Salt System
With the increasing price of chlorine, many homeowners are looking to upgrade to a new salt water pool system. We specialize in upgrading pools to salt water systems.
List of Salt System
Mined Salt
Mined salt is the best type of salt to use in your pool. This variety ranges from 95% to 99% pure sodium chloride and, as the name suggests, comes from mining it out of the earth. This is easily the most popular type of salt in the United States, which is part of why it’s so affordable to use in pools. The US produces millions of tons of mined salt annually, usually through deep shaft mining, where companies can extract it in large chunks and break it up to their preferred consistency. Mined salt also works particularly well with chlorine generators because there are few impurities to corrode or damage the systems.
Mechanically Evaporated Salt
Mechanically evaporated salt comes from artificially-generated heat that removes salty water, leaving the crystals behind. Generating heat just to boil water and create salt is rarely cost-effective on its own, so some companies do this as a secondary use for heat created for generating power. If they’re paying to generate the heat anyway, reusing that heat makes it far more affordable to make this salt. In most cases, mechanical evaporation systems use specific temperatures designed to kill off bacteria, brine shrimp, and anything else that may be in the water before it’s evaporated. Through further processing, it’s easy to remove most of these and leave moderately pure salt crystals behind.
Solar Salt
Solar salt is similar to mechanically evaporated salt, except that it uses wind and sunlight to evaporate the water. This is extraordinarily cost-effective because nature does all of the work, and evaporation areas are easily reusable, making solar salt one of the most cost-effective options currently on the market. However, this process also temporarily increases the presence of brine shrimp and bacteria in the salt. They die when the ratio of salt to the water gets too high, but it also means solar salt has a particularly high level of impurities when compared to other types of pool salt. This is why solar salt is the worst of the three types of pool salts.
