Salt Chlorine Generator

I want a salt pool!  Wow we hear that a lot… we also hear “I don’t want a chlorine pool, I want a salt pool”.  That is when the education starts.  I always like to use simplistic terms, so as basic as possible, we ask folks if they remember in chemistry back in high school, another name for salt was sodium chloride.  Well, when we add water and electricity  to a plate covered with rhodium, we get two by-products.  One is chlorine gas, which comes from the chloride portion of sodium chloride.  The other by-product is sodium hydroxide, which comes from the sodium part of sodium chloride… obviously, the hydroxide comes from the water portion (H2O).  The nice thing about salt chlorine generators is that they keep pH much more balanced.  While chlorine gas has a very low pH of below 1, sodium hydroxide has a very high pH of above 13.  pH is on a scale from 0 – 14.  Zero is acidic and 14 is scale forming.  The ideal range for pH is 7.4 to 7.6.  The reason why people love swimming in salt water pools is much more because with traditional chlorine tablets, they have a pH of 2.9 and tend to make the water acidic and even eat up equipment (especially heaters).  A human eye, with a pH of 7.4 likes water that is close to that pH.  With salt, your pH will tend to rise slowly (usually), but much slower than pH lowers with chlorine tablets.  The salt level in the ocean is appx. 32,000 parts per million of salt.  In salt pools, it is at 3,200 parts per million, or only about 10% of sea water.  So unlike opening your eyes in the ocean, we even use saline solution in our eyes from time to time to keep them from burning.  The salt feel is good for our skin and a good feel overall!