Solar Powered Pool Ioniser Review | Best Buyers Guide

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If you run a solar powered pool ioniser you’ll use a lot less chlorine or bromine products in the pool, and you don’t have to run the pool pump so often. It certainly won’t eliminate the need for chlorine completely but could reduce the amount you use by 60% or more.

Ideal for all pool users but obviously interesting for folks who have a sensitivity to chlorine. A pool ioniser is definitely not a chlorine substitute but by reducing the amount present in the pool the water will feel softer on your skin and the water has a more silkier feel. You’ll also notice your skin or hair doesn’t dry out the same way it did with a full chlorine system.

How A Pool Ioniser Works

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE IONS

Don’t worry this isn’t going to turn into a physics and chemistry class but to understand how an ioniser works you’ll need to know what an ion is.

Ions are everywhere and in abundance, in the air and in your pool too. They either have either a negative or positive charge.

We are breathing them in all the time in fact. Levels in the air can vary dramatically depending on weather conditions and where you are.

Negative ions can be created in huge amounts near waterfalls and even in your bathroom after you take a shower. Breathing in large quantities of negative ions make you feel great. Thats’s why you feel exhilarated when you take a stroll in the country especially by moving water like a river or just breath good clean country air, that’s packed with negative ions too.

But in our pool we want to create positive ions in the water because they’re what’s going to attach on to then attack and neutralise any potential algae attacks before they start. These positive ions are effective against bacteria too, but remember that the pool still needs a supplementary sanitiser, a pool ioniser can’t do it all on its own.

How does the magic happen? Well just like it says on the box using solar technology

In fact the solar powered pool ioniser combines new and old technology to produce a very small electrical current from the solar panels which is then passed through a copper electrode. Once the copper has been energised by the current it starts to lose positive ions to the water and they’re called “cations”.

They’re suspended in the pool water but when they encounter an anionic micro-organism like bacteria or algae precursors they attach on and effectively destroy them.

So there’s a war going to go on between good and evil and it’s going to happen in your pool. Yikes! We want the good guys to win but they’ll need a little help from our old friend chlorine.

Pool ionisers are great at fighting organic matter and bacteria. They’re not the best oxidisers though. That means they are not a complete pool sanitisation treatment. You will still need chlorine, but because the ioniser has taken care of a lot of the undesirable pool contaminants you’ll need significantly less.

TYPICAL CHLORINE VALUES

Normal pool chlorine is kept between 1 and 3 parts per million. Generally with the addition of an ioniser this can be reduced to somewhere between 0.5 – 1.0 per million. It doesn’t sound like a lot when we’re talking in parts per million but in fact it’s quite significant.

It’s a hard thing to visualise but you can certainly feel the difference in the water quality as mentioned above it’s softer, silkier and after a prolonged time in the pool you don’t come out suffering from red eye or prune skin.

ALTERNATIVE POOL IONISATION SYSTEMS

Solar powered ionisers will continue to run on slightly overcast days but not when the sun is clouded out, it’s obviously not going to function through the winter either.

So not everyone lives in a sun belt state, some folks have an indoor pool, others want to run their pool all year round. Of course the solution is a hard wired ioniser that’s going to run no matter what the month or the what the weather.

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This pool ioniser doesn’t run on free energy, but it’s pretty frugal. The manufacturer claims just a couple of cents a day, sixty cents a month, we’ll live with that.

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