Small pool with salt chlorine generator

[skijunkie]

This is a very similar question to the one in "Oversized Salt Water Generator" but I wanted to check and see if the advise in that thread holds up when we are talking one third the amount of water.

I'm getting a small exercise pool installed. I guess some might call it a spool. It is 8 x 17 x 5. Once you remove the volume taken by the steps and bench it is only about 3900 gallons.

I'm currently planning on getting a salt chlorine generator from Hayward. The smallest cell they have is designed for pools up to 15000 gallons. I've read a couple of posts that say once the cell size is 3 times greater than the number of gallons you will run into trouble. Is this something I should be concerned about? Will I be able to get by running it at a very low percentage? I will have a P4 controller that should allow me to set the "on" time in 1% increments.

The "Oversized Salt Generator" thread seems to indicate this would be okay, but that thread is talking about a 12,000 gallon pool, where my pool is 1/3rd that size.

Thanks,
Mike

 

[susa]

it will work just fine, have installed several 3x and 4x size(d) units

 

[JasonLion]

The larger the SWG is relative to the size of the pool, the lower the percentage you need to run it on, the larger a 1% change in output is. Nothing goes wrong really, you just end up being forced to run the cell for longer than you would otherwise need to if you had finer control over the run time. As the cell gets larger that extra run time from rounding up the percentage to the next higher integer starts to eat into your savings from buying a larger cell. This is not much of a problem at 3x, starts to be noticeable at 4x, and only gets to be a serious issue somewhere larger than that.