importance of salt to CSI in non-salt pool?

[anonapersona]

I was just advising someone to play with the Pool Calculator to get familiar with it and so I started playing with in with my pool values.

My pool is not salt, as far as I know, but then I've added so much bleach to it in 18 months that it may have a lot of salt in it now. I noted the other day that I found it easy to float, which makes me think that maybe it is a bit salty. I can't taste any salt however.

I recall that someone said that a non-salt pool might still have 1500 ppm of salt.... so I added that to my values in the Calculator and WOW -- suddenly my CSI is at -.51

So, should I be testing for salt? Should we all be testing for salt? It seems to make a difference, at least to me since I'd run TA to the low side to keep pH in check, then started using tabs to get CYA up. If I assume no salt, the CSI is fine at -.37.

 

[JasonLion]

Most people don't need to worry about the effect of salt on CSI, because you don't usually need to know what your CSI level is that precisely.

 

[chem geek]

Since you have an in-ground presumably gunite pool with waterfall and spa spillover, it would be better for you to have a higher CH level to get the saturation index higher to protect the plaster and rock (depending on type) surfaces. It doesn't have to be exactly at zero, but I wouldn't have it be so low for a very long time -- short-term exposures are OK. If you had a vinyl pool with no exposed grout in tile, then the CSI wouldn't matter if it were low. I don't think you need to test for salt, but I would assume that you've probably got at least 1000 ppm unless you have fairly decent water dilution.

 

[anonapersona]

I can get that CH up to the 300s easily. Will do.