How to Take Care of a Saltwater Pool

By Gaby Chapman

This is the book we wish we could have had the day our pool contractor finished our new concrete pool. We would have liked to have had a guide to de-mystify saltwater pool care and direct us to the sources and resources we needed. We now know that it is particularly useful to understand how to take care of your own saltwater pool. This is because a saltwater pool by nature tends to become more alkaline over time. When this alkalinity, or pH, is not regularly tested and adjusted, the water can lose its characteristic sparkling clarity. Since the whole point of having a saltwater pool is to have the pleasure of swimming in absolutely gorgeous water, regular testing of the water is especially important. The person in the best position to provide this kind of care is the person who swims in it regularly. This book is for that person.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gaby Chapman
• Release date: Mar 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781452448336

Gaby Chapman

Gaby is a retired high school English teacher. She currently maintains a webpage: http://www.gabysbooks.com/ that recommends adult-level books for teen readers.

Book preview

How to Take Care of a Saltwater Pool

By Gaby and Mike Chapman

Copyright ©2012 Gaby and Mike Chapman

Smashwords Edition

The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. All recommendations are made without guarantee; the authors make no claim to professional expertise and disclaim any liability in connection with the use of this information.

Foreword

Finally, after almost five months of construction, our new saltwater pool was finished. The pool was full of water, the salt had been added, all the equipment was installed—the heater, the pump, the filters, the electronic chlorine generator, and the automatic pool cover. Warm summer weather was just weeks away.

The last of the pool contractors packed up their tools, cleaned up their mess, and drove off with the promise that a pool technician would be back in a few days to show us how to operate all the pool equipment. We waited. We left messages on answering machines. Finally we realized our promised technician just wasn’t coming.

We called the two local pool service businesses, but they both had more customers than they could handle. We called a different pool contractor in the next county and he lectured us for not picking him to build our pool in the first place.

Reality set in. We were on our own. And neither of us is at all handy about the house.

We bought books, we sought information on the Internet, we read all our manuals cover-to-cover, and we made many mistakes. But we figured it out in due course without any unredeemable disasters.

This book is the book we wish we could have had the day the contractor drove off down the road. We would have liked to have had a guide like this one that could de-mystify saltwater pool care and direct us to the sources and resources we needed.

If you have a saltwater pool, it is particularly useful to understand how to take care of it. This is because a saltwater pool by nature tends to become more alkaline over time. When this alkalinity, or pH, is not regularly tested and adjusted, the water can lose its characteristic sparkling clarity. Since the whole point of having a saltwater pool is to have the pleasure of swimming in absolutely gorgeous water, regular testing of the water is especially important. The person in the best position to provide this kind of care is the person who swims in it regularly—you.

In the years we have had our saltwater pool, we have always been happy with the quality of the water and we have always enjoyed taking care of it. We by no means consider ourselves experts—in fact we are always learning more about taking care of our pool. We hope our book will help those of you who are new to the saltwater pool experience to enjoy it as much as we have.

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Chapter 1: Is a Saltwater Pool for You?

Ahh… the luxurious feeling of diving into a gorgeous crystal-clear pool where the water feels like pure silk. A well-maintained saltwater pool is the Cadillac of the pool world. Once you get used to it, diving into a regular pool will feel like diving into synthetic water, made out of something like diesel fuel or tobacco spittle. Too bad the pristine pleasure of a saltwater pool is so rare.

But wait! Saltwater pools needn’t be so uncommon. This is a pool that can cost less to maintain than a regular