Salt System Conversion Pricing Calculator (what to charge for a salt changeover)
Price a saltwater conversion from your own numbers: cell and board cost, markup, install hours, the initial salt charge from your pool volume, start-up visit and the cell replacement that follows.
How this is calculated
Two halves. The salt charge is a mass balance on the pool's own volume; the rest is a build-up from hardware at your cost with your markup, plus time you enter at your rate. Task times are per technician and crew size multiplies them. Drive time is tracked twice, so every drive hour lands in your cost while only the share you choose to bill lands in the charge. The licensed electrical line is dropped entirely unless you tick it in, because an excluded scope should leave no trace in the number. And the replacement cell is valued separately: it never touches this quote.
deltaPpm = max(0, targetPpm - currentPpm)
saltLb = deltaPpm x (volumeGal / 10,000) x 0.0834
bags = ceil(saltLb / bagSize) (rounded UP)
saltCharge = bags x pricePerBag x (1 + saltMarkup)
equipCost = cellCost + plumbingCost
equipCharge = equipCost x (1 + equipMarkup)
onSite = installHours + startupHours + extraHours
crewHours = onSite x crewSize
driveCrew = driveHours x crewSize
billedDrive = driveCrew x driveBillPct
labour = (crewHours + billedDrive) x chargeRate
elecCharge = elecCost x (1 + elecMarkup) (only when ticked in)
subtotal = equipCharge + saltCharge + labour + elecCharge
quote = max(subtotal, jobMinimum)
tax = quote x taxRate
valueAdded = quote - equipCost - saltCost - elecCost
cost = equipCost + saltCost + elecCost
+ (crewHours + driveCrew) x costRate
margin = (quote - cost) / quote
replacement = replacementCell x (1 + markup)
+ replacementHours x crewSize x chargeRate
perYear = replacement / cellLifeYearsWorked example, the one the tests pin. A 20,000 gallon pool that has never been salted, taken to 3,200 ppm. The salt half: 3,200 x 2 x 0.0834 = 533.76 lb, which is 14 bags of 40 lb with 26.24 lb left over, 168 at cost and 210 charged at a 25% markup. The money half: a 750 cell and 120 of plumbing is 870 of hardware, charged at 1,174.50 on a 35% markup; install 3 h plus a 1 h start-up visit is 4 crew-hours at 110, so labor is 440; the one-hour round trip is not billed and the electrician is excluded. Subtotal 1,824.50, which is the quote. Paid hours are 5.0, so the headline reads 364.90 per paid crew-hour; strip the hardware and salt back out at cost and the job returns 786.50, or 157.30 per paid crew-hour. At a 55 cost per crew-hour the job costs 1,313 for a gross profit of 511.50 and a realised margin of 28.0%. The replacement horizon, a 600 cell at 35% plus an hour to fit it, is worth 920 when it comes due, about 184 a year over five years, and none of it is in the quote above.
The one real constant, with its basis. Salt dosing runs on 0.0834 lb of salt per ppm per 10,000 US gallons. That is not a rule of thumb, it is arithmetic: water weighs about 8.34 lb per US gallon, so one part per million of 10,000 gallons is 8.34 / 1,000,000 x 10,000 = 0.0834 lb. Metric readers get the same identity in a friendlier form, since a litre of water weighs essentially a kilogram: kg = litres x ppm / 1,000,000. The pool salt calculator uses the identical constant, deliberately, so the two pages can never disagree about how many bags a pool needs.
Bags round up, and the tool shows the leftover. You cannot buy two thirds of a bag, so a pool needing 13.3 bags takes 14 off the truck. The leftover is printed rather than hidden, because it is the part you either carry back or leave with the customer, and it is the reason the last bag always feels like a rounding error until it happens fifty times a season.
Target salinity is editable and advisory. The box starts at 3,200 ppm and the tool flags a target outside roughly 2,700 to 3,400 ppm, but that band is an advisory, not a rule: generators differ, and the manual for the cell you are installing is the authority. Change the number when the manual says something else. Nothing on this page is a substitute for reading it.
Sizing the cell is a different question. Which cell class goes on the pool, and how far to oversize it, is settled in the salt cell sizing calculator. This page starts after that decision: it takes the cell you specified and turns the job into a number. Two rungs, one entity, and they should not be collapsed into one page.
Why value added matters more than the headline per hour. A conversion quote is mostly hardware. Dividing the whole quote by crew-hours therefore produces a per-hour figure that flatters the job and cannot be compared with a service-only rate. So the tool also strips the pass-throughs back out (hardware at cost, salt at cost, the electrician at cost) and reports what is left per paid crew-hour.
What the conversion does not include. This tool prices; it does not balance water. Stabilizer, the existing chlorine residual and the rest of the start-up chemistry are separate work and belong on the product label and in the dosing tools. Two other things are worth writing into the quote rather than discovering later: the customer is buying a running-cost change as much as a comfort change, which is the argument the chlorine type cost comparator makes in numbers, and salt water is harder on some deck, coping and metal fittings than the water it replaces, so look at what surrounds the pool before you promise anything about it.
Everything runs in your browser. No account, no email gate, nothing stored or sent.
One changeover, priced as a job
Converting a pool to salt is an equipment sale wrapped around an install. There is a cell and a control board you buy at a price nobody publishes, plumbing and bonding parts, a cut-in, a start-up visit that almost always happens on a different day, an initial salt charge that depends entirely on how much water is actually in the pool, and a question about who is allowed to touch the circuit. This calculator builds the quote from those lines and stops there. One job per page: one changeover, one number you can send.
And then, three to six years later, the same customer needs a cell. That is the part of this job that makes it worth winning, so the tool values it separately and keeps it out of today’s quote.
Sizing the cell is a different rung
Which cell goes on the pool, and how far to oversize it for the water it has to keep up with, is settled in the salt cell sizing calculator. That is an equipment decision and it comes first. This page takes the cell you specified and prices the work around it. Two rungs on one entity, and pricing before sizing is how a quote ends up built around the wrong hardware.
Every money field starts empty on purpose
Search for the cost of a saltwater conversion and you will find plenty of numbers. They are homeowner cost bands, written for the person paying the invoice and assembled by directories quoting each other. None of them knows your distributor pricing, your markup policy or your loaded crew cost, which are the only three numbers that decide whether this job earned anything. So every currency box here starts blank.
Three figures are pre-filled, and all three are editable for a reason. The target salinity starts at 3,200 ppm because that sits inside the band the sibling salt tools document, 2,700 to 3,400 ppm, but the manual for the cell you are installing is the authority and generators differ. The bag size follows the unit toggle, 40 lb in US units and 25 kg in metric, because that is what comes off most trucks. And the cell life in the horizon block is a placeholder for a number only you and the manufacturer can supply.
The salt charge is the one piece of real arithmetic
Everything else on this page is a build-up. The salt is a mass balance, and it is shown with its basis rather than asserted: 0.0834 lb of salt per ppm per 10,000 US gallons, which is simply the 8.34 lb that a US gallon of water weighs, divided by a million, multiplied by ten thousand. Metric readers get the same identity in a friendlier shape, because a litre of water weighs essentially a kilogram: kg = litres x ppm / 1,000,000.
That means the bag count is only as good as the volume. Measure it, do not inherit it from the last guy’s paperwork. And when you need the dose on its own, away from a quote, the pool salt calculator runs the identical constant, deliberately, so the two pages can never disagree about how many bags a pool needs.
Bags round up, because you cannot buy two thirds of a bag, and the leftover is printed rather than hidden. It is the part you carry back or leave behind, and over a season it is not nothing.
The start-up visit is a second trip, and it should be priced like one
Salt takes time to dissolve, so the salinity reading that tells you whether the cell is set correctly is not available on install day. That means most conversions are two visits, and the drive time is doubled. The calculator tracks drive hours twice: every hour lands in your cost, because you pay the crew for it regardless, and only the share you nominate lands in the charge. If a job with four crew-hours of work is carrying three crew-hours of windshield, that is worth seeing before you discount it.
What the conversion does not include, and should say so
This tool prices; it does not balance water. Stabilizer, the existing chlorine residual and the rest of the start-up chemistry are separate work, they belong on the product label and in the dosing tools, and nothing on this page quantifies them.
Two other exclusions are worth writing into the quote rather than discovering later. The first is the licensed electrical work: a generator needs a supply and a bond that meet code, and the tool asks which side of the quote that sits on every time you leave the line empty. The second is everything the salt water will be in contact with, since some deck, coping and metal fittings tolerate it better than others. Look at what surrounds the pool before you promise anything about it.
What the customer is really buying, meanwhile, is a change in running cost and handling, and that argument is far better made in numbers than in adjectives. The chlorine type cost comparator is where the per-ppm comparison belongs, and bringing it to the conversation turns a sales pitch into arithmetic.
Judge the job on value added
A conversion quote is mostly hardware. Divide the whole number by crew-hours and you get a per-hour figure that looks wonderful and cannot be set beside a service rate. So the tool reports both: the headline, and the same figure with the hardware, the salt and the electrician stripped back out at cost. The second number is what the labor half of the job actually returned, and it is the one that tells you whether the install was worth the day.
Everything runs in your browser: no account, no email gate, nothing stored or sent. Estimate only, not a binding quote.