Salt Water

Here be dragons!

Our pool is a salt water pool, meaning that some computerized dingus makes chlorine out of salt dissoved in the water (salt is just sodium and chlorine anyway). The computer does a self-test every so often and reports, among other things, the level of salt in the pool. It's supposed to be 2000 parts per million (PPM). About a month ago I reviewed the computer's control panel and saw that the "extremely low salt" light was on, and that the salt concentration had fallen to about 700 PPM.

So what did I do? Instead of wondering where the salt might have gone, I stopped at the store and bought a hefty bag of water conditioner salt and heaved it into the pool. An hour later I retested the water and it was still about 700 PPM.

Hmm. Now, salt doesn't evaporate from a pool. Water does, but salt doesn't. The only way you can lose salt from a pool is to A) pump out a lot of the water, or B) have it overflow from rainwater, or C) have a substantial leak. I hadn't pumped out any water, it hadn't rained that much, and I didn't think it had a leak. So where had the salt gone??

It was still there. What happened is that a fragment of a leaf somehow got into the chlorine dingus and caused the system to make wildly inaccurate guesses about the salt level. Once I cleaned the leafy matter out of the chlorine thing, the salt concentration suddenly shot up to 3700 PPM.

Doh.

Fortunately there's no such thing as "too much salt", though at around 4500 PPM it starts to get somewhat corrosive. Below that level, it's strictly a matter of taste - some people apparently don't like the slightly salty taste, but I find that I don't mind the taste, and I like the way it makes me float like a cork. It also doesn't burn my eyes and doesn't do a number on my hair the way regular chlorine pools do.

Now if it would only warm up so I can swim!

We're already starting to buy pool toys. We have a couple of things that are doomed to be called "floaty things" and I'm already starting to look for radio-controlled boats. I really want a radio-controlled submarine, and I'm not sure why. Maybe I'll sink a 1/350th scale battleship in the pool and send the submarine down, Ballard-like, and explore the wreck.