high salt usage

I have a commercial 44,000 gal infinity edge pool. heavy usage at certain times. We have a Chlor-King 5lb SWG. I was told that once the salt was added it would take very little salt. We have found just the opposite. We use a bag of salt a day, which ends up costing much more than we were spending on chlorine. Everyone loves the salt except us who have to maintain it. I have had a professional leak testing company and ran several bucket in water and other tests including surge tank and have found only minimal water difference overnight. I have seen tons of water splash out over the edge and miss the trough, but the board can't accept that as the problem and baulk at spending thousands to make the trough wider than the 12" it is now. Has anyone had this problem?

How are you testing the salt?

What's the water temp?

Does the pool have an auto-fill?

Sorry for the questions, but they will help us narrow down what's happening so we can give you a practical solution to your problem.:)

We test daily with electronic salt tester the Chlor-King SWG recommends 5000ppm. Temp is from 75 to 85, it is Hawaii. the pool has a surge tank which has an auto fill that supplies the water fall, that goes into the pool, the surge tank also has a return drain from the infinity edge trough. Thanks Woody

Hey Woody.

The reason I asked about the test method was to see if you were relying on the unit to tell you the salinity. Since you're using an electronic tester, that's out (as is the temp. skewing your results). I'll assume that the tester has been calibrated correctly.

With you having an autofill, I'd say you are loosing a lot of water daily:( Since the board doesn't want to enlarge the trough, can you put up a barrier to minimize the loss? Another possibility is to somehow deflect the water coming off the ledge so that most of it will stay in the collection trough (though that's likely to be less aesthetically pleasing to the pool users)

Please let us know how things turn out & of course, ask any other questions you have.:)

Has anyone had to enlarge the trough in a situation like this and what were the results? Woody

Woody,
You've got to remember that with the ChlorKing unit, maintaining salinity at 5000 ppm, means you're having to add 40% more salt than you would with most other salt systems that operate at 3000 ppm. The fact is, if you don't have a water leak, you're loosing water somewhere else in the system.

Sounds like it would mostly likely be due to the heavy bather loads that splashes and drags out the salt with them. To maintain 5000 ppm, you should adding 84 lbs of salt for every 2000 gallons of water added from the water losses (but not from evaporation). If your salt bags are 40 lbs, then it's possible that you're loosing 1000 gallons of water daily, from splash out, bathing suit drag out, and run off water that's not going into the trough. Then there's the question on how frequently you're backwashing your filter!?

Is there no way to measure how much water the autofill is adding (or how much is been added to it)? Seems like if you were really losing that much water it would lead to high water bills too unless you've got your own well.

the auto fill is just water , we add the salt manually.