New Member Question: Is the salt from bleach or sodium hypochlorite harmful?

[dmeyer]

I found myself an accidental pool owner after buying a house with a really beautiful 30k gallon kidney shaped pool with a mechanized retractable cover. Chemically, the pool appears to be a great shape, and we had a pool guy out who verified that right now things look good.

The posts here have be been invaluable in seeing that the costs of this thing and the work involved is going to be manageable. I'm signing up in anticipation that I will have lots of questions, once i get my test kit up and running. Until then the information in the forum seems quite complete, and the BBB method advocated here makes a ton of sense.

Here's something I haven't seen addressed yet. My understanding of Sodium Hypochlorite (e.g. bleach, liquid "shock") is that it will break down in order to chlorinate my pool, with the only side effect being some added salt. My question is - How is it that the salt is harmless? Salt is hard to filter from water, so it seems like this could build up. If I really use my imagination, I wonder if my pool could ever get salty enough it could start to corrode the metal mechanism on my cover. I'm sure there's no basis to this, because I know lots of people use sodium hypochlorite, and I've never seen a complaint, but is it possible this could become a problem? Any idea why not?