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

[dmeyer]

Interesting, thanks for your reply. I look forward to getting some real numbers from the water.

[chem geek]

As a point of reference, I use 12.5% chlorinating liquid in my pool as my primary source of chlorine. I have relatively low daily chlorine demand of 1 ppm FC per day due to a mostly opaque electric safety cover, though the pool is used (open) every day for an hour or so and longer on weekends and it's kept warm at 88ºF. The point is that salt does build up so I use winter rains to dilute my pool water by up to 50%. It's a nice way of refreshing the water to get rid of anything in it that isn't handled by other means such as filtration or oxidation. My salt level tends to range between 600 and 1200 ppm as a result.

A more typical daily chlorine usage for pools without opaque covers is around 2 ppm FC per day and at that rate one would add about 100 ppm salt per month if there were no water dilution.

For those in areas of the country with summer rains, that can also be used to help with diluting the water if it's enough to overflow or if one intentionally drains some (having summer rains just make up for evaporation won't change the water chemistry).

Note that saltwater chlorine generator pools have 3000 ppm salt which is generally higher than most manually dosed pools that are usually in the 1000-2000 range, though obviously it depends on actual chlorine usage, length of season, and amount of water dilution.