Pool Store Notes

Thursday, August 1st, 2013

by Dennis DiPaolo

Do you use a salt-to-chlorine generator now?  Want to delay having to replace your $800 platinum salt cell?  It will probably only last for 10,000 hours of operation – and less if you don’t care for it.  Here are some tips: 1. Only use Pool Salt with no YPS (Yellow Prussiate of Soda), or other anti-caking agents.  Most salt has YPS so that the salt stays granular in the bag.  So pool salt becomes one big lump in the bag.  But YPS adds Phosphates, which ruin the salt cell and grow algae – which makes you run the cell more hours!  We have seen pools require $200 worth of phosphate remover just to get it back under control.  2.  Use real shock instead of the “Boost” button to shock your pool.  Note that “Boost” button gives you 100% running for a day, but only if you remembered to reset the filter to run the pool 24 hours when you hit “Boost”.  There is a reason why that button does not say “Shock”.  The button has no idea if it worked, and neither do you.  Your options are to buy an expensive test kit that can read 15 ppm of chlorine, and keep testing every few hours to see if you got there.  Or just throw in the normal amount of shock, and be sure.  And save electricity and cell life.  Just use “Boost” when your chlorine gets low and you need to catch up.  3.  Seriously, read the directions about chemically cleaning your cell twice a year.  Once the build-up on the electrodes gets too thick, you won’t get it off.  In the meantime, you are wasting electricity and cell life trying to get the electrons through the coating.  If you want, we can do it for you.