With inflation hitting record highs and some products in short supply, the last thing you want to do is waste money and time on your salt water pool unnecessarily.
Here are common salt water pool mistakes that cost you money and how you can avoid each one.
Salt content level mistakes
Salt is of course what separates your salt water pool from other pools that don’t use salt to produce chlorine.
You typically want a salt content of between 2700 ppm and 3400 ppm where ppm stands for parts per million. Follow the advice of your salt water chlorinator manufacturer or short of that, your pool company to be sure. But the 2700 – 3400 ppm range is fairly standard.
When the salt level is too low, the chlorinator can have a difficult time producing chlorine and at some point, will shut down to protect the salt cell from damage.
When the salt level is too high, it will eventually drop of course over time but in the meantime it may also cause the chlorinator to shut down to protect the salt cell. Plus an excessively high salt content is corrosive and can damage metal parts of your pool such as a ladder. It may also irritate eyes and skin while swimming.
Keeping your salt content level in range goes a long way to keeping your salt cell and chlorinator performing properly producing enough chlorine and it can also help to extend the life of your equipment.
Chlorine mistakes
Two mistakes that people make regarding salt water pools is not realizing that:
- Salt water pools are chlorinated pools.
- Salt water pools have the same chemicals that other pools have, chlorine being just one of them.
Plus of course salt water pools have salt (!) and cyanuric acid (CYA) which is also called stabilizer, to help protect the chlorine produced against the rays of the sun.
Salt water pools have chlorine. It’s just that unlike old school pools that require you to dump in chemical chlorine manually, the salt chlorinator and salt cell produce chlorine for you automatically.
You can use – and will need to use – chlorine products like pucks, granules and/or shock from time to time even in your salt water pool. So if you think your salt water pool isn’t a chlorinated one, it absolutely is!
Also, salt water pools require the same sorts of chemicals (chlorine is a chemical after all) from time to time just like other pools do including muriatic acid, products to raise or lower pH, algaecide, filter cleaner, and stabilizer (CYA) to name a few.
Granted, you don’t always need to use these chemicals, but you might. There are other ones too, but these are main chemicals I’ve used in our salt water pool.
Familiarize yourself with common pool chemicals and use them when needed, in the proper way and amount. It’s part of being a pool owner, even a salt water pool.
Salt water pool heating mistakes
Gas pool heaters are expensive and the heating costs can add up quickly. My neighbor once told me upon having their pool installed in early September, he turned the gas heater on and left it on. For one month. He wasn’t really aware of the gas bill he was about to receive until he got it in the mail. It was around $1,000 from memory when his normal bill was around $200 and change.
On that note, check out this article on that subject: Is It Cheaper To Keep A Pool Heater On All Night? (Natural Gas)
Using a gas, electric or solar heater can be a great way to quickly heat your pool to get it to the temperature you like. And just so you know, you can heat a salt water pool with the exact same heating option as any other pool! Gas, electric and solar all work with your salt water pool.
But there are other ways to both heat your pool and maintain the temperature that can be used in conjunction with a heater such as a solar blanket. A solar blanket keeps heat in and also helps to reduce evaporation of water which lowers your water replacement costs, too.
And looking at pool heating isn’t the only way you can save money with your salt water pool. Check out my article How To Reduce Energy Costs to learn more about other ways.
Salt water pool filtration mistakes
Early on in my salt pool ownership, I noticed that the filter cartridges I used would perform well when new but in a short period of time seemed to pump out water less forcefully after some time. I assumed this was reasonable and it was simply a sign of normal wear and tear.
Since I regularly rinsed the cartridges every few times per pool season, I assumed I was doing everything I could. Again, when I rinsed the cartridges, the water force would increase for a few days but then die down again. I again assumed this was normal as the cartridges were starting to collect debris again and thus the water pressure dropped as one would expect.
It wasn’t until I bough a bottle of cartridge filter cleaner and soaked my used cartridges in a large bucket of water overnight that I realized how MUCH CLEANER they could be rather than just rinsing them every so often.
I took the bottle of filter cleaner, poured it into a large bucket, and filled it with water. I actually used a large clean garbage bin! My cartridges are big and round and I had no other option! But it worked just fine. Soaked them overnight, rinsed them off the next morning and reinstalled them. They worked pretty much as new.
Not only does filter cleaner get rid of algae and other debris, it can help to remove oil, grease and other contaminants you can’t see that can negatively impact performance.
Before throwing out your old cartridges – they will eventually have to be replaced of course – consider cleaning them the right way with a recommended filter cleaner first. It might help like it did for me.
Pool pump mistakes
When I first moved to our house with the salt water pool in 2006, I assumed you ran your pump 24/7 during the pool season because that’s what you do, right? Long story short, you might find that you only need to run your pump 8-10 hours per day like I do.
Running your pool pump less frequently means:
- Lower electricity costs
- Less stress on your pump which can increase its lifespan
You just have to ensure you run the pump enough because when the pump isn’t running, no chlorine is being produced.
And just like the aforementioned pool heating options above, you can use the exact same pool pumps with your salt water pool that you use with other pool types too.
Time-wasting mistakes
The pool season only lasts so long and depending on where you live it might be as little as 3.5 months long. The quicker you can clear up a problem, the sooner you can go back to using your pool.
Using shock or chlorine to kill green algae – the common algae that salt water pool owners experience – is a waste of time and money in my experience. To be clear, you do have green algae for a reason such as low or no chlorine so you need to get your chlorine level back to the required 1 ppm – 3 ppm level, if it’s lower than that.
But to actually end a green algae outbreak ASAP, you’re better off going straight to using a chemical algaecide in my experience. You’d have to dump an awfully large amount of chlorine in your pool to kill a live green algae bloom. Since you have a salt water pool, you may not even have any chlorine on hand let alone enough to kill algae.