SWG - General Fault High Salt at 84 Degrees

[zenlen]

Greetings!

Just finished up our backyard a few months ago. Thanks to solar and some great weather here in northern CA, we've been enjoying it since mid april. The water looks and feels great. I have a decent test kit (not strips) and all numbers are within the recommended ranges. I've also had the CYA and CH tested at the local, independent store and all is good.

The basic equipment is nature 2 soft with zodiac/jandy PDA. I've done several salt tests (incl at the store twice and all show around 3600ppm (the PDA says 3800)

I noticed that everything is running fine until the water hits 84 degrees. Then - if the solar is on - the system beeps and PDA reads General Fault/High Salt/4100ppm.

However, when I turn the solar off, the error goes away regardless of water temp. and the PDA and box shows everything working fine.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Len

 

[JasonLion]

Welcome to TFP!

I suspect your SWG is getting water from the output of the solar panels (which is normal) and that water is hotter than 84 degrees. Warmer water has the same effect on the SWG as higher salt levels. There are two approaches to avoiding the error messages. You can either reduce the salt level, or cool down the water coming from the solar panels.

A properly balanced solar system should only be raising the water temperature by a couple of degrees. If your flow rate is too low, it could be warming the water significantly more than that. You may be able to adjust the solar diverter to send more water to the panels, which will reduce the single pass temperature gain (and increase the overall efficiency). You can get sense of how much of an issue this is by measure the temperature gain through the solar panels. If it is over 5 degrees gained (difference between the water sent to the panels and the water coming back from the panels) then things probably need adjusting.

Meanwhile, your salt level is slightly high. Lowering your salt level just a little will likely also take care of the problem.

 

[zenlen]

thanks Jason :-D

I've been messing around with the variable speed ePump for energy savings. I'm not sure if it is the default setting from Jandy or PB service tech but the default for solar is 2450rpm. Since we only have a one story and a small pool (16.5K gal) I thought I could drop the RPMs a bit so started experimenting @ 1800rpm. SWG would eventually say "no flow". Ah - the wonderful things "they" don't tell you. Should have spent more time here I guess. - We are still happy with the SWG so far, just didn't realize it needed the higher rpms. Obviously the energy usage at 1350 is much more attractive to the wallet than the 1750 it seems to need to make chlorine. Anyway, I've got the ePump down to 2150rpm which seems to work well while using slightly less energy. Maybe that is the issue though. Good call man

The solar raises the temp about a degree an hour which based on my lurking around, seems pretty normal and the water coming out isn't blistering hot or anything. I'm not sure I really need to use the solar to make the water any hotter than 84 but you make some excellent points about how to fix the error message.

I might try lowering the salt a bit (not super excited about that choice since chemicals are spot on) but it makes a lot of sense.

Gonna try your suggestions and see what happens

1. increase the pump speed and see if i can successfully raise the temp over 84 with solar on.
2. reduce salt a few hundred ppm then start process again from lower rpm range

A lot of great people and posts on TBF - really helped a lot. Thanks again - here is a link to our yardcrash if anyone wants to check it out

Len
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set ... 20eb16a57b

the furniture is from http://www.lolldesigns.com --- we are very happy with it --- stylish, comfortable and maintenance free ... although we did go broke in the process