I've Turned My Back On Salt For Chlorine Tablets.

[up2you2]

Lately my Compu-Chlor salt chlorinator was temperamental in the extreme, just like Goldilocks and the three bears, not too cold, not too hot, but just right.

Too little salt it did not work, too much salt it did not work, you had to get the amount of salt just right for it to work.

This Australian company has no representatives in Thailand, to take care and look after their products, with some kind of service arrangement.

Communication with them back in Australia was a nightmare.

My steps were going black, along with all the grouting between the tiles.

A new salt chlorinator costs an arm and a leg, and masses of salt during the monsoon season.

And of course there was the chance that I would experience all of these faults again with another manufacturer.

My prayers were answered though with the suggestion of a drip feed chlorinator.

The US company that makes it is AstralPool, 9,363 Baht incl tax supplied and fitted by a service pool contractor here in Phuket.

In a word brilliant.

No moving parts, no circuit boards in all of this humidity to short.

It has cleaned up my steps, and they have never looked better.

The grouting also is nearly looking like new.

I have reduced the gauge to 1, and it's barely dissolving the chlorine tablets, I would say a packet every three weeks at 160 Baht.

[notime]

Thank you for posting this. It's my nightmare to think about replacing the electrode on our Zodiac chlorinator that costs almost as much as new complete chlorinator. It's 3 years old and I'm sure it won't work forever. AstralPool drip feed chlorinator may be the best, cost effective solution. Let's see how it goes for you in a longer run.

[SantiSuk]

Interesting perspective.

My new pool was fitted with an Astral Pool salt water chlorinator 18 months ago but I have not yet used it because the idiot contractor wired it up wrongly and it took a visit to the manufacturers rep agent in Bangkok 6 months ago to get a work-around to make its timer work automatically (since the contractor swore blind it was correctly fitted and refused to come back out to Issaan). Meanwhile I had bought a 50 kg tub of chlorine powder, so I thought I might as well use most of that up before trying out the chlorinator. I agree that the Astral Pool rep business here in Thailand is very helpful BTW

My perspective is that throwing a bit of chlorine in every 2-3 days is pretty non-invasive of my time and I dont find handling the stuff at all uncomfortable. One advantage I have found about chlorine, which I have never seen written up, is that if you get a bit of local discoloration in any part of the pool (grouting or tiles, side or bottom) then spreading the chlorine there usually eliminates the problem overnight.

I have seen it written (by Pool Doctor I think) that chlorine powder/granules/tablets will eventually degrade the grouting, requiring a time-consuming drain and re-grout job. If that is indeed true (no sign of it yet for me after 18 months) then maybe the chlorine option is not necessarily the best long-run approach despoite it being cheap/easy. In that context, it's interesting that you say you were already having grout problems using a chlorinator; interesting also that you found the salt use expensive - the chlorinator fans usually run with the line that you just salt-dose the pool then switch on the chlorinator and forget about it! I was poo pooed on a pool forum when I suggested that even a chlorinator requires monitoring and re-dosing.

I suspect that there is no right answer as to which is best - chlorinator or chlorine. Anyone on a budget should not however feel that they are missing out big time by taking the cheap manually-applied chlorine approach, but you do have to be in residence or have a reliable pool boy if you have periods away (my brother-in-law in my case), or use an auto-chlorine application machine like suggested by the OP.

For info, I've used about 4,000 bahts worth of Japanese chlorine powder (40kg), sourced from a local Watsadu shed, in my 75 cu m pool over the last 18 months, had no acid or cyanauric build-up problem and had to resort to algaecide only once after I went away and my BIL got too sick to come round. I shock the pool pretty infrequently - about every three months when the combined chlorine has crept above 0.5 with total chlorine at 1.0 . I can never get my combined chlorine down below 0.2, but I don't seem to have any problems with smells or bacterial infection so I ignore the technically purist approach that would probably have me shocking every 2 weeks in an attempt to keep combined chlorine near zero. Match that up against the significant capital cost of the alternative, a chlorinator and control box - about 90,000 baht per my builder's cost spec if I remember correctly.

In the New Year I'll switch the chlorinator on (if 18 months of non-use and chlorinated water passing thru it has not bu$$ered up the electrodes) and see how that goes. I should be in a better position then to comment authoritatively on which is best.

Edited December 12, 2012 by SantiSuk