Are These Saltwater Pools?

This is the question that everyone asks

What they want to know is “Can you put a salt water chlorine generator on this swimming pool?” The answer is that you can add a salt water chlorine generator to ANY swimming pool.

Customers don’t ask swimming pool professionals if they SHOULD add a salt system to their pool. Most have a neighbour or brother-in-law that has already told them to get one. I have come to

Test your pool water with a simple test strip.

understand that once you have a salt system, you don’t need to do anything to your pool. There are thousands of customers who believe this expert advice and do exactly nothing. You are welcome to be one of these customers and you will probably live blissfully ever after!

I have also helped hundreds of customers fix the problems that were caused by doing nothing to their Salt Water swimming pool, so for those of you that would like a little bit more information, I have included some here:
1 – Salt is not a sanitizer.
You add salt to your swimming pool water, making a mild saline solution. The salt by itself will cause the water in the pool to become more comfortable – some say softer and silkier. The water is about ½ as salty as your tears and the comfort alone is justification for adding salt to the pool. However, most people want to sanitize the pool with the salt, which means that we need to add a little equipment over by the pump. A Salt Water Chlorine Generator will cost between about $800 and $2,000 installed. In its simplest form, it consists of a power source and an electrolysis cell. When the pool water passes through the cell, an electric charge splits the salt into its two basic components – sodium and chlorine.

That’s right – the salt pool is using Chlorine! It doesn’t smell like chlorine because it is “clean” chlorine. Everyone will say that they don’t want stinky chlorine in their pool and that they want a “chemical free” environment. The fact is a pool with clean chlorine doesn’t smell. When you go to the public pool and smell the “stinky” chlorine, it is not because they have just added chlorine to the pool, it is because the pool is filthy! You are smelling chloramines, or combined chlorine, and they need to clean the pool ASAP! It is the dirty pool that tends to cause skin and eye irritations, not the chlorine.

2 – You still need to test the water.
Salt water chlorine generators produce other gases that tend to cause the pH to rise. You can’t see or smell high pH, but it can certainly cause other problems for your pool water. Most notably, water that is not properly balanced will be the number one cause of irritated eyes and skin. There are far more serious problems that will affect the surface of the pool and cause damage, both short and long term, if not corrected. This is particularly true of concrete pools where resurfacing can be VERY expensive.

The great news here is that water testing takes only seconds. We find that AquaChek makes test strips that are easiest to use and read, but there are others as well. It is much simpler and cheaper to make tiny adjustments to the water on a weekly basis than deal with a massive problem when you let it go for weeks at a time.

3 – Salt systems are not cheaper to operate.
This is almost universally true, though I’m sure that the most diligent of homeowners could prove me wrong. The cell that produces the electric charge will wear out. In our experience, the cell will need to be replaced in as little as three years, and often within five. An average cell will run you about $1,000 installed, so even with five years use, that’s $200 per year. That means for most people it is MORE expensive to operate, but you do not have to handle the chlorine, which for some more than makes up for the cost. If you keep the cell clean and the water balanced, you will enjoy longer cell life.

The reality is that there are trade-offs for everything. The guy down the street who has the perfect pool and claims to do nothing is probably not telling you the whole story. On the bright side, that same guy loves his pool and finds it very easy to maintain. If you go in with your eyes open, I say “Go for it – salt systems are great!”