Hi all,
When we purchased our pool it came with initial chems including a mineral blend called Aqua Therepe (previously named Mineral Max) made by Astral Pool - http://www.astralpool.com.au/products/acqua-therepe. This completely replaces plain pool salt at the normal concentration (4000ppm for my SWCG). I'm not too fussed about being "sold" by the PB because the total package cost was in line with the other quotes and it was presented more like a value-add so it wouldn't have reduced the price going to normal salt anyway.
I'm having trouble getting any info about the exact ingredients and suspect it's probably 99% plain old salt with a sniff of magnesium and the like? This is our first pool and I've never been a big swimmer so I have no personal experience to know if it actually "feels" any better than using plain salt. Sales brochures claim other benefits to skin, hair, eyes etc and also claim it helps reduce calcium build up and staining etc. We all initially thought our skin felt REALLY soft and silky when getting out of the pool in the first couple of weeks, but I now suspect that was actually due to high PH of around 8 - I say this because caustic cleaning products are usually quite slippery which I've always thought is because of the alkalinity? Does that sound right? Now that our water is balanced, the soft slippery feeling is gone, but the water itself does still feel nice.
Does anyone have any knowledge of this product with regards to water feel, health benefits and water balance? We've just had a significant amount of rain and my latest test with AquaCheck strips show my salt levels have dropped to 3320ppm and pool calc tells me I should add 25KG of salt. I haven't priced the Aqua Therepe bags yet, but I believe it will come at a fairly high premium over plain (even high quality) pool salt.
Thanks,
Steve.
PS - price is not everything if it is indeed making the water nicer, but my suspicion is we'd be just as well off saving some cash and converting to plain salt now...
When we purchased our pool it came with initial chems including a mineral blend called Aqua Therepe (previously named Mineral Max) made by Astral Pool - http://www.astralpool.com.au/products/acqua-therepe. This completely replaces plain pool salt at the normal concentration (4000ppm for my SWCG). I'm not too fussed about being "sold" by the PB because the total package cost was in line with the other quotes and it was presented more like a value-add so it wouldn't have reduced the price going to normal salt anyway.
I'm having trouble getting any info about the exact ingredients and suspect it's probably 99% plain old salt with a sniff of magnesium and the like? This is our first pool and I've never been a big swimmer so I have no personal experience to know if it actually "feels" any better than using plain salt. Sales brochures claim other benefits to skin, hair, eyes etc and also claim it helps reduce calcium build up and staining etc. We all initially thought our skin felt REALLY soft and silky when getting out of the pool in the first couple of weeks, but I now suspect that was actually due to high PH of around 8 - I say this because caustic cleaning products are usually quite slippery which I've always thought is because of the alkalinity? Does that sound right? Now that our water is balanced, the soft slippery feeling is gone, but the water itself does still feel nice.
Does anyone have any knowledge of this product with regards to water feel, health benefits and water balance? We've just had a significant amount of rain and my latest test with AquaCheck strips show my salt levels have dropped to 3320ppm and pool calc tells me I should add 25KG of salt. I haven't priced the Aqua Therepe bags yet, but I believe it will come at a fairly high premium over plain (even high quality) pool salt.
Thanks,
Steve.
PS - price is not everything if it is indeed making the water nicer, but my suspicion is we'd be just as well off saving some cash and converting to plain salt now...