To prolong the life of a salt water chlorine generator's cell, would it be better to run the pool system at 25% for 24 hrs., 50% for 12 hrs. or 100% 6 hrs CircuPool RJ-PLUS Series Salt Chlorine Generators - Owner Resources Salt Chlorinators

Question

To prolong the life of a salt water chlorine generator's cell, would it be better to run the pool system at 25% for 24 hrs., 50% for 12 hrs. or 100% 6 hrs CircuPool RJ-PLUS Series Salt Chlorine Generators - Owner Resources Salt Chlorinators

I have a RJ-60 Plus

Status: Open Jul 31, 2026 - 08:08 AM

Do you have the same question? Follow this Question

1answer

Staff Answer

Jul 31, 2026 - 12:00 PM

There are multiple aspects to this question that are important to point out.

For salt chlorine generators generally, the less hours you put on them, the less time there is wear-and-tear occurring on the cell plates. To the extent that you can effect the situation, if you can minimize the hours at a medium output, that is likely an optimal scenario. The dynamic that plays the biggest difference is simply not generating more chlorine than your pool needs, keeping mineral scaling or solids from bridging the plates, keeping an optimal salinity level, and never inserting anything hard between the plates which might scratch their coatings.

Note that for models which count the usage of the cell in hours, note that if you give the system very long run times at low output, and assuming you're not unnecessarily over-chlorinating the water, the hours that it counts for the cell might reach the point where it alerts you to high usage, when the actual wear on the cell isn't yet that near to being at end of life.

For scenarios where a user might have things set for a very small number of hours of run time at high output, while you might have a net effect of maintaining the necessary chlorine residual, you likely will be having greater swings of the chlorine level throughout the day. The level would likely be higher hours the system is running, and lower by the time the day has passed and time nears when the system would begin generating chlorine again. So you wouldn't want to be extreme about minimizing the system's run time.

Ultimately a balanced approach is probably a good way strategy to address all of the concerns involved.

For the RJ-series models in particular that the question was asked about, it has a "duty-cycle" which begins and ends its chlorine generation regularly throughout the day at a frequency determined by the chlorine output setting, so this will help to mitigate the downside of having the system set to run a higher number of hours (again assuming it is set to produce only enough chlorine to keep a 1-3ppm free chlorine level overall).