Intex SWG Not Coding - Strip based salt test says 1850

[frogabog]

I finally tested salt. Been waiting because the stupid HTH salt kit comes with strips, is nearly $20 and that's just dum. But H bought one so I opened it and ran the test.

1850ppm Huh???

SWG seems to be perfectly happy. It was happy at 20ppm CYA, happy at 40ppm CYA, and now happy at 65-70ppm CYA (I haven't decided what the CYA test really is yet today. Probably gonna pour a few more times).

I'm still working on how long I need to run the SWG per day but have yet to fall below 3.5ppm running it twice at 4 hours each. I'm still only a week into this so I'm not worried about that just yet unless 8 hours per day on a ~5000 gallon pool seems excessive to someone here.

My CH is relatively non-existent. Fill water is ~2-4ppm depending on whether the water comes from the reservoir or the wells in the city (drought status). I read a lot here about calcium scaling on the plates, making the SWG think it's got low salt. Could the soft water be part of the SWG's happiness?

Basically I want to know if I should bother adding more salt right now or if I should wait till the unit codes. Perhaps 8 hours is excessive and more salt will decrease this time?

hmmm...

pH- 7.4
TA- 70
Borates- 50+ (think I overdid it a little)

 

[elwood58]

Sounds like you have things pretty dialed in right now. Most say if the SWG is happy, leave it alone. You can always bump the salt up, but it is much harder to take it back down again.

 

[Bama Rambler]

If you're following the instructions exactly on the bottle I'd suspect the strips. I'd run a sample to a pool store for verification only. If your test and the stores results are close I'd up the salt a little.