allowing +- 0.3 pH of saturation. And that’s great if you’re a pool tech. You can look at the charts provided and actually make out what their version of balanced water is supposed to be. But getting back to the Target Audience; Joe Pool Owner. Is he going to get it? Or is he going to let his eyes roll back in his head and say, “Yeah, Honey, everything’s fine. The kids can swim.”

Because the truth is, if he really did wade through all this and used the chart and the calculator and did all the math, what he’ll find out is that come winter, if his pool water is balanced at 60 degrees F, 600 ppm Calcium Hardness, 75 Total Alkalinity and TDS Above 1000, he’s got to tell the wife that they can’t heat the spa to 103 until he either raises the Total Alkalinity to 125 or lowers the pH to 7.2, and then reverts back to the previous readings before the spa cools off again.

A note in passing: Is the fact that no one ever worries about that the reason that plaster in spas on pool/spa combos with salt systems always gets those little calcium nodules? I vote Yes. And voting’s all we’re going to do, anyway. There’s no research going on beyond what Pool Guys are doing, at their own peril of liability, in their customer’s back yards. If I’m wrong, and there’s this whole industry of research happening that none of us out here in the field know about, then somebody write and tell me.

By Golly, Scott’s right. These systems are “dummy-proof”.

Now, I’m going to beat Sean to the punch here. As he’s reading this, he’s hopping up and down behind his laptop, scrolling down to the comments section to write and tell us that if that’s what we’re all worried about, then why not just use AutoPilot’s Total Control System and let the machine monitor and adjust the pH, too?

And I say - like I always say about salt systems - if your idea of “better” is spending yet more and more money on yet more and more “accessories” for your pool, then by all means, buy it.

Or, you could just use chlorine tablets and enjoy pretty much rock solid pH that “tends to stabilize” somewhere around 7.5. Not 7.4. Not 7.2. Not 7.8.

Seven Point Five.

And if you want soft water, buy Twenty Mule Team Borax for $2.99 a 4 lbs. box and really live it up.

Well, we’ve gotten to the second page of the P&SN article… Just kidding. That’s really about it. The only other thing I keyed on, and it’s probably just a poor choice of adverb, was this: “The conditioner – typically cyanuric acid – only protects the chlorine”. Typically? That implies there are other “types” of stabilizer. Did I miss something? I know I’m getting old. Did ya’ll come up with something else to stabilize chlorine while I was taking my afternoon nap?

So, what’s the Governor of Florida and Pasco County got to do with any of this? Well, several years ago, in California, when they started looking really hard at their dwindling water resources and began considering and then implementing reuse, certain areas zeroed in on salt based water softeners as one way to improve their wastewater quality. Soon after, certain water districts banned water softeners. Then, Santa Clarita banned salt systems on pools that backwashed to the sewer. Now, the Governor of California is poised TO SIGN LEGISLATION allowing every water district, at their discretion, to ban salt based water softeners.

California Assemblyman John Laird said this about the Water Softener Industry, who are the only people lobbying against the bill; “ It’s not time to protect somebody that’s polluting groundwater at a time that we have to rely increasingly more on groundwater as part of a comprehensive solution”.

A few years from now, when the water they’re starting to reuse in Florida isn’t working out so well because of its high chloride content, The Governor of Florida, or the Mayor of Tampa will be saying the same thing about water softeners – and later, salt pools – in Florida. And then when you come to this blog, you’ll see a whole list of counties and states and water districts that have banned their use.

It started with Santa Clarita. It spread to Dixon, CA and then Scottsdale, AZ, and now the whole state of California. And the pattern is the same. They try to reuse their wastewater and then they find out how damaging that water is.

And time after time, the only people who oppose the restrictions are people making money off the pollution of our groundwater. That would be people who sell appliances that use tremendous amounts of salt for their operation. You know, like water softeners and pool salt systems and... water softeners and pool salt systems and... Yep. That about covers it.

I stated earlier that the P&SN article talked about how destructive salt systems can be. The very last thing they talk about - almost reluctantly, it seems - is "Compatible equipment". They talk about how hard salt systems can be on the aluminum tracks for an automatic pool cover. They quote Randy Parsons as saying, "I've had a number of [pools] where the tracks have been destroyed by salt." Word here in Texas from the local Automatic Cover Guru is that when those tracks are corroded, they usually have to be jackhammered out of the tile line to replace them. You see, they're set into the tile line at the time of pool construction, and so having a corroded track is just about the worst and most expensive thing that could happen to a pool owner.

Boy, P&SN, talk about Burying The Lead.

Many of you in the industry who read this blog regularly who think I’m So Wrong on So Many Levels, you ought to take a moment here and re-read some of my earlier pieces.

I ranted about stone and concrete damage and the manufacturers and reps called me a liar. Now they have all added disclaimers to their owner’s manuals and websites.

I was the first in the industry, with Baboosa’s nudging, to talk about salt systems causing galvanic corrosion. The manufacturers and the reps called me crazy out of one side of their mouth and told you all to put zinc balls in your pump baskets out the other.

I was the first one to talk about Exploding Salt Cells and everybody and their brother jumped up and down and called me certifiably insane. And then I pointed out half a dozen incidents of it occurring around the world, and can point you now to ANOTHER POOL GUY’S BLOG (scroll down to SAFETY) where he describes first hand his experience with the explosion of a properly installed salt cell.

I’ve talked a lot about the environmental impact of your salt pools on our environment, and you all say I’m overstating the case, even after I’ve pointed out several places where levels of sodium and chloride in wastewater are being legislated and even your salt system manufacturers now work a caution about how salt will “damage or destroy certain types of plants” into their disclaimers. In case you Missed a Memo, those Dead Plants are The Environment.

I can just hear ya’ll at the public hearings when they outlaw these things; “But my kids can swim with their eyes open underwater. That ought to be worth something!”

Good luck with that.

And we haven’t even talked about the lawsuits that have started to pop up, as pool owners file suit against builders and builders turn around and file suit against manufacturers. Oh, you hadn’t heard? And, yes, I predicted that, too.

Folks, the Titanic has hit the Iceberg. You can either make for the Lifeboats or Stand Around and Rearrange the Deckchairs.

To put it literally instead of metaphorically; the manufacturers and the media in our industry are doing everything they can to create a body of work – sometimes referred to as evidence in the event of future litigation – that says, “We warned those pool stores and builders and service guys that there were downsides and that they needed to think really hard before they sold these salt systems. Look, we wrote about it here in our warranties and over here in our media publications and over here on our websites. We Have No Liability if things go astray after installation”.

No one’s going to hold their feet to the fire over what they say in a marketing brochure. No one’s ever going to lose a lawsuit over No More Green Hair! But in the little-read and oft-overlooked Fine Print, they’ve covered their asses quite well.

It’s called The Writing On The Wall. Take a moment and read it.

The 2.6 Million Dollar Salt System (cont.)

I’ve been keeping an eye on the renovation of the wave pool and enclosure at the Southland Leisure Centre this last year. I first brought it up here where I talked about the City of Calgary being forced to perform a 2.6 million dollar renovation of their wave pool a mere 31 months after the addition of a Lectranator commercial salt system. To recap that story, what happened was, “in a wave pool situation -- which no one could have really anticipated -- the salt is going airborne as a result of the wave action,’ said Ron Krell, manager of Southland Leisure Centre. ‘We're getting a coating of salt in the leisure centre equipment.’, and all that airborne salt caused a whopping 2.6 mil damage.

EDIT:

Well, today I'm doing something that I've never done before on this blog. There was a rather long blog piece that followed that opening paragraph. A little piece of detective work where I tried to put together disparate pieces of the puzzle about what happened with the indoor wave pool at the Southland Leisure Centre, and about halfway through the day I received a very lucid explanation of why I was wrong in some of my assumptions. So, I have deleted the rest of this post.

In it's place, I am posting the contents of an e-mail I received from Mr. Ron Krell, the manager of the Southland Leisure Centre. He talks a lot about the entire renovation of the Centre and all of the contributing factors. I found it all interesting. But if you just want to specifically know How The Salt System Ate The Leisure Centre, I've highlighted those passages. The emphasis (bold print; italics) is mine.

Hi there: I had the opportunity to read your blog and I wanted to let you know that your comments about the renovation and lifecycle replacement of 25 year old equipment are a bit off the mark. It is somewhat understandable as you are not privy to all the information about the project and only gleaning snippets of information from various sources.

I will provide some further background that may assist in clarifying how some of the work for the Southland Leisure Centre project came to be and how that relates to some of your comments and observations. The original renovation that was approved by City Council was for $8 million and approved in June 2006. This was to include upgrades and updating to the Southland Leisure Centre Locker Rooms, add an Aquaplay Family Water Feature, Steamroom, New Fitness Expansion Area with new fitness equipment, Elevator and Accessible Service Counter. The Council approved funding also allowed for painting most of the common areas and pool to provide for an updated look to complete this portion of the renovations as well as a Council mandated Public Art Project which is part of the Capital funding formula. This funding had been provided to keep the Centre updated and make improvements so that our base of Customers would continue to enjoy using it and of course, attract new users. If you have had the opportunity to use the Centre in the last few years, for example, you would not have been impressed with the locker rooms as they were impossible to keep clean, i.e. old tiling, old grout that was difficult to repair and clean, damaged lockers, etc…….many areas were in need of updating………nothing worse than coming into a public facility and finding it in poor condition in spite of our best efforts to make the old stuff look good!

As for the Salt System……a decision was made in 2004 to install a Salt Lectranator system at Southland. It was installed in November 2004 as an add on to our current pool system with the intent that it would replace Chlorine Gas (as you know Chlorine Gas is a volatile, dangerous and difficult substance to work with). The filtration was a DE (Diatemacous Earth) based system. The intent to replace the chlorine gas with the salt system as recommended by a Consultant showed that such a system could work in a large wave pool provided that the proper number of Lectranator cells were specified. Based on this information, the project went ahead. Since the original install date in November 2004, the salt system never quite seemed to work properly, i.e. did not produce enough Chlorine to meet the demand. As a result, the Consultant determined that the lectranator system must have been slightly undersized and additional cells were added in March 2005. Even after the upsized installation, the system never met its targets and further to that, we began experiencing salt issues in our mechanical areas, exposed metal surfaces, humidification systems, etc….

The system did not perform and the situation was deteriorating. As you can imagine, the entire system was original (25 years old) with the exception of the newer salt lectranators. In April 2007, I started as the Manager of this Leisure Centre. After a review of the mechanical areas, the aging equipment, the noticeable salt damage and concerns with our inability to meet chlorine demand versus bather load, concerns with DE (carcinogenic material), leaking and corroded piping, large amounts of staff time trying to troubleshoot the system, assurances from the supplier that the system would work when it repeatedly became more apparent that it was not working, etc…..………It was decided with the support of the Director of Recreation and the General Manager of Community Services to approach City Council outlining the concerns about this situation. As a result of a report to Council in June 2007, approval was given for a further $2.6 million to update the pool system at the Southland Leisure Centre. The salt system and DE were removed and replaced with Liquid Chlorine, UV and Sand Filters along with an older boiler system, piping, etc…. and ……..we know that these systems work well and will position us to operate more efficiently and effectively for the next 20+ years.

In today's dollars, the Southland Leisure Centre's replacement value is in the neighbourhood of $125 million and has approx. 1.8 million visitors per year. The decision to update and upgrade the pool mechanical systems was not taken lightly and the expenditure is a positive one to protect the long term operational integrity of this facility. As you can see, the $8 million and the $2.6 million came about as separate projects. As well, I recognize that some of the facts and assumptions that you flagged were taken from bits and pieces of information, media, etc……..Please note that the Village Square Leisure Centre renovation was also approved by Council in June 2006 in the amount of $8 million. They do 'not' have a salt system, but do have gas chlorine which will be changed out as part of their project. That Centre is also 25 years old and in need of various lifecycle replacements, updating, etc……..

This is the first time that I have viewed your information and I appreciate the opportunity to provide some information that may help clarify why we did the system change here at the Southland Leisure Centre. If you have any questions, please contact me at the numbers provided below.

Thank you
Ron Krell Manager

Southland Leisure Centre # 159

So there you have it. No need to speculate any more. It wasn't high free available chlorine with no stabilizer that caused all that corrosion, as so many members of the Head In The Sand Society have speculated. You have it right here, in the words of the manager who had to deal with all of this. Truth is, the Lectranator never even produced enough chlorine to meet bather load. it's hard to imagine not enough free available chlorine could have destroyed the Leisure Centre equipment in some 31 months, when sufficient free available chlorine from gas cylinders hadn't done it in the twenty plus years prior.

It is exactly as I've always said; It's the Salt, Folks. It's the Salt.

But there's more.

I worte back to Mr. Krell seeeking permission to publish his e-mails in this blog. His response (oncea again, emphasis is mine);

Hi: sorry for not getting back to you sooner. I would be comfortable with you printing my response for your blog....I cannot remove the non disclosure statement as that is automatically added to all of our emails at work. However, I would approve your reprinting my wording verbatim as long as it is stated factually. Would that work for you?? Let me know what you think.

Also, I would be interested to hear more information about salt systems.................my opinion based on the experience here is that I believe that salt systems can work in smaller applications without too much difficulty.....however, I don't trust salt over the longer period as I think that it eventually permeates the equipment and corrodes it.

Mid-size Wave Pools can utilize it with mixed results, i.e. Collicut Centre in Red Deer, but will show damage to equipment eventually. That Centre opened in 2000 and it is showing signs of salt damage here in 2008.....not as bad as what we experienced at Southland, but enough to be of concern.

Large Wave Pools seems to be a non-starter for a salt application. It failed at Millwoods Pool in Edmonton and now had very poor results here at the Southland Leisure Centre (230,000 gallon US). I am not sure that the Engineering Consultant had enough information about salt to determine that it could not work.....I believe that they took the approach that the system designed for Millwoods was undersized and that by merely upsizing the salt lectranators, they could achieve the perfect operating formula. It did not work as outlined in my previous email. I suspect that they were surprised by this, as we were.

My guess is that salt in the larger applications with large bather loads reaches a threshold level at which point the salt cannot convert to chlorine as quickly as required and even adding additional salt cells does not make a difference.....reaches a saturation point. I am not a chemist, but it is the closest that I can come to describing the situation based on my Grade 12 and University Chemistry courses.

I would not be able to prove this theory, but my experience tells that that I am probably not far off on this one. Your thoughts??

Ron

So, we're not just talking about a single facility that experienced heavy and expensive corrosion as a result of installing Lectranator commercial salt systems. According to Mr. Krell, "it failed at Millwood", "had very poor results" at his facility, and after eight years, Colicut Centre in Red Deer "is showing signs of salt damage", "enough to be concerned".

It turns out it's just a matter of time and they all experience these issues. I'm going to try to contact some of these facilities to find out more about their unique situations. Seems to me that with all this Public Money being spent to fix the issues wrought by Salt Chlorine Generation, that some bright-eyed reporter at the CBC should be interested in what is apparently common knowledge among the folks working with these systems in an indoor environment.

Since he'd asked for my thoughts, I wrote back to Mr. Krell and gave him as condensed a version as I could of why I think it's utter insanity to install a salt system on any pool or spa:

My opinion is that the core issue with salt systems is that they use salt. Salt is a corrosive. There's no way around it. All chlorine ends up putting salt (sodium chloride) into our pool or spa water. The new system you mentioned that you've installed on your wave pool, the liquid chlorine feeder, has one of the highest salt contents of any of the bottled/packaged sanitizers. But it's still nowhere near the level of salt that we start with on a salt pool. Typically, our tap water is below 250 ppm (parts per million) chloride. That's been established here in the US as the "level of taste" by EPA and it's the target that most water districts shoot for. So, with a freshly filled pool, that's where you start. Then you introduce sanitizer. Over time, you will increase that sodium chloride level to as much as 1,500 ppm or 2,000 ppm. Usually, that takes years. And especially in something like a wave pool, where so much water is aerated and lost and you're constantly introducing low chloride fill water to make up for it, you may never see those elevated sodium chloride levels. But even if you do someday end up with that high sodium chloride level, you will also have accompanying elevated levels of calcium and manganese and iron and copper and everything else that's in our water supply system and that bathers end up excreting into our pools. That's the point that, before salt systems came along, we would drain and refill our pools. The old standard was 3,000 ppm TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) maximum.

So, we never had reason to worry too much about all the different mechanisms by which sodium chloride could damage our pools and our pool enclosures. There would be isolated incidences of pool enclosure roof collapses, and the investigation would usually point chloride stress corrosion of the supporting bolts. But as a whole, industrywide, these were very isolated instances.

http://corrosion-doctors.org/Forms-SCC/swimming.htm

http://www.thefabricator.com/MetalsMaterials/MetalsMaterials_Article.cfm?ID=731

Both of those links cite the same instance of a pool enclosure roof collapse due to chloride stress corrosion.

However, the use of calcium chloride as an accelerator in the mixing of concrete has been cited in many instances as the main contributor to subsequent chloride stress corrosion that results in the earlier than anticipated failure of metal bolts and support structures worldwide.

So, as you see, it doesn't matter where the chloride comes from, the result is the same; premature aging of the components of whatever structure we are trying to maintain, whether it be a bridge or a swimming pool or it's enclosure... or the bolts in a waterslide.

This is the point where I feel that my industry has departed from reality on the subject, and I think it's for no other reason than greed. Upton Sinclair once said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

And therein lies our problem. The internet is lousy with reports of salt damage to everything in nature. Ask a metallurgist at what level salt will corrode and they'll most likely tell you that, in the right circumstances, pitted against the right substance, salt will corrode at levels as low as 10 and 20 ppm. Ask a highway maintenance engineer what the number one cause of road damage is and he'll tell you it's the salt they use to keep the roads clear in the winter.

The things you've told me in your last e-mail support what I'm saying - and what scientists have been saying for hundreds of years. You mentioned that a mid sized wave pool in Collicut Centre in Red Deer is showing signs of salt damage after 8 years. Your own wave pool showed signs thirty-one months after salt system installation. I have met customers who had stainless steel filter tanks and put salt systems on their residential pools, and within one year they had to buy a new fiberglass filter (about $1,200 for a residential model) and by the next year, their limestone coping and decks were spalled and looked thirty years old instead of two or three. None of these things would have occurred and the normal life cycles in each of these instances would have been 20 and 30 years without salt (I service some stainless steel DE filters that are easily 20 years old, on non-salt pools, of course).

Yet, the pool industry is simply ignoring science so that they have another gadget to sell to pool owners. And it's a gadget that comes with a significant after market. Salt cells, even the best ones out there, are typically rated for about 10,000 hours of operation. In a commercial environment, with 24 hour a day operation, that's not much more than a year. And from everything I can find, manufacturers customarily provide a one year warranty for commercial use. When you imagine the after market in salt cell sales - at $500 to $800 per cell - if every pool were converted to salt chlorine generation, it's easy to see why it's hard to get objective information from the manufacturers. And it's impossible to see where the highly touted savings over other chlorination methods comes in.

I know I'm starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist here. That's not it. I just feel that the sale of salt systems has become Sales and Marketing without Borders. There is applicable research that's been done on the effects of salt on every component that makes up every configuration of a swimming pool. There is research on it's effects on stone, concrete, metals - such as copper, aluminum, brass, cupro nickel, and all types of stainless steel - and in every instance, the research proves that damage is accelerated proportional to the increase in chloride levels over background.

Further, there is abundant research available on the debilitating effects of stray current corrosion on submerged or partially submerged metals - such as ladders, rails, lights, light conduit, heater heat exchangers, etc. Stray current corrosion is often called "electrolysis", the very process whereby we create chlorine from salt. For example. I replaced a 20 amp fuse on a residential salt system the other day. That fuse provided power to the salt cell. Hence, that salt cell was receiving just shy of 20 amps of current from plate to plate, in the water, up until that fuse blew. Stray current corrosion is usually measured in milliamps. There are indications of it's damage nearly everywhere a salt system is installed. There are now pool specialty equipment companies that sell zinc anodes to mute the effects of stray current corrosion. Yet the manufacturers continue to insist that it doesn't exist, that because they met UL 1081 standards in a laboratory environment, that the discussion is off the table.

Well, that's all the news that fit to print for this installment. Happy Trails to all you Salt Reps trying to work up snappy comebacks when this stuff comes up in your Lying Contests.., I mean Sales Seminars.