Sold my home w/ pool, bought a house with hot tub. Newbie questions....

[zimm]

I've been away for a couple of years. We sold our house which had a great pool. I learned how to take care of it here on TFP. Well in 2 months we close on a new house to us. It has a hot tub on the screened porch. At first we were going to toss it, but after seeing it during the home inspection, it looks like a pretty nice one.

Do I treat this thing just like a pool? Looks like I'll need another TFP test kit. I don't think I'm going to care about some levels like hardness and CYA. It has a big insulated cover on it.

Do I always keep it hot? I'm sure I'll have more questions after I get the house and read through the hot tub manual.

 

[MasterTinkerer]

As long as you plan to get into it, I would keep it hot. 100^o is the standard temp for mine.

Read the stickies at the top to get an understanding of how to balance your chemicals. You'll have to pick between Bromine and Chlorine. I used Bromine up to recently... tried Chlorine... then switched back. CYA will matter if you are going chlorine, and hardness will matter for both (hard water doesn't foam up as much)

For me, the hot tub takes a bit more focus to maintain than the pool does, but I love them equally.

- - - Updated - - -

1st thing I'd do with a new one is buy some AhhSome and do a flush... probably get a new filter too... who knows what might be floating in there.

 

[Jimrahbe]

z,

I picked up a used Hot Tub about six months ago and also recommend that you use Ahh-Some to flush it out before use.. It probably will take a couple of times to get rid of all the stuff that builds up in the pipes.. I would also install a new filter.

I like the way my saltwater pool works, so I converted my Hot Tub to use saltwater also.. There is no real "conversion", I just added salt and a Saltron Mini over the side cell.. Total cost was less than $200 bucks.

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Works great for us, but there are just two of us and although we use the tub almost every night, we don't stay in but about half an hour. As a general rule the FC stays up and the CC's are never more than 1 ppm. Once in while I might have to add a little extra liquid chlorine. For me, it is about as carefree as it can get.. I suspect with heavy use, it would take a little more effort. Just like a saltwater pool, you have to add CYA and keep an eye of CH, TA and pH...

The only problems I have had are pretty minor.. The unit has no clock.. so it just runs for the number of hours you set. It starts when you set it. The problem is, if you have a power outage it starts at the time the power comes back on.. Not a major issue, I just have to remember to reset it after an outage.

We leave ours on 24/7... set to about 95 degrees and then it automatically ramps up to 102 in time for our nightly soak..

Thanks for posting,

Jim R.