Morton's makes a 40lb bag of pool salt. White and blue bag... usually Walmart carries it for around $5-6. It's granulated...no need to crush anything.

I was actually thinking about making some sort of plastic strainer to put the whole pellets in.
Dont know how that will work, guess i will have to experiment a little!

Ooooorrrrr.... you could look at my suggestion above.

No idea how much to suggest for you to use, but we salted our pool and used water softner pellets by just throwing them in and playing in the pool. Took about half an hour for them to dissolve. Just be sure that your salt source has nothing in it but salt. Some softner salts have other "stuff" in them.

wow so far im impressed with the mini saltron unit
last night i measured my ppm in the spa, and it was only 350
i looked on the chart of the manual for how much salt to use, it came out to 8.5 lbs., i added and today my ppm is 2800
instead of using the expensive strips i bought a salt 3000 and love that too!!