If you have a residential swimming pool and own a salt chlorinator in Las Vegas you should be concerned with our water hardness. If you want to keep your salt cell working great there are a variety of steps that are necessary to take to make that happen. Since our tap water is loaded with calcium, magnesium, and other hardness minerals it makes it a little more challenging to own one. In the Las Vegas area, our calcium coming out of the tap is 400 parts per million (ppm) and higher. This is one of the main reasons why they don’t work but the following are others you should be concerned with as well…..

  • Unbalanced pH
  • Lack of or too much Cyanuric Acid (CYA)
  • Not enough or too much salt

Deciding to invest in a salt system can be great because you will definitely notice a difference in the feel of the water and you won’t smell like chlorine when you get out of the pool but keeping your salt cell working great is vital if you want to achieve those. That’s why we decided to blog about this topic because we recently tested a residential swimming pool with the following chemistry:

  • Calcium Hardness – 1130 parts per million (ppm) – too high for a salt system
  • pH – 7.68
  • CYA – 0ppm – not enough stabilizer for operation
  • Salt – 6453ppm – too high for operation
  • TDS – 8200ppm

Based on the above numbers it wasn’t working because the calcium was way too high and so was the salt. Another factor that was preventing it from functioning was the fact that they had no stabilizer (CYA) in their pool. After filtering this swimming pool for 12 hours using our Reverse Osmosis (RO) mobile filtration trailer we left them with the following ending chemistry:

  • Calcium Hardness – 150ppm (much lower than Las Vegas tap water)
  • pH – 7.4
  • CYA – 0ppm
  • Salt – 1221ppm

With lowered calcium and salt they were now able to start over and get their salt system working.

The following are the water chemistry guidelines for their salt system:

  • Calcium Hardness – 200-400ppm
  • pH – 7.4 – 7.8
  • CYA – 50 – 80ppm
  • Salt – 3000pmm

By keeping your calcium levels low it will prevent scaling on the salt cell.  By adding enough stabilizer to keep it between 50-80ppm that will help as well as adding the additional salt for what the system requires. This is something we did and they now have a salt system that is working great! Please keep in mind that most salt systems have specific requirements when it comes to water chemistry and you must maintain those to keep them working. By using our Reverse Osmosis (RO) mobile filtration trailer it is possible to give you the great quality of water that salt systems need to function. This is a service we recommend on salt pools every 1-2 years to keep them working great. If you should have any questions about how our system works and how it can help you, contact us today!