This guide covers how you should reduce the salt level in your pool. You've just converted over to a salt water pool and discovered that your resulting salt level is too high. You were targeting for 3500 ppm and ended up with over 4000 ppm. How could this happen? The most common answer is you overestimated the size of your pool. Instead of having 13,000 gallons you have 10,000. Now you have too much salt in your water. How many pounds of salt are you over and how do you get that out of the pool water?
1. The only way to reduce the salt level in your pool is to dilute it. And if your pool is full that means you are going to have to drain your pool down to a level that you can add fresh water to. You cannot wait for the water to evaporate. That does nothing to reduce the salt level. In fact, when the water evaporates, the salt still remains in the pool and your salt level actually goes up. So the question now is, "How much do you have to drain to make room for fresh water?".
2. Salt water generators operate between values that range from 3000 ppm to 4000 ppm. We are assuming that you have a salt water generator that operates at 3500 and so you were adding salt to reach a salt level of 3500 ppm.
3. When you measured your salt level using salt test strip you got a reading of just above 6.5 which equates to 4000 ppm. So you're over by 500 ppm. What's that mean in real numbers and how do you get it out of your pool.
4. To help visualize this we will convert ppm to bags of salt. On the back of the salt bag it states that 1 40# bag of salt will raise the salt level by 480 ppm for a 10,000 gallon pool. So if your pool's salt level is 4000, you have just over 8 bags of salt in your pool (4000/480). To reach 3500 ppm in a 10,000 gallon pool you should have the equivalent of just over 7 bags (3500/480).
5. You have about 8 bags of salt in your pool . You want to extract about 1 bag of salt. To do that you have to you have to drain about 1/8 of your pool water.
6. When you replace that 1/8 of pool water with fresh water, you'll end up with 7 bags of salt or approximately 3500 ppm.
7. So you must dump 1/8 of the pool's water. How many inches of water is that? First determine the average depth of your pool. If the shallow end is 3' and the deep end is 6', your average depth is 3' + 6' or 9 ' divided by 2 = 4.5'. This is equal to 54". To determine the number of inches to drain from your pool to dump 1/8 of your pool water, divide the average depth of your pool in inches by 8 (54 / 8 = 6.75 or approximately 7"). Bottomline - to reduce your salt water level from 4000 to 3500, you must drain out 7" of salt water and replace it with 7" of fresh water. The basic formulas you need to get to this number are restated below. They will work for any pool size.
8. A: % OF SALT OVER TARGET PPM = (measured ppm - target ppm) / measured ppm. In our example (4000 - 3500)/ 4000 or 500 / 4000 = 12.5% which is the same as 1/8 discussed above. Note: It is not necessary to convert ppm to bags of salt as done above. That was only done to help visualize the problem. Also, note that this formula works for most size pool. We only have to consider the depth , not the width or length.
9. B: AVERAGE DEPTH OF POOL: (Shallow End + Deep End)/2 x 12. In our example, (3' + 6')/2 x 12" = 54".
10. C: NUMBER OF INCHES TO DRAIN: B times A. In our example, 54" x 12.5% = 6.75" (approximately 7").
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