Hello everyone,

I have been debating turning my SWG off for the winter and dosing the pool with bleach. My reasoning is that
the chlorine demand is low in the winter, so I can save some of the life of the cell by turning it off.

I know I can turn down the percentage, but turning it completely off would seem to give me more usable hours out of it.

Is this a viable strategy?

Suggestions/recommendations/accusations welcome!

SF

Definitely can be done. You will just need to keep CYA/FC in check. Chlorine consumption will go way down. Even though I have solar going and my water temps are upper 80's the loss of light has dropped my daily FC consumption in half to about 1 ppm a day. I am going to run my SWCG every other day. The $$$ you save in the cell will likely be spent on bleach. Give it a try, keep a log and see how much bleach you go through over a couple weeks. Run the numbers and see if it is worth the trouble.

I'm considering this as well. During the summer my Aquarite was set at about 20% and the pump was running about 5.5 to 6 hours a day. My chlorine stayed around 6-7 ppm. Now that fall has arrived I've lowered the percentage to around 10% and reduced the pump time to around 4 hours a day but chlorine has risen to about 8 ppm.

I'll try lowering the setting to around 5% and cutting back the pump run time to around 3 hours a day. If it's still high I'd just as soon turn the SWG off and add bleach every few days.

Many SWGs cease functioning somewhere around 55 degrees. A few continue to work even in the cold but are much less efficient than usual. I recommend turning off a SWG when the water gets down to 50 degree, if not sooner, and switching to manual chlorination (which is much easier than usual because of the cold water).

I have the Pentair IC40 and was wondering about this as well. My Cl is ~ 17ppm right now with the cover on <yikes> so I've reduced the output to 0. Does anyone know if this is good enough as far as turning the IEC off or should I go further and unplug this thing? I don't see a key press combination that turns it off beyond 0% output...