I thought instead of saltwater the Intex had some mechanism that de-ionized the water or something else scientific sounding. So nothing other than the shock/cleaner type things were needed.
Of all the vids I see 99% of people seem to be doing the floaty thing with bromine and then maybe a bottle or two of other chems to "calm it down"/etc. I probably should educate myself on it so I don't end up in a dermatologist's office.
Sudo-science "or something". Pretend it doesn't exist. Use chlorine or bromine, either one. Follow
this guide for chlorine or this one
for bromine.
My hope is that if I put a layer of insulation sheathing/board under it, and if need be on top of it, that it will maintain the heat and keep the electric bill from spiking. Doesn't help once we're in it with the cover off though.
Yes, that will help. Not perfect but depends on ambient environment.
I did that for ours. I set ours up inside our "unheated" garage. I never saw it get below 50 °F, but the concrete was 50 as well, and there is almost no insulation on the bottom (tiny bubble wrap liner is all you get). I did some rough energy loss calculations that suggested I was loosing roughly 550 watts of heat through the bottom alone, and that adding 1.5" rigid foam board would drop that to 43 watts, saving 375 kWh ($40 @ $0.11/kWh) a month in standby losses. Unfortunately I couldn't find my power meter to do before/after measurements, but my electric bill did drop, and the temp loss with cover dropped as well...but didn't go away. With cover off, and insulation, at 50 °F ambient I'd loose about 1 °F per hour (more like 3 °F an hour before insulation) with no bubbles starting at 99 °F, our preferred temp. It took both the bottom insulation and ambient temps getting back up to around 60-65 °F in the garage before it could hold temp around 99 °F with the cover off and no bubbles.
Definitely get insulation to put it on, and keep my rough temps and temp loss in mind if you want to put this outside where it'll get colder.
More information: I got ours for my wife and I at Christmas. It's a "6-person" hot tub (more like 4 unless you like lots of touching legs). At first we were in it every day, that tapered down until we were only it in a couple times a week. Spring hit, and eventually I took it down after I realized it was warm enough I didn't feel like getting into a hot tub and neither of us had been in it in two or three weeks. So it's probably only had about 4 months of runtime so far. I'll be setting it back up when cool fall temps hit. Unlike some of the stories I've heard, I had zero air loss in the tub. I filled it up and 4 months later when I took it down it was still nice and stiff. In fact I haven't bothered to deflate it, I simply drained it and then stood it up on it's side in the garage.
On initial filling where it might be 70 °F or less, the temp will rise about 2 °F per hour. This drops to 1 °F, or less, per hour in the 90's and above. So you
have to keep it at temp all the time, unless going on a long trip. This means no dropping it down in temp to save money and heating it half an hour before getting into it, like you can with a real spa. An annoyance is that after 3 days of time, the pump (and so heater) will shut off. So if you don't use it for 4 days, you may come in to use it only to find it shut off, dropped 10 °F, and it'll take till tomorrow to reheat. If you use chlorine as I do, you'll be in there at least every-other day to add some, so just power the tub off and on again using the control panel to reset the shut-off timer when you test/add chlorine.
The bubbles...well, first off, I may be biased, as I dislike bubbles in other hot tubs as well. By other I mean public ones, the only ones I'd ever been in before this. (and now think hard about if I really want to get into them. The side affect of learning to take care of your own water: You learn that most people
don't take good care of their water and it starts giving you the heebie-jeebies when you think about getting into a spa/pool that's not yours). Anyhow, back to the bubbles. They advertise them as being massage bubbles, and there sure are a lot of them. But I wouldn't say they do much massaging. The air blower is annoyingly loud and high-pitched. A normal 120 V circuit can only supply 1800 watts and the NEC says that any permanent device can only draw 3/4 of that, which is 1350 watts, so the hot tub has a 1300 watt heater and 50 watt pump. But the air blower takes 800 W (don't quote that), so your 1300 watt heater drops to half power or so when you turn the air pump on. So now you have half your marginal heat, and
tons and tons of agitation from the bubbles, causing rapid heat loss. I think at 50 °F ambient, I could loose 4 °F in 20 minutes! On the flip side, they are
excellent for stirring up the hot tub, which makes the acid and aeration portion of the initial fill water balance go really fast.
Get a pack of filters with the tub. Mine uses two, and says to change every week. That seemed excessive to me from looking at them. I found that one had much more waterflow through it than the other (the one by the pump), so I'd remove and throw out the one by the pump, move the other one to the pump side, and put a new one in the one away from the pump. I'd do this every week or two, depending on how much we used the tub. This means 1 filter every week or two instead of two every week like they say.
Don't skimp on a
test kit. You're looking at $75-$125 depending on kit and if you get the SpeedStir (get it). Cheap kits, or worse, test strips, cannot tell you what you need to properly take care of your water. Avoid pool stores. They test water for free, then conveniently tell you what you need to add. See any issues with this? They rely on people not learning anything to sell loads of overpriced pool chemicals, when they could be buying dirt cheap common chemicals from any big box store instead. Below is my set of "pool chemicals" and test kit. Everything I needed to take care of my spa (except I forgot to throw the borax into the picture). You'll note only one is actually a pool/spa brand, and also the most expensive of the chemicals. And I use only a tiny portion of it, it'll last for years with a spa. Bottom line is this site saves you from buying all sorts of expensive pool chemicals the pool store or other sites will tell you to buy, and asks you nicely to buy an expensive test kit with
some of the savings instead.
2018-02-24_04-40-37 by
jseyfert3, on Flickr
Seats: Well, here's the biggest downside in my book. It's sure nice to soak in a big tub, don't get me wrong there. I'll actually read a book or my tablet and spend literally hours in the tub at a go if I have it at just the right temp. But what I wish for is a nice reclining seat. Of course you get those with a real spa, and this was a temporary one. What it told us it that we like it, and we would probably like a real spa even more. People with real spas report that nothing's better than sitting in the spa, sipping a drink, as snow falls around you. That sounds amazing. But you won't be doing that with an inflatable spa. Bottom line: I think it's a great way to see if you would like a spa. And if you do and you decide to upgrade, remember that the test kit will work just fine on a real spa too. Did I say it enough? No?
Get the right test kit!
(Sorry, some people balk at getting a good test kit, but you can't take care of a spa/pool properly with the wrong kit, and we can't help you either if we don't have the right numbers)
Do it!
