Can I add bleach to salt water pool?

[oroepke1]

First of all I should mention, I haven't been to this forum in a year or so. Reason is that with all the help I got from here, I didn't need to :-) Thanks again for maintaining this great site!

But now I have a question regarding chlorine level in colder weather. It seems that when the water temp goes below 65 degrees, it is difficult to maintain the correct chlorine level just with the salt generator. I used to add chlorine tabs, but that's rather expensive. Can I just use bleach? if so, is there a formula that tells me how much bleach to use to get the chlorine up a certain number?

Again, thanks for all the help I got from here!

Olaf
CenTX, in ground gunnite, 12,000 gal

[CarlD]

Absolutely! You can use Liquid Chlorine as well! But you MUST use regular, unscented bleach. The anti-splash, gel, scented, etc are all no-nos, but ultra bleach (6% vs 5.25%) or the new super-ultra (8.xx%) are all perfectly fine.

In the water, chlorine is chlorine. Bleach / LC into the water is always OK. The saltwater generator makes chlorine by breaking salt, NaCl into sodium and chlorine, which, when used up, recombine into salt again.

In fact, our SWCG pros here recommend that instead of using your "boost" cycle to shock your pool, use bleach or LC instead to make your cell last longer. I started using an SWCG this year for the first time and used LC whenever I needed to shock it.