Author name: Bryan Baez

Some facts & opinions, we bet you didn’t know on pool salt systems A salt cell produces chlorine via electrolysis. A salt cell has titanium plates inside that are coated in a rare precious metal oxide called ruthenium and sometimes iridium (which is what makes them so expensive). Those plates have an anode and a cathode. The cathode takes electrons from the anode. Dissolved salt and water pass over the electrically charged plates, the charged plates breaks them apart and produces chlorine gas and sodium hydroxide. The gas then mixes with the water and makes chlorine. Why Salt Systems are so PopularMany people like salt systems because the water feels softer. Some theories say it’s because a pure chlorine pool (non-salt) causes a hypertonic effect on your body. Water is always seeking balance, which is true, so they say it pulls salt from your body. Which they say is why in a chlorine pool your skin feels very dry. On the contrary they say in a salt pool there is enough salt for the water, so the water does not pull salt from your body, is what they say. Again this is just a theory we hear a-lot.  Don’t kill the messenger. Either way salt water is softer on the skin than just a regular chlorine pool.  Salt cells raise the PH of the water because the salt cell creates tiny bubbles while working. These tiny bubbles escape at the waters surface forcing dissolved carbon dioxide out of the water, in turn raising PH. Your pool should always be balanced whether chlorine or salt. But with salt pools you need to be more meticulous because if your water isn’t balanced your salt cell plates will scale often and scale on the salt cell plates cause resistance on the conduction of electricity going through them. Yes, eventually your salt cell plates will scale but the better your water is balanced the longer it will go without scaling. Water not being balanced, they will be scaled all the time. This is why you should hire a professional pool company to service your pool, pool maintenance miami is what we do. Also not balancing your water and it being on the corrosive side is also bad. Because corrosive water can eat at the salt cell plates and ruin them. That is why the Langelier Saturation Index is extremely important. Phosphates We have noticed that pools that have high phosphates a-lot, the salt cells don’t last as long as pools with no phosphate issues. Our opinion is that it seems to be that since the phosphates coat the salt cells metal plates they cause a-lot of resistance to the conduction of electricity through the plates, shortening the lifespan of the cell. Again our opinion but that resistance may be causing small damage to the plates and with time the plates don’t conduce the electricity as well as before. A little bit off topic but if you live on the ocean, like an ocean canal. Where the water is kind of brackish/dark. We’ve always noticed very high phosphates in those pools. Our theory is the wind and boaters passing by stirrup the water and algae spores fly around and land in your pool. The chlorine in your pool kills the algae spores but the phosphates in the algae remain. Yes cause algae eats phosphates, so they are full of phosphates. And yes algae spores can be carried by the wind and dropped in different places. Our suggestion if you live near the ocean and have a salt system, have a plan for the phosphates. You also want to make sure you have the appropriate salt levels in the pool. Most salt systems require between 3400-3600 ppm salt and some 3200. Going way below the ideal salt parameters strains the salt cell as well shortening its life. You also have to check your owners manual for the amount of TDS you should have in your pool for your salt system. Usually you want to be no higher in TDS than your salt level plus TDS coming from tap water plus 1500ppm. For example if your tap water has 500 tds and the ideal salt level for your salt system is 3500 you do not want more than 5,500 TDS in your pool, (salt is factored in to your TDS). The reason you do not want such high TDS is because TDS is essentially junk in the water and it will make it harder for the electricity on the plates to affect the salt molecule (chloride ion). Also too high of salt levels could cause the salt cell to not produce chlorine because it could also interfere with the electrolysis process. You also want to make sure you clean the salt cell with the manufacturer’s instructions on acid to water ratio. If done with too high of a acid water ratio you could damage one of the plates. Yes a higher acid concentration will get rid of the calcium scale on the plates faster but could damage your cell. Which is why we think customers should pay to have salt cells cleaned as an extra, not included in the pool service rate. Because your insuring your salt cell is being cleaned properly and no one is rushing to have it cleaned fast and possibly ruining it. We take our time but we’ve taken on accounts where the previous service company has burned through the metal plates while cleaning the salt cell. Also do not use sulfuric acid when cleaning the cell you could damage the cell. Also another factor in making sure your salt cell lasts a long time and most companies say this is the most important factor. Is how often the salt cell reverses polarity and cleans itself. They say to follow the manufacturers instructions on the right ratio of how often your salt cell should clean itself. They say there is a right ratio, I believe it is based on run time. They say

Perfect water balance the LSI and how it came about Langelier Saturation Index How a 1930s professor’s formula for keeping pipes from corroding became one of the most widely used tools in water treatment worldwide. Water is one of the most chemically aggressive substances on earth. It dissolves minerals, corrodes metals, and deposits scale — sometimes all at once. For the engineers of the early 20th century tasked with building and maintaining municipal water systems, understanding when water would attack a pipe and when it would silently coat it in protective scale was a pressing practical problem with no clean mathematical solution. That changed in 1936. The man behind the index Wilfred Langelier was a professor of civil engineering at the University of California Berkeley — a careful, methodical scientist working at the intersection of chemistry and public infrastructure. His focus was municipal water distribution: the vast networks of pipes, joints, and valves that carried drinking water to American cities in the early twentieth century. The problem he was trying to solve was concrete: flowing water in pipes either corrodes the metal or deposits calcium carbonate (limestone scale) on the interior. Corrosion means leaks, contaminated water, and costly repairs. Scale means reduced flow, clogged systems, and eventual blockage. Both outcomes were expensive and, in the case of lead and iron pipes, potentially hazardous to public health. “His goal was to prevent pipes from corroding or clogging with scale — a simple ambition that required a precise new way of thinking about water chemistry.” Langelier’s insight was to approach the question thermodynamically. Rather than measuring corrosion or scale empirically (an expensive, slow process), he sought a formula that could predict a water sample’s behavior from a handful of measurable chemical properties. The 1936 paper In 1936, Langelier published his landmark paper, “The Analytical Control of Anti-Corrosion Water Treatment,” in the Journal of the American Water Works Association. The paper introduced what he called the Saturation Index — a single number derived from the difference between a water sample’s actual pH and its theoretical “saturation pH” (the pH at which water would be in perfect equilibrium with calcium carbonate).The formula was elegant in its logic. If a water sample’s actual pH is higher than its saturation pH, the water has more alkalinity than it needs to stay balanced — it will deposit scale. If the actual pH is lower, the water is “hungry” for calcium carbonate and will dissolve it from pipes and surfaces. At zero, the water is perfectly balanced. The LSI scale at a glance Below -0.3 Water is aggressive — undersaturated, will corrode surfaces and dissolve materials 0.00 Perfectly balanced — water is in equilibrium with calcium carbonate Above +0.3 Water is scale-forming — oversaturated, will deposit calcium carbonate. To calculate the saturation pH, Langelier identified five key variables: pH, water temperature, calcium hardness, total alkalinity, and total dissolved solids. Each factor was assigned a numerical value that fed into the formula, producing a result any water treatment engineer could act on. From boilers to swimming pools Langelier’s original work was designed for closed-loop systems — boilers and municipal pipe networks — not open bodies of water. He never wrote about swimming pools. Yet the elegance and utility of his index proved irresistible to other industries, and it spread far beyond its original application. By the mid-twentieth century, water treatment professionals in industrial cooling systems, drinking water plants, and eventually the nascent swimming pool industry had adopted the LSI as a standard tool. Its journey into pool chemistry required some adaptation: pools are open to the atmosphere, exposed to sunlight, bathers, and sanitizing chemicals that Langelier’s original model never accounted for.The critical addition came in the 1970s, when researcher John A. Wojtowicz expanded the index for swimming pool applications, introducing a sixth variable — cyanuric acid — to account for the stabilizers widely used in outdoor pools. His work, published across several papers in the Journal of the Swimming Pool and Spa Industry, gave pool professionals a properly calibrated tool for their specific environment. The Langelier Saturation Index was not taken into account in Flint, Michigan in 2014 when Flint switched there municipal water supply to the Flint River. Which had very corrosive water. It lead to metals being leached from pipes into the drinking water of nearly 100,000 residents. It caused an outbreak of Legionnaires’ Disease. It caused permanent brain and nervous system damage and developmental issues to residents. How the formula evolved Langelier’s original index relied on printed tables, lookup charts, and manual arithmetic — a process that was accurate but slow and impractical for routine field work. Over the following decades, researchers refined the underlying thermodynamic constants, improved the solubility models, and simplified the calculation process for practical use. The digital age transformed the LSI from a laboratory calculation into an everyday field tool. Online calculators and smartphone apps now compute an LSI result in seconds from a handful of test readings. Companies like Orenda Technologies built entire product ecosystems around the index, offering free mobile calculators that gave pool technicians instant, actionable readings on the job. The orenda calculator is what we use when we service our pools. Miami Pool Service is what we do CYA is used in swimming pools to protect chlorine from the sun. The way CYA is factored into the LSI is it removed from the total alkalinity measurement to give carbonate alkalinity and carbonate alkalinity is factored into the LSI. CYA is factored out of the alkalinity because it is not as protective as carbonate ions are. So CYA adds to your alkalinity but then it is factored out. Legacy and lasting relevance Nearly ninety years after Langelier published his paper, the index bearing his name remains one of the foundational tools of water treatment science. Although other under indexes have been made the LSI is the one used the most and the most accurate. It is taught in every serious pool operator certification course, referenced in industrial water