Not me. My friends in Virginia. Long post—questions at the end if you just want to skip over this sorry tale.
They have an inground rectangular vinyl pool which ran on Baquacil for the first few seasons. I suggested they convert to BBB but my friend was unwilling to do the testing, saying she's "not a chemist". The water turned a murky green, I refused to swim in it any more and wouldn't let my dogs in it, either. Then the pink and white algae happened and they agreed that maybe Baqua wasn't what they wanted.
I offered to come down and convert the pool to BBB but no, they wanted the pool store to do that. Pool store said it can't be done but we can drain and refill, and that's what they did. Their new sanitizing system became an inline chlorinator using trichlor pucks. Every time my friend took a water sample to the store there was something wrong with the balance (we are not surprised, right?) and the water needed this and that, big money. She was always complaining about how expensive the chlorine method was. My suggestions of going with BBB continued to fall on deaf ears.
Toward the end of last season she complained about the water feeling "dry and hard" and the liner on the bottom had developed major wrinkles. I suspect her CYA was over the moon and her pH was likely down to the skin dissolving ranges. The pool store suggested draining and replacing the liner. The pool was empty for a good month. It's a miracle that it didn't get damaged during that time.
New liner was installed, pool was filled by a water truck. They now have a Hayward Swim-Pure SWCG. The pool company told them to get 20 bags of salt in preparation for them coming out to bring the generator on line. They bought the salt at Lowe's, Diamond Solar Salt, the same stuff I put in my pool each year to improve the water feel.
Pool company was aghast! Totally the wrong kind of salt, they said. This salt is too coarse, it has sharp edges which will cut your new liner, won't dissolve, won't work! Bad, bad salt! We'll bring you ours when we come out, powdered salt, genteel salt, much safer, much better.
And much costlier, I would imagine.
They did say to keep the solar salt for the future, that they could dissolve it in a bucket and add it to the pool when the SWCG needed to be fed.
At this point, my friend plans to do the maintenance by herself "for a couple of weeks, see how it goes" but the pool company will come out on a weekly basis to make whatever adjustments are necessary.
So. My questions:
1. Is regular solar salt okay or must it be powdered salt?
2. Is it true that a SWCG pool needs some copper in the water? If so, how is the copper added? Isn't it copper which turns blond hair green?
3. What kind of testing do you do with a SWCG? My guess is, the same as with BBB.
4. How complicated is it to adjust the system so it runs smoothly?
I know next to nothing about SWCGs. I would like to be able to help her and be supportive, maybe even teach her how to get away from the pool store although past history doesn't make me very hopeful.
