Adding a hot tub or spa to your can improve the quality of your life, bringing luxury, and an inviting escape to your backyard. Being a new hot tub owner can be both exciting and a little overwhelming at first. That’s why we’ve come up with this list of quick tips to help you!
Regularly Test & Maintain Your Water
The most crucial step to your long term enjoyment of your hot tub is to regularly test and treat your hot tub water! Unbalanced water can cause a host of issues, from foamy water to scale buildup to green water. To ensure that your hot tub water stays clear and comfortable you’ll want to test it weekly by using a home test kit or stopping in at one of our locations. Having your spa water professionally tested at least once a month at one out stores will help ensure that the water will be balanced and sanitized and in the safest condition for use.
Based on your results, you may need to add in some small amounts of balancing or sanitizing chemicals. If you’re unsure about what to add, or how much bring in a sample of your water.
Add Your Chemicals Correctly
Believe it or not, how you add chemicals to your hot tub water can make a big difference in how effectively they do their job. To ensure the chemicals you add to your hot tub water are working at peak efficiency you will need to do 2 things:
- Make sure the jets are turned on. Turning the jets on (with the air controls off) keeps the chemicals suspended in the water as they dissolve and prevents them clumping together on the seats or floor of the hot tub. This ensures that the chemical dissolves fully and is spread evenly throughout the water.
- Add each chemical at least 15 minutes apart. Spacing out your chemicals for at least 15 minutes give each chemical the opportunity to fully incorporate into the water before the next chemical is added. This prevents the chemicals interacting with each other in ways that can reduce their effectiveness and negatively affect the water balance of your hot tub water.
Take Your Water Samples With The Jets Running
Before taking your water sample we recommend that you run the hot tub’s jet pumps for a couple of minutes. Taking your test at the surface of the water, for example, might yield different results than if the sample were taken from water at the bottom of the hot tub.
This is especially true of sanitizer levels, with the level of sanitizer typically being much higher near the dispenser. For this reason, it’s usually a good idea to mix the water up for a few minutes before taking your sample. By mixing up the water you even out the small differences in the water balance throughout the water; giving you a more accurate result.
Leave Your Cover Open When Adding Chemicals
Always leave your cover fully open for at least 30 minutes after shocking your hot tub water. Shocking the water helps your bromine or chlorine work more effectively by releasing gases like Nitrogen that bond to them.
If you close your cover after shocking these gases can’t escape, reducing the effectiveness of the shock treatment and damaging the underside of the cover.
Store Your Chemicals and Test Kits Indoors
Keep your chemicals out of reach of children and pets. To keep your chemicals and test kits working at peak efficiency you’ll want to store them in a dry space that isn’t too hot or too cold. High heat and humidity can negatively affect the performance of all chemicals. Extreme cold can also freeze liquid based chemicals, which can degrade their effectiveness once thawed back out.
Regularly Clean & Replace Your Filters
To keep your filters working at peak efficiency, you will need to rinse them every 2-4 weeks (depending on use). This can be done either with a garden hose or under a sink. This will help remove any built up dirt or other particulate trapped in the filter but won’t effectively remove all the oils and lotions. For that you will need to chemically clean the filters by submerging them in filter cleaner. This should be done every 3-4 months, depending on how often you use the hot tub.
Over time, the woven layers that make up a hot tub filter will begin to loosen and expand. As they expand, larger and larger material can pass through the filter. This can lead to water quality and clarity issues. For this reason, hot tub filters should be replaced around once per year (depending on use).
Get A Set Of Backup Filters
For best results, you’ll want to let your filters fully dry after a chemical cleaning before you put them back into the hot tub. To ensure that your hot tub doesn’t run without a filter during this time, we recommend rotating between two sets of filters. While you clean one, the other can be put into the hot tub. When it is time to chemically clean that filter, the original can be put back in the hot tub and so on.
Keep Your Cover Closed & Locked When Not In Use
When you’re not using the hot tub, keep the cover closed. There are a few reasons for this:
- Closing the cover, greatly increasing the energy efficiency of the hot tub.
- If the cover is closed, debris like dirt and leaves can’t get in the water. This keeps the water cleaner and means that you’ll go through less chemicals.
- If the cover is open during the day, the UV radiation from the Sun can quickly break down the sanitizer in the water, allowing bacteria to grow more easily.
Close Your Air Controls When Not In Use
Before getting out of your hot tub you’ll want to make sure that you’ve shut all i air controls. This is because adding air to water raises its pH, lowers the water temperature, and can cause you to go through more sanitizer!
