Aquarite 900 not generating

[michaeljoseph01]

This board is going to be my best friend this summer, I can already tell.

We have a 6 month old salt plaster pool, everything was great until about a month ago when I noticed it seemed like chlorine levels were dipping. I took the cell apart (t9) thinking it must be covered in deposits, and there were some scaling but really not bad at all and nothing compared to some photos of other cells I've seen. I was surprised because this part of Florida has very hard water, the hardness test strips are showing around 450... Anyways, did clean it and put it back in expecting my problem to be solved... Boy I was wrong. It's really not generating anything. If I switch to SUPER and test the chlorine at the end of the day, it will read very little but at least detectable, but when kept on AUTO at 70% it is not producing anything detectable and I have a small pool. The initial salt level when the pool people set everything up was 3500+ which I thought was high but after draining water it's now down to 3100. Voltage reading is 27.6, I read somewhere that it should be 22-25 when generating. Amps are 4.5. There are no error lights that have ever turned on. The cell is clean, it says generating, but clearly it isn't. 6 months old!!??

[Teapot1]

What is your salt level like?

[michaeljoseph01]

So I brought a water sample to the pool store, they said my salt was low. I added a bag, salt levels are now at 3400 via separate strip test. My stabilizer level was in the 40s so I added a whole container of dry stabilizer also thinking that HAS to solve the issue, stabilizer is now around 70. I am STILL having this issue!!??? I keep having to add liquid chlorine to my pool and it's gone within a day and a half, not sure if that's normal or not. The one thing I just noticed today.... it gets a little better when I run the pump at a higher speed. When the pool was first set up the maxflo vs500 was running at like 2700rpm all day. One thing I'm thinking about now is that about a month ago I reprogrammed it to run at an hour @ 2250 and the rest of the day @ 1750rpm. I think that might be around the time this problem started...

What gives? I've heard of people running salt water systems at waayyy lower speeds and not having trouble generating chlorine. Do you think the hayward aquarite 900 really just requires that high of a flow rate to generate chlorine in my setup? Why would that be? The other thing is even at low speeds I can plainly see chlorine gas bubbles coming from the return, but when I measure at that spot I get no reading. I'm experimenting now with higher pump speed to see if that is indeed the issue.

[Teapot1]

Adding more stabiliser will make the situation worse by redicing the effectiveness of what you have already. Ask on here first before adding stuff. You just require sufficient flow to activate the flow/pressure switch to make the chlorinator work. With salt cells they often short across the connection end rather than the actual plates so hard to see sometimes.