Photo source: Me! This is our salt water pool.
Hi, I’m Carl and I am a salt water pool owner! Thanks for stopping by Salt Water Pool Report.
When my family bought a resale house in 2006 with a 5 year old salt water pool already built, I was surprised to learn that salt water pools even existed. Having never owned a pool before and not growing up in a house with a pool, I was a pool layman. So was my wife. We knew nothing about pools of any kind other than jumping in them and swimming.
When I considered pool maintenance, I thought about all the things I’d been led to believe and had read about pools over the years:
- Pool chemistry with little vials of chemicals to measure levels of chlorine, etc.
- The strong smell of chlorine in your hair, skin and clothes after swimming.
- Sore, bloodshot eyes after getting chlorine in them!
- The time and effort involved in vacuuming, skimming and keeping a pool clean.
- Buying chemicals and dumping them in the pool to keep the water crystal clear.
I quickly realized the benefits of a salt water pool over chlorine or bromine pools when I started doing research and speaking with people who owned pools that weren’t salt-based.
Very little maintenance
I took responsibility for taking care of the pool, cleaning it, vacuuming, etc and since I love learning about new stuff like this, did a lot of research to familiarize myself with the technology that we had inherited and how to actually maintain a pool since there was no training involved when we bought the house.
One of the things that amazed me was how little maintenance salt water pools required. Sure, the vacuuming and cleaning part is the same as chlorine or bromine. But other than a box of salt water pool test strips to test the salt and chlorine levels, it’s pretty straight forward to keep a salt water pool running. I have never owned one of those pool chemical products with the little vials of various fluids. I don’t even know what each vial is! You don’t need this with a salt water pool.
In fact, when we bought the house, the pool had a very basic Lectranator salt water chlorinator system. It was a small white box that had been attached to a wood panel next to the pump, it had a plastic dial that went from 1 to 10 and a few LED lights that would tell me when the chlorinator cell was working or not.
That was it. No LED display, no timer, nothing fancy. It was a basic old school salt water pool system and a first generation one at that.
And it worked pretty good! With hardly any maintenance on my part. Keeping the salt and chlorine levels at the optimal levels were really no trouble.
Lectranator Systems filed for bankruptcy in early 2020 so they don’t even exist anymore. Fortunately, we had upgraded the salt water system after being in the house for several years to a Hayward AquaRite salt chlorinator which was night and day in terms of functionality. What a great system.
What you can expect from me
On this website, you’ll see a number of posts, resources and personal thoughts about salt water pools and my experience with them. While I have no specific experience with chlorine and bromine systems, I have experience with chlorine since salt water pools do require using it as a shock at the beginning of the season and occasionally during the season when needed.
So on this website, you’ll see all the tips and tricks that I learned over the years often through trial and error, as well as things I learned from the pool company we dealt with. I went from paying this company to open and close the pool every year to doing the openings myself with my wife and saving a few hundred dollars each year as a result.
I also figured out over time – again through trial and error and with some online research – how to deal with algae, how to clean filter mediums (the actual filters that sit inside the filter itself) to make them last longer, setting the pump on a schedule to keep chemical levels optimum, troubleshooting and much more.
Do check back often as I update this site regularly. Thanks again for stopping by!
Carl
P.S. If you check the main photo at the top of this article, you’ll see an actual picture of our pool. You can see some of the shrubs and plants around the pool which looks great but adds to the pool cleaning time. And the large green bush at the top right of the pic is actually part of a rock water feature which also looks cool but is an expensive aspect of the pool design. We’ll discuss pool buyer’s remorse and considerations of various features which add to the cost and cleaning time of your salt water pool.
