About your daughter and her rash — I don’t feel qualified to address that. My first thought was that it’s more likely chloramines than chlorine, but it may be something else entirely. Have you had your family physician look at it?

I don’t feel real comfortable recommending any particular brand. The manufacturer I use makes a product suited to my needs; your needs may be different, so I’d hate to tell you to get brand X when Y may be more appropriate. Please just consider this post a starting place, then do a little more research on your own. Check with the local pool store, pool service people, coworkers, friends and family, maybe an online forum.

Boy, looking through this response to your questions, I wasn’t a whole lot of help, huh? If, after checking into things a bit more, you still have questions, please email me.

My 5 year old daughter gets little itchy, rash-like bumps, which we think might be from chlorine, so we’ve been looking at using other things instead. Maybe salt isn’t so good, but ozone sounds promising. Which brand of ozone would you recommend?

One thing first — SWG stands for Salt Water Generator, for those not familiar with the acronym.

It’s a piece of equipment that converts salt in the pool water into chlorine. Add a whole bunch of salt to the pool, install one of these miniature chlorine factories, and no more need to add chlorine.

At least that’s what the sales people tell you. They’ll also tell you it’s a “friendlier” form of chlorine; that there’ll be no more need to add chemicals to your water; that you won’t have to buy or transport chemicals again; and so on.

In the real world, though, many of those claims don’t stand up. I think that these units appeal to you and others because they believe that they’ll them save time and/or money. It will do neither.

You will still need to regularly test your chemicals, as you would for a regular pool, adding chlorine occasionally (especially in cooler weather) and acid a lot (these salt cells tend to raise pH a pretty fair amount, so need to acid to bring pH back down). Plus you’ll need to clean the salt cell itself …

Neither will they save you money. Setting aside the cost of the unit initially, in the future you’ll need to replace the cell every four or five years. Those cost about $600, which if spread out over 4-5 years is just slightly less than you’d spend on chlorine.

And there sometimes problems with corrosion, damage to deck/coping/landscaping due to salt, and other problems (check link on home page to poolbiz, a site that is critical of salt cells and salt pools).

Anyway, the downside to salt seems too great, besides being WAY oversold by sales reps. That’s the reason I’ve been trying out ozone: salt leaves a lot to be desired, and people still want low-fuss pools. Now, ozone ain’t magic, make no mistake; you’re still going to need to take care of your pool. But it does have some definite positives. Hopefully, as time goes by I’ll see more results from the pools I’ve installed it on.

Hope this helps. Enjoy your swimming and sun worshiping.

Question about SWG: will they work with ozone, using them both together? Ozone sounds like something to check out for sure and I’ve heard a lot about SWG. I’m trying to get away from messing with our new (6 mos.) pool, and from what a coworker says, it sounds like this may be the way to go. Ozone and chlorine added automagically. I can spend more time enjoying the pool and sun worshipping instead, instead of doing chemicals and things.