MossRoad
Super Moderator
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2001
- Messages
- 60,207
- Location
- South Bend, Indiana (near)
- Tractor
- Power Trac PT425 2001 Model Year
Unless your dogs will habitually drink out of the pool, chlorine won't hurt them.
Salt water systems in pools means you're adding salt, instead of chlorine tablets. But then, the salt(sodium chloride) is split apart so you still end up with chlorine in the water, the way you introduce it is different. Chlorine tablets when improperly stored/used can be dangerous and cause burns, so I guess salt has that going for it. If you had no chlorine suspended in the pool algae would grow on the surfaces with nothing to kill it. Even with chlorine, I still get a bit of algae.
I only add salt at the start of the year when I top off the pool. I add enough to bring it up to 3500ppm. Then I don't have to add any more salt for the rest of the year, unless we get a huge rain that overflows the pool and dilutes the salt.
Salt cannot evaporate. Therefore, once it's in the pool, it stays in the pool, regardless of how much water evaporates. So as your pool level drops due to evaporation, the salt level increases. As you add water to the pool, the salt level decreases.
Chlorine tablets have to get added constantly and consistently throughout the year, wether it's by an automatic system, or manually.
If you forget to add chlorine to your automated system, or to your manual system, you'll be out of chlorine eventually, whereas with salt, you don't have to worry about forgetting, because you never have to add it regularly, because it's always suspended in the water.
The only thing you have to worry about is a power outage that kills the saltwater chlorine generator, but then, your filter pump will be dead too, and so would your automated chlorine dispenser if you had one.