Do you have a salt system in your swimming pool? Were you hoping for less maintenance, better feeling of the water and for the ability of the system to make chlorine? Salt systems are great when they are functioning but what happens when the calcium levels in the swimming pool increases and the salt system no longer works? This is a very common problem in the Southern California area due to our hard water and we hope this blog post gives you some insight on what you can do. Salt systems hit the market in a furry, years ago and numerous swimming pool owners purchased them with the hope of all of the above. Well, as long as you keep your calcium hardness lower, your cyanuric acid (CYA) within range, your salt within the salt systems limits and your pH in range the system will work great! If you’re starting to see issues then you would be correct, they aren’t as low maintenance as they were originally sold to be but all of this is pretty easy to keep on top of.
If you own a salt system in our area the biggest issue you’re going to face is controlling your calcium hardness. Typically, calcium coming out of the tap water in our area can be 400 parts per million (ppm) and higher. Most salt systems on the market want your target calcium hardness to be between the range of 200-400ppm. That means most systems will not operate optimally in our area. Please also keep in mind that as water evaporates, calcium and the other hardness minerals remain in solution and gradually increase. When this happens scaling on your water tile line, the liner of your swimming pool and filtration equipment occurs. This also means that scaling will also occur on your electrode plates of your salt cell too. When this happens it prevents the system from working optimally. Most importantly it prevents the system from manufacturing chlorine. At this point you can take apart the salt cell and acid bath the electrode plates to remove the calcium but if you don’t change out the water it will just come back. Keep in mind that the more acid baths you do the more life of the system you remove. That’s why we see so many systems unplugged and the pool is maintained with normal sanitation procedures. This is also one of the main reasons why we get called to so many salt pools. The biggest complaints we get are the following:
- The calcium levels are too high
- The CYA levels are too high
- The salt levels in the pool are too high
Any of these reasons could cause the system to not function appropriately but instead of draining the swimming pool, we get called to recycle the swimming pool water instead. We offer a mobile filtration system that comes to your home or commercial property and recycles the water instead. We use Reverse Osmosis (RO) membrane filtration to lower all of the above issues and our guarantee is to give you better water than what is coming out of the tap. If you own a salt system you will want to contact us a minimum of every two years because we can give you better water than tap, we can conserve up to 85% of the existing water in the swimming pool and we never expose your liner. This will help your salt system to function the way that it should instead of being unplugged. If you have questions about how our mobile filtration system works and how it can help you…. then contact us today to learn more!
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