Will Witt

I think the post by jond neatly sums up the situation - and we only charge 1000 - 2000 euros for salt water chlorination systems in a new pool - certainly not 4000!

Sorry last phrase should have read - "and alarms may even be removed then"

We will all know when it happens because there will be a lot of publicity - but this is probably not the main issue at the moment. There seems to be a gathering consensus in the industry that alarms  do not work - and I agree.  Unfortunately it is very likely that sooner or later a child will drown and the pool alarm will either be found to have been  deactivated because it was going off at random times at day and night or it just did not work! The alarms will then be removed from the approved list and everyone will have to have an approved cover or a fence - and they cost several times what an alarm costs. The law is also up for review - this year I believe - and fences may even be removed then.

I do have reservations about salt water chlorination but pumping out a few hundred litres of  back wash water onto a lawn for instance is not one of them - having said that no pool backwash water should be allowed to get into water-courses for obvious reasons. The salt concentration in salt water chlorination is about one tenth of  sea-water and there are places in the world where crops are regularly irrigated by waste water that has higher levels of salinity than this. The point is that all plants and crops vary in their resistance to salinity. In France where we have a quite high rainfall the salinity also gets washed away every times that it rains and so there is a constant natural dilution process at work. So if you pump your backwash water out onto your lawn your grass may go a bit brown for a while but you will not create a desert in your back garden!!! What is the advantage of salt water chlorination - In saltwater pools there is 0.5 to 1.0 ppm chlorine and in traditional pools there is 3.0 - 10.0 ppm chlorine - if someone is very sensitive to chlorine then this could make a big difference to their enjoyment of their swimming pool. What are the disadvantages? It is more expensive to install - but cheaper to run In hard water areas like Charente-Maritime and the Dordogne the very hard water causes scale deposits to form on the electrodes. The cell then needs to be taken apart and the electrodes cleaned off with an appropriate acidic cleaner. This can even happen every month or so if the pH control is not rigorous. If you want to read more about salt water chlorination please look at my blog of December 30th here  http://www.bluepools.typepad.com/bluepools/

I would like to clarify a few things as we are based in Jonzac. We do not have an office in Lorignac and we have never worked for JJ. We absolutely guarantee that we make sure that all our clients are 100% satisfied with their pool before we ask for the final payment. We will then attend the site and repair / replace anything that goes wrong with the pool in the first two years of operation - provided that it has been operated and maintained properly. And the structures of our pools are guaranteed for life.

The micro-organisms that carry out the purification process in a fosse system are very dependent on there being constant conditions in both the tank ( where about 25% of the water purification takes place) and the filter bed (where the remaining 75% of the pollutants and the pathogens are removed). If the fosse is suddenly loaded with the contents of a pool it will stop working immediately - and maybe for a long time if the water has a high chlorine content