Chlorine high on Salt System - Help

[jaimslaw]

I recently replaced my T Cell 15 with a new one - also, recently repaired the Board on my PS-4 (fixed the "no cell power" error message, thanks to the repair method described at "nocellpower.com website).

Anyways, am now experiencing unusually high Chlorine levels even though I have tried reducing the controller Chlorine setting down to as low as 10%.

My salt level is at optimum (3200) and confirmed by store testing. My conditioner is a little low, but otherwise, PH and everything else is fine.

I guess I could monitor the system and see if I am getting periodic "off" times for the generator (that being the means by which Chlorine levels are adjusted).

Any other suggestions? Could it be that the output is at 100% notwithstanding that I have the chlorine output levels set really low (ie, faulty reading or some other quirk going on with the control board).

Have seen a lot of posts about chlorine being too low - but this is weird cause it is the opposite.

Thanks for any help/suggestions you might be able to offer.

[aylad]

I'll let those with SWCG experience chime in on this one, but just wanted to throw an idea out there for consideration........

Don't forget that as your water temp drops, your chlorine will take much longer to dissipate--I've gone from adding a couple of gallons of bleach a week to only one gallon every couple of weeks and still maintaining 10-12 ppm chlorine. So it seems to me that unless your chlorine generation is very, very low, you're going to have high chlorine levels throughout the winter, and I don't know how low you can set them. Don't know where you live or if you use the pool during the wintertime, but maybe you should consider cutting back the run time to only a few hours/day, if you're not using the pool?

Janet

[waste]

#1 - Welcome to the forum!

#2 - While Janet 'claims' not to know about SWCG's, she's right on in her advice

If the water is colder than usual and there is ~ no chlorine demand, it's easy for a SWCG to 'overproduce'. The solution is to cut the "on" time for the cell and possibly the pump run time.

5% is as low as you can set your unit so, if it's already set there, you need to actually turn the unit off for "a while" (how long depends on your conditions) to enable you to maintain a proper cl level.

Is there any chance you could post your full chemical results, so the experts here could tell you what level of chlorine you'll be wanting to maintain over the winter?

[jaimslaw]

Yes,I will post chemistry this weekend when I can get my pool store to run all of them (incl. the conditioner, which I believe is best left to the store's test device)

BTW my controller allows the salt setting to go all the way down to 1%, which is where I have it now. I have periodically checked to see that the salt system is cycling off (as is should pretty much 99% of the time the pump is running since I have the salt generator set to run only 1% of the time).

Perhaps it is just the colder water temp. I live in San Diego. Warm in the winter on a relative scale, but we are going through some cold nights (33 degrees - that's cold for us). So water temp is hovering around 40 degrees, which probably is the high chlorine problem.

I would think that levels would start to improve as I have been running the pump with no salt generator for almost a week now. Oh well - will take a reading this weekend and post results.