I know that there are special saltwater swimming pools, but every article I read about them was about large pools that have various systems and so on.
What if instead you just put salt in a tiny intex pool of 4500l (1200 gallons) that has a small plastic pump?
For example would it change the smell to a more pleasant sea/ocean type of a smell or would it still smell the same as before? Also what about the use of chlorine, could it be lowered? I know that there are special saltwater pool pumps, but what if you didn’t use them and you just used the default plastic pump?
Saltwater swimming pools come in two forms. You could bring the salt concentration up to something like seawater. That would probably yield an environment where a large number of pesky biota would be unhappy. These exist. But it is lot of salt, and still not maintenance free. After all, there is plenty that lives in the sea.
The usual salt pool is a way of creating free chlorine in the water as an alternative to adding chlorine compounds directly. Much much less salt than seawater. Indeed just on the edge of taste. They require use of a electrolytic cell to create the free chlorine. Typically a reasonably beefy DC power supply and a cell make with ruthenium plated electrodes.
Cyanuric acid is used in any pool using chlorine sanitisation and that sees sunlight, as it acts to prevent UV light causing the free chlorine to degrade. The chlorine smell is from the combined (aka not the free) chlorine compounds, hence why cyanuric helps reduce the smell. It is the free chlorine that does the work. As it works it recombines, hence why you need an electrolytic cell to reverse the process.
There is a whole new world inside the terms “free chlorine” and the combined forms. Water is much more complicated than one might hope. Salt water chlorinator chemistry is much more complex than just free sodium and chloride ions in a solution of H2O molecules.
Your garden variety pool pump is not going to be happy being presented with seawater levels of salinity. Even the stainless steel bolts may corrode (depends on the grade.) That level of salinity will rust anything ferrous at an alarming rate. Pump motor bodies especially. And it will kill your garden. There was a reason the Romans salted the ground of a vanquished enemy. Saltwater chlorinators however use such a low concentration that it pretty much doesn’t matter.
You can get a saltwater pump for Intex pools. In fact, I just sold mine, as we upgraded to a inground pool this year. It was great, a bag of salt at startup and thanks to the fact vinyl pools are pretty forgiving about pH and the like, we didn’t have to mess with chemicals all summer.
Just adding salt to the pool with the little cheapy pump won’t do anything for sanitizing the water and might damage those garbage little pumps the pools come with. You need the saltwater pump so the electolytic cell can use the salt to santize the water.
We had an in-ground salt water swimming pool installed last year. The pump/chlorinator cell runs 8 hours a day and provides all the chlorine we need - unless we get a lot of fresh water in the form of rain, or we get too much rain and have to drain the pool and re-add from the hose.
The first 6 months required constant water monitoring, as the pool plaster, as it cured, constantly changed the chemical composition of the water. An above-ground pool probably wouldn’t have this problem, but the smaller water volume may present its own challenges in keeping things stable. You may have to be more vigilant about adding stabilizer, for instance.