Poolman pool systems President Fred Wagner is a trusted expert in the pool industry. Based out of Phoenix, Arizona, Wagner takes the time to tell us about why so many of his customers are now requesting saltwater pool systems.
A saltwater pool system is essentially a type of chlorination system. Rather than adding chlorine once a week, though, with a saltwater system, you simply add salt to the swimming pool. These types of systems have been around in places like Australia for more than 30 years. But here in the United States, they have really only been known about for the past 10 years.
Of course, just because you are adding salt to your pool doesn’t mean you will feel like you’re swimming in the ocean. This type of water is nothing like what the ocean is like. With a saltwater system, we are only bringing the salt in the water up to about 3,500 parts per million, whereas the ocean is more like 35,000 parts per million.
How the system itself words is like this: After you’ve put the salt in the water, that salty water will go through an electrical salt cell. Through this process, it will generate chlorine that then is put back into the swimming pool. The beautiful thing with this type of system is that every time you run your swimming pool, the system itself is replacing the chlorine in the pool.
A saltwater system removes a lot of the chlorination problems that we see with typical pools. Rather than having someone come out and service your pool once a week — during which time they have to put enough chemicals into the pool to last until they return the next week — the saltwater system produces a little bit of chlorine each day. So you never have high chlorine and you never have low chlorine: You have a constant amount going in every day.
With traditional systems, the first day you put the chlorine in that chlorine level is really high. From there, it is somewhat like guesswork. As a pool technician, you want to put enough chlorine in to last the week as otherwise you will end up with a green pool. But you don’t want to put too much chlorine in there, which will make the pool smell and cause other problems. So a saltwater system eliminates this issue entirely.
In addition, people like saltwater pools because they do not dry out the skin in the way that traditional chlorine pools often do. People who have these types of pools say that their eyes don’t feel dry, and they don’t need to put on as much lotion after swimming each day.
Despite the fact that these systems have been around for a while now, they took some time to catch on because of cost. To buy a saltwater system and have it installed with the salt can easily run $1,200 to $1,700. Here at Poolman, though, we offer a great service that makes this a lot better for our clients. What we do for our clients who are interested in a salt-water system is we will install the saltwater sysem at no charge as long as the client is on service with us. And we will continue to own the system, which means that when it wears out we will fix it and replace it at no cost the customer.
Salt-water pools have so many benefits, it is really no wonder that the popularity of these systems is increasing so much every year.
