Adding Salt to Your Pool? Don’t Make These Mistakes!

If you’ve ever converted a chlorine pool to salt and immediately regretted it, the problem usually isn’t the salt system. It’s the startup. We break down a practical, step-by-step salt pool startup process that helps you avoid the two headaches that wreck new installs: runaway pH and scale on the surface or inside the salt cell.

We start with timing, especially for new plaster, quartz, and pebble style finishes. Plaster keeps curing for months and creates heavy acid demand early on, so turning on a saltwater chlorine generator too soon can make pH control feel impossible. I share the real-world waiting window I prefer, what happens if a homeowner pushes for day-one salt, and how that decision can show up later as scaling and constant corrections.

Then we get into the numbers that make a salt pool conversion smooth: getting total alkalinity near 80 ppm and pH around 7.4 to 7.6 before the generator ever comes online, and using LSI guidance with tools like the Orenda app. We also talk about borates at 50 ppm as a smart add-on for pH stability, plus the safest way to add salt: test first with a digital salt meter, use pool salt only, add less than the bag math suggests, and recheck after 24 hours so you don’t end up draining water to fix an overshoot.

Finally, we tackle cyanuric acid (CYA) reality. If you’re coming from trichlor, CYA may be sky high, and your free chlorine target must match it using proven ratios like Bob Lowry’s guidance. 

• waiting to turn on a salt cell on new plaster to reduce pH battles and scaling risk
• why saltwater chlorine generators raise pH through aeration and chemical reaction
• starting conditions that set you up for success: clear water, clean filter, balanced alkalinity and pH
• why high alkalinity buffers pH and makes acid less effective
• using LSI and tools like the Orenda app to avoid scale or corrosion
• adding borates to 50 ppm to stabilize pH and reduce drift
• using pool salt only to avoid staining from impurities
• testing salinity first with a digital salt meter and adding less salt than the ca

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Transcript

Welcome And Salt Pool Focus

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Hey, welcome to the Pool Game Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm gonna go over salt pool startups, whether you have a brand new salt pool that was just built, or you're converting your existing chlorine pool to a salt pool. I'll go over some do's and don'ts, mainly don'ts, I think in this episode, of what to do when you're converting over from a chlorine pool to salt or a new pool build. Are you a pool service pro looking to take your business to the next level? Join the pool guy coaching program. Get expert advice, business tips, exclusive content, and get direct support from me. I'm a 35-year veteran in the industry. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, I've got the tools to help you succeed. Learn more at swimmingpoollearning.com. And this first don't is for plaster pools, pebble tech pools, quartz pools, to some extent fiberglass and vinyl pools, but not quite. It's not quite as bad as a problem as with a plaster pool. The plaster pool is curing in the first, you know, six months, nine months, one year is still curing. And so there's a really high acid demand in the plaster itself for this. The plaster has a high pH. The Pebble Tech, not quite a problem, or the same problem as you're gonna run into with plaster. And same with fiberglass and vinyl, it's not quite as bad. But for a plaster pool or quartz pool, you don't really want to start with the salt water system right after the pool's built. I technically like to wait at least two months to put the salt in, turn on the generator. That way I have a fighting chance in keeping the pH in balance. So the problem with the salt water generator, and this is a problem across all pool types, is that as the saltwater generator is producing chlorine, it raises the pH significantly in the pool. There are two reasons for this. One is there's a lot of turbulence in the cell, and this is aeration that's going to raise the pH in the pool. The other reason, and the main reason, is that during the production there's a chemical reaction, and the offshoot of that reaction is that the pH will be rising in the pool. And it rises very dramatically in some cases. So the reason why you don't want to start the saltwater system immediately after a new plaster pool build, again, not quite as bad with other types, is because there's going to be already a problem controlling the pH to begin with because of the high acid demand of the new plaster surface. That if you have the salt water generator also raising the pH at the same time, it becomes nearly impossible to keep that pH in line with the salt water generator running. So I usually just keep it on as a chlorine pool until a certain period of time, you know, six not six months. I guess you can go six months if you wanted to, two to three months is optimal. I mean 30 days if the customer is really pushing you to have it on, it's not the best. I usually like to go at least two months so that I can kind of balance the pH and get everything set before I turn it on. That way it's not gonna have you're not gonna have any issues with scale later on forming on the plaster or the surface. So that's kind of the go-to with the brand new build. Don't turn it on right away and try to let the plaster cure somewhat. It's gonna take at least six months to a year to fully cure, and the pH or the acid demand is gonna go a little lower as the plaster ages a little bit, but immediately turning on the saltwater generator makes that whole process very difficult or more difficult than it has to be. This kind of leads into the secondary thing you probably would have to do with even a new build or an existing pool where you're converting it over to a saltwater pool, and that is try to balance the chemistry in the pool. Now you don't want to turn on a saltwater system and start generating chlorine if the pool is full of algae, you know, green algae, and you know the walls are covered with yellow algae and there's no chlorine in the pool. Not ideal. You want to start the saltwater system in ideal circumstances or as close to ideal circumstances as possible. That means that you would want to have your pH and alkalinity, and of course, the water should be clear, the filter should be clean, all these things all help the saltwater generator kind of get a good start or a good running start, I should say. And so the alkalinity and pH should be in balance. I would say that before you add the salt and start to the generator, you would want the alkalinity at about 80, and then you would want the pH somewhere around 7.4, 7.6. Again, all this depends on the LSI, of course. If you're doing that, then some of that is part of balancing the pool and making sure it's not scale forming or corrosive, but you don't want to start the salt water pool when the p when the pH is 8.2 or 8.0, or when the alkalinity is at 160 or 180, because you're gonna have a again a more difficult time of bringing the pH down. And with the high alkalinity, if you haven't if you don't know this about alkalinity, so the alkalinity actually is a buffer for the pH. And the the reason why I'm explaining this is that if you are gonna start a saltwater pool and the pH is at 8 and then the alkalinity is at 140 or 150, the problem is that it's in a buffer, any acid you put in there to lower the pH down because the alkalinity is higher. If the alkalinity was at 80, there's less buffer in the water. And so if you add a quart of acid that's gonna have a larger or or more reaction, it's gonna move the pH lower and it's gonna let the pH stay lower longer. Rather than if you had your alkalinity at 150, let's say you added a quart of acid. Since there's so much buffer in the water with the high alkalinity, your pH may lower a little bit or may not lower down as much as you want it to, and it may bounce back to 8.0 right away. So before you start the generator, have everything balanced in the sense that you would want to be able to keep the pH from rising rapidly because I mentioned at the very beginning the side effect of the salt generation or the chlorine generation from the salt water generator, I should say, is that the pH rises rapidly in the pool. So therefore, starting at a high pH and high alkalinity does not help you in any shape or form in balancing the pH in the pool going forward. So again, alkalinity at 80, pH somewhere around 7.6, 7.4. Once you start generating these the chlorine, it's gonna start raising the pH immediately in the pool. You don't have to lower it to 7 or 6.8, that's kind of crazy. But lowering it down to kind of a mid-range pH so that you can keep it balanced at least when it goes to 8.0, you can bring it back down to 7.6. Again, depending on where it needs to be with the LSI, if you're using the Arenda app, I recommend that. That'll give you a way to make sure that the saltwater system at least won't be causing scale in the pool immediately. It won't be the side effect because you're going to try your best to balance that pH as best you can. One thing that you may want to do before you start the saltwater generator is to add borates to the pool at 50 parts per million. Now borates are really great in a few ways, and one way that really helps is it's actually a pH buffer, a secondary buffer of pH, which means that if you get your alkaline down to 80, your pH down to 7.6 or 7.4, and then you add borates to 50 parts per million, what's going to happen is that the pH is going to be much more stabler in the water at that point. And this is a key because once you start to salt water generator, again the pH is going to start rising rapidly in the pool. So before you do anything as far as turning on the salt system, you may want to add borates to your pool to 50 parts per million. I get my boric acid from due to diesel.com. They'll ship it to you FedEx, at least in my area. It's fairly affordable. You know, you can get a 40-pound bucket and have it shipped to your house within a week, and it's not super expensive. Again, that's doodadeel.com. They probably should pay me for advertising them. You can probably find it locally sometimes, but online that's my go-to source for it. And then you just broadcast the boric acid powder, I like the powdered form, in the pool to the desired level. Now, to find out how much borate to add to your pool, I use the pool calculator app. It's an app that you can go to online, and it is called the poolcalculator.com. And this has a category for borate. You just enter the amount of water in your pool by gallons, and then you go to the borate tab, and you can add, you can see how much boric acid powder you're gonna need to add to the pool to bring it to 50 parts per million. It's really easy to do, and I recommend doing that with the poolcalculator.com app, it's just the best way to get the most accurate borate level for your pool in that situation. It's pretty good. And then you would want to get some boric test strips from Amazon and test it to make sure you're at the level you need to be at. Of course, you could buy a spin touch by Lamot for a thousand dollars and it has a Boreate disc in there. If you do pool servers, not a bad investment to have that to test the Boreate levels in the pools on your route. Now that you have the pool balance, it's blue, and you have your alkalinity down, your pH is down, and you added the boreate to 50 parts a million, which I recommend doing with a salt water pool, by the way, because it does really help with that rising pH in the pool. You can actually start think about adding the salt to the pool. Now, I recommend adding all the salt at one time, it's not gonna affect anything because it's easier when you add it all at once. However, and this is a caution, and I caution you here. However, I always add less salt at the beginning based on the calculation for adding salt. You can look at the back of the bag on the back of the bag of salt, and by the way, you should be using pool salt only. So when you're buying salt for the pool, you're not using any kind of water softener salt or any kind of rock salt or anything weird like that. The bag has to say swimming pool salt or pool salt on the bag. You know, Morton makes it, there's aqua salt, there's all different kinds of brands. Home Depot carries it, Lowe's carries it, I think Walmart carries it as well. But the bag has to stay pool salt for purity reasons because the other salt is not pure and it could stain the pool surface. Believe it or not, there could be metal ions in there or other things that could stain the pool surface. So, pool salt is what you want to use only, and they sell them at 40 pound bags. Now, if you're an old pool guy like me, you remember the 50 pound bag, 50 pound bags of salt, they were pretty heavy, they're like the same weight as a 50-pound bucket of tablets, and I don't know why they went to 40 pounds, maybe mathematically it was better. I just think that a 50-pound bag was just too heavy for the consumer or the pool guy to utilize, so they no longer make the 50-pound bags for as I know. They're all 40-pound bags. On the back is the math. Now, the reason why I say put less in is because look at the math on the back of the bag, it's based on gallons of water in the pool. And if you know anything about measuring gallons and pools, it's really difficult to get an exact gallonage of the pool. There may already be a salt level in there if you're using liquid chlorine, so there may be some salinity in the pool itself already when you start. And by the way, I highly recommend getting a digital salt meter. Now, the salt test strips are okay, they work fairly good, but to me they're they're not accurate. So a digital meter, you can get them on Amazon, you can get a cheap one. I think they have some for like 30 or 40 bucks. I do like the Lamotte and Hawk ones, they're to me more robust and more pro-level salt testers. They're like$120 for one of those. But the digital salt tester is much better than relying on the screen of the salt system if it has a salinity reading. And it's always good to have one of those on your pool route to test salt levels independently in the pools. So the first thing you want to do is test the salt level first because there may be salt in the water. It's one of those things where adding the salt blindly without testing for salinity first is the big problem. It causes a problem of having too much salt in the water after you add the salt. So test the water, make sure that you get a salinity reading, and then you can take that and calculate how much more salt you need to add to the pool. Again, the poolcalculator.com app that I referenced earlier does have a salt calculator as well, how much salt to add to the pool based on the salinity level. Usually it's around zero in a new build, and you can see how much salt to add to bring it to what the manufacturer recommends, and each salt system is slightly different, but most manufacturers recommend 3,000 to 3800 parts per million of salt. I think the lowest is like 2800 parts per million. Hayward can still work at 2800, but 3000 is like the sweet spot or 3200 parts per million of salt in the water, and so you calculate how much to add based on that, how many bags to dump in. So let's say you calculate it, and it says you need to add eight bags of salt. That's good. I would add six bags. That way you have a two-bag cushion. And if you have to add more later, you can add some more later, but you don't want to over add the salt because if you add the salt and you're getting a reading of 4,500 parts a million, most salt systems won't operate, and it's also going to add some corrosion possibilities with the wall with the salt at that level in the pool. So don't overdo it. Always add less salt at the beginning and then get the reading. Wait 24 hours and read the level again with your digital meter and then add more salt if necessary. But you definitely do not want to be adding salt based on a calculation that may not be accurate because, again, you can't really tell exactly how big the pool is exactly. There may be salt in there already if you don't test it first. And overadding salt is a big problem. The only way to correct that is to actually drain some water out of the pool, and you don't want to be doing that. If you added it up to 5,000 parts per million, you have to drain, you know, a fourth of the water out of the pool, so that's a big problem. Funny story is that I miscommunicated with the customer one time. I told them, hey, your pool's low on salt. I got busy, I don't know what happened, but I didn't finish my text where I was supposed to say I'm gonna get some and add it. So I added like three bags of salt and just forgot all about it because I didn't finish my message, it was my fault. And then he then I went to the pool the week later and I saw like three empty bags of salt or four empty bags of salt back there, and I was like, oh man, it's a problem. So I checked my messages, and like, oh man, I I sent it without like finishing it, it's kind of weird. And he added more salt, so it was like at 5,000 parts a million. My fault. And I told him, you know, we have to drain a little bit of water. I think we drained like a foot and a half out. He wasn't completely pleased with it, but stuff like that happens a lot with new builds too, where the builder will add salt and you don't know that he added the salt, he throw away the bags. And I also like leaving the bags by the equipment so that people know that I added salt to the pool, by the way. It's kind of like a uh, you know, a visual thing, like, oh, I add the six bags of salt, leave the six bags right there by the equipment. That way, anyone who goes back there knows you've added the salt, they'll figure out that empty bags means you put it in the pool, hopefully. And so the builders will do this a lot where they'll add the salt without telling you. And if you're not testing the water prior, you'll add the salt afterwards too, and it can get ugly. And I've had startup guys do the same thing where they'll start the pool, add salt, and then the homeowner doesn't tell anybody, and then the pool guy goes there and adds salt who's not checking it, and then you have like 6,000 parts per million. So, again, check the pool before you add salt. It's so critical to use your digital tester and check that salinity level to make sure there's not salt already in the water, you're not gonna overdo it. And the last thing I'll mention is that in an ideal world, the cyaneric acid for a salt pool should be about 80 parts per million. But the reality is if you're converting from a chlorine pool, you're probably using trichlor. The cyaneric acid is probably somewhere in the 200 parts million range or 150 parts a million. Now you can drain some of the water out before you add the salt to the pool and start the generator. Most people don't do that, they'll just convert the salt, leave the cyaneric acid at 180 and not worry about it. Well, there are some concerns with that. That high cyanaric acid, even with the salt system producing salt, you still want to rely on Bob Lowry 7.5% formula of free chlorine versus the cyaneric acid level. Now, if you added borates to 50 parts per million, like I suggested, you'd have you can use a 5% formula, but let's just say you didn't add borates. Let's say the cyaneric acid is 100 parts per million just for sake of easy math. That means you have to have a free chlorine level of 7.5 parts per million for that to be effective in the pool. Really easy to do with the salt generator because you can set it for a higher output and you could have it producing 10 parts per million a day, not a problem. But you can't convert to salt with the highest cyaneric acid and not be concerned about the free chlorine level if the cyaneric acid is really elevated in the pool. So again, ideally draining the pool down to 100 parts a million or 80 parts a million would be ideal. Adding borates to 50 parts a million helps to that equation. So instead of having it at 8 parts per million, you would only have to have it at 5 parts a million. If the cyaneric acid was at 100 parts per million, was at 200 parts per million, you would have to have 10 parts a million if you had borese in there, or you would have to have it at what 14 parts per million without borese. So the cyaneric acid level is a factor, and sometimes there's problems that develop when you convert to salt with high cyanaric acid. If you don't have the output coming, you know, bringing like five or ten parts per million of chlorine every day. You don't want to overdo it, of course, and have it at 20 parts a million because the salt water generator can do that in some cases. But you do want to make sure that the free chlorine level is kind of based on the cyaneric acid level in the pool when you converted it. And again, 80 parts a million would be the ideal level for a saltwater pool. Looking for other podcasts, you can find those by going to my website, SonyProLearning.com, and on the banner, click on the podcast icon. There'll be 1900 podcasts for you to listen to at your leisure. And if you're interested in the coaching program, you can learn more at poolguycoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have the rest of your week. God bless.