RO Filtration and Salt Pools

Were you sold a salt system for your swimming pool because you were told the pool was going to be easier to take care of, that the water would feel much softer and you wouldn’t have to use chlorine? If you were, you aren’t alone. Many residential swimming pool owners, however, were not told about our high levels of Calcium Hardness and how the calcium can cause problems to the salt chlorinators. With that said, we hope this blog post helps explain how you should care for your system to prevent calcium scaling on the electrode plates.

Most salt systems that are sold on the market today recommend Calcium Hardness to between 200 – 400 parts per million (ppm). Unfortunately, in the San Diego area and many parts of the country, the water coming out of the tap is 400 ppm and higher which means your water is already too hard for the system. That means, scaling will occur on the electrode plates, the system will struggle to work, and the salt cell will need to be cleaned. Depending on what type of system you have, you can use a tool to remove the calcium or an acid bath. Please note that the system itself can only handle a certain amount of acid baths because it will wear down the cell.

At Pure Water Industries, we have a great solution that we would like to share with you to help you with the Calcium Hardness issue.  Using our mobile filtration system that houses Reverse Osmosis (RO) filtration is by far the best way to lower Calcium Hardness in your swimming pool. Since we use RO membranes to lower Calcium Hardness, Total Dissolved Solids (TDS), Cyanuric Acid (CYA) and so much more we are able to bring down your calcium concentration to levels much lower than tap water. This will allow your salt cell to work much better too. This past week we filtered a 20,000-gallon salt pool that was struggling with high calcium and because of that their salt chlorinator wasn’t working correctly. The following were the results:

Calcium Hardness – 1300 ppm

CYA – 60 ppm

Salt – 5064 ppm

TDS – 7882 ppm

After filtering this swimming pool for 14 hours we were able to lower the above levels to the following:

Calcium Hardness – 140 ppm

CYA – 0 ppm

Salt – 576 ppm

TDS – 832 ppm

At this point, we advised the homeowner of these results and mentioned to them that they would need to raise their salt content and CYA levels to the recommendations of their salt system. The best part about RO filtration is the fact that their Calcium Harness is now at 140 ppm which will prevent scaling and allow the system to work optimally. In the future, we do recommend using this service every 1 – 2 years to prevent this from happening again.

If you should have any questions about RO filtration or would like to set up an appointment today, please contact us!