I have to agree with Carl. No matter what a dealer may tell you a salt system is not cheaper than manually chlorinating, and perhaps costs more.

That said, I love my salt system because of the convenience it offers. This past season my main pump died and I had to manually chlorinate for about a week or so. I was so happy to get my salt system back up and running once the pump was replaced!

Btw, to answer the original question, we got our Aqua Rite at the same time we had our pool installed in 2004. I believe it ran about $1000 installed. Since then the cell has been replaced once and a circuit board had to be replaced (about $650 combined). So I figured that comes to about $165 per season, not including electricity costs to run it.