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Home Depot Salt
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Posted by travis_turner (My Page) on Sun, Nov 1, 09 at 13:06
| Anyone have any experience using the Home Depot salt? I live 30 minutes away from the nearest pool store, but 5 minutes from the HD. I am getting low on salt. |
Follow-Up Postings:
RE: Home Depot Salt
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| I have used it several times. You just want to make sure it is over 99% pure with no additives. The blue bags are the cheapest. |
RE: Home Depot Salt
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| You can use the blue bags of Morton. It is over 99% pure. Many of them in my neck of the woods sell the pool salt as well. It is just a seed salt so it disolves quicker, for this they charge $3.00 more a bag. |
RE: Home Depot Salt
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| The stuff I bought is called Diamond Crystal and it is in a blue and white bag. Bag says 99.3 to 99.8 % pure. Is that adequate? |
RE: Home Depot Salt
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Impurities in salt is just dirt or silt which will fall out and vacuum up, don't fret over it.
Pool salt is the biggest scam, but it does dissolve faster. Don't buy salt with iron-out though |
RE: Home Depot Salt
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| If you are just topping off your salt I would say its fine. But for a freshly filled pool I would only reccommend the purest salt available. After all If the salt is 99% pure and you need 400 lbs., you will be adding 4lbs. of ?? Thats a lot of ?? to put in a newly plastered pool. What if its 98% "pure"? If the pool is 10 years old, then maybe you dont care. |
RE: Home Depot Salt
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| It's not 99, it's typically better than 99.6. Most of what is contaminating it is other salts (often potassium) which won't bother anything or small amounts of insoluable stuff like sand which as ZL points out will just not dissolve. |
RE: Home Depot Salt
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| As ling as there are no iron removers, iodine, or cruciate (anticaking stuff) in there, you should be ok. Scott |
RE: Home Depot Salt
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| Just topping off. I only added a little bit today to see how it dissolved. Did OK, but will probably go to a pool store this weekend to buy something a little more finely ground. |
RE: Home Depot Salt
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| "If you are just topping off your salt I would say its fine. But for a freshly filled pool I would only reccommend the purest salt available. After all If the salt is 99% pure and you need 400 lbs., you will be adding 4lbs. of ?? Thats a lot of ?? to put in a newly plastered pool. What if its 98% "pure"? If the pool is 10 years old, then maybe you dont care." It's the same thing in a fancier bag, Anything 99%+ is fine, every time it rains or the wind blows you get many lbs of ???? Travis you can always pre-dissolve it before adding. |
RE: Home Depot Salt
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| Racket, Never considered that...like in a bucket of water and then pour it in the pool? Sounds like a good idea. |
RE: Home Depot Salt
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| Exactly, the warmer water the better. |
RE: Home Depot Salt
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| I pour mine in the skimmer. It dissolves fairly quickly this way due to the water flow plus it captures any small rocks that may be left in the salt. |
RE: Home Depot Salt
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| Bad idea, if you have a heater. |
RE: Home Depot Salt
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| I pour mine in the skimmer too, five years and no issues with the heater. Makes sense, the concentration of salt only peaks for a couple of seconds and then quickly returns to normal. |
RE: Home Depot Salt
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| Five years is a horrible sample to assess damages. I think you would be pissed if your heater lasted only 8. Adding salt through a skimmer isn't necessary, so why put all that extra corrosive water through your heat exchanger.
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RE: Home Depot Salt
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| Modern pool heaters have heat exchangers that are unlikely to be affected by a brief pass with high salt content e.g titanium, cupro-nickel. The heat exchanger is more likely to be damaged from the long-term effects of chemical imbalance such high/low pH, scale, or issues with the velocity of the water through it (scouring). Just don't but that there is a risk to adding salt directly given the short exposure. Perhaps if my heater was built in the days prior to salt systems being the norm, then maybe on a long shot, but not today. And let's also look at the so called "recommended" method of pouring the salt into the pool and then brushing it toward the main drain. Saltwater is heavier the fresh, so by pouring the salt into the pool, you're creating the same high salt concentration at the bottom of the pool, and since that concentration will seek out the lowest point (main drain), I think the effect is going to be nearly the same as just pouring it directly in the skimmer. And via the skimmer mode, if it takes you two minutes a 40 pound bag to pour it in the skimmer, and your pulling 100 gpm, thats only 23,000 ppm assuming the salt is completely dissolved (which it's not). It's more likely (if using the standard water softener size crystals), that most of the salt will pass right through and be trapped within the filter where is will finish dissolving. |
RE: Home Depot Salt
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| Most heat exchangers are made from a copper nickel alloy which has excellent resitance to salt water corrosion (titanium is even better). According to the link below, with CONSTANT exposure to SEA WATER, the alloys will at most lose about 25 microns per YEAR. With only a few minutes of high salt concentrations when adding salt, I doubt this would be a long term problem. I usually don't do things like this without doing my homework first. |
Here is a link that might be useful: Copper-Nickel Alloys, Properties and Applications
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