My experience with Ahh-some

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trudge

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Jun 24, 2012
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I got a new hot tub up and running about 3 weeks ago. I was having some issues with rising chlorine demand which I thought was settling down but started to rise again. On the advice of one of the members (JoyfulNoise) I purchased a container of Ahh-some to do a purge. I have a 250 gallon tub so I put in 2 1/2 teaspoons, set the air and jets on high and let it go to work.

It started foaming pretty quickly and after not much time I started seeing some greenish/brown gunk on the foam. I had read some of the other posts on TFP about using Ahh-some so I was wiping the scum off the sides as the process moved along.

The directions say to run the spa for 15-30 minutes and then drain. I have read that others vary on this time and method so I ran it for an hour. More gunk kept coming out so I just kept wiping it off the sides. The foam and gunk gradually diminished and after an hour there wasn't really any foam or gunk left so that is when I drained the tub. I did turn the jets on for a few seconds with an empty tub to clear the lines out as much as possible per the instructions.

I didn't get near the foaming and gunk that I have seen others get when they have used Ahh-some but was surprised by what I did get since it is a new tub. I am glad I did the purge and will definitely use Ahh-some at each water change. Hopefully this will help with my initial issue of high chloring demand.
 
When I did it to mine I ran it for about 40 minutes. I was happy I had your type of results where I didn't get that much scum out of the pipes. Next time I will try running mine for an hour. I will definitely be using Ahh some to keep mine clean from here on out.
 
Congratulations! You've completed a very important milestone in spa maintenance and joined the ranks of those who have proved by experience that new spas are often shipped already contaminated with biofilms.

I had that experience with my hot springs grande which was delivered contaminated. Had trouble from day one until I did the ahhsome thing. Even tested a handful of other products and came away astonished at what they dont do!
 
Yeah for this run anyway an hour seemed to be perfect. Foam and gunk had pretty much disappeared after an hour. My baseline chlorine demand is 43% which is 10% better than what I got the first time so that was a good outcome. I will definitely be doing this at every water change.
 
Nice work. I did quite a bit of experimenting a while back. If you're interested in a long read, the below is what convinced me to purge with ahhsome

Zenfolio | Photos by Boise Diesel | Controling biofilms in spas and hot tubs - PART 1


It's really good to see someone else concerned about decay rate. I'm interested in more of your data..43% sounds high to me. At what level do u measure it? I'll be posting some bromine results soon ..... with bromine and ozone in play I'm getting some crazy low decay rates but I find it is NOT linear
 
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So I just tested my FC and CD went from 43% to 62% from the initial baseline calculation. Last night FC was at 7.8 after I soaked and added dichlor. Today (about 21 hours later) it was down to 3. This is pretty much what happened on my first initial fill. The CD steadily climbed for a few days and then started to drop but then started to go up so I did the Ahh-some purge. From reading some other posts is this maybe happening because of residual Ahh-some still kicking out some gunk which the chlorine is working on?

My limited knowledge on CD is based on the write up Nitro did (same person who wrote chlorine sticky). He does say once you start using the tub the CD will go up but you are shooting for your baseline. He says 25% is ideal and 50% is what a lot of people have. From what I gather from his post you need to keep shocking until CD gets to a healthy level. Is this the best course of action to take?
 

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I have a bit different approach to measuring sanitizer demand that stems from the observation that the numbers are meaningless under load. there is always high sanitizer demand well after soak , so you dont know if the sanitizer is being consumed by bather load or biofilms.

I find that removing the bather load variable is essential and that the real data of interest is to plot fc levels over time , without using the spa.

Its the shape of the decay curve that is important. I have measured 11 ppm on day one and 9 ppm on day 2, which is 20% decay. But I also measure a half ppm drop from 1ppm to .5ppm over 24 hours which is 50% decay. All under no load, covered of course. Note that I have a bromine spa with an ozone generator, which itself contributes to bromine production, so my data will look different.

Anywsy the 25% rule of thumb for me is a reasonable starting point but it really doesn't mean anything if there is bather load..

Consider too that that 25% loss at 4ppm means a drop from 4 to 3, but it also implies a drop from 1ppm to .75ppm which I have only seen in a bromine spa with ozone assisting in the production of bromine. So what this means is you need to measure decay at the same level (say, 4ppm) and after the post-soak demand has subsided and you have true no load conditions
 
That makes sense with the bather load messing up the actual decay rate. I am sure that the chlorine is working and being used up for awhile after I get out. A good portion of the sanitizer I put in after the soak is probably used up so that wouldn't be a true chlorine demand when I check it the next day. Again that makes a lot of sense. I guess I would have to wait a period of time (I'm not sure how long exactly) after I get out and then add more sanitizer to a set value. I will give this a try. I do think it is probably good advice as per Nitro's CD post to make sure and use enough chlorine when soaking and afterwards.
 
So just to chime in here on the discussion, I shocked mine Sunday night to a calculated FC: 13 at 7PM When I checked it Monday evening at 6 it was down to FC:6.5. Not sure if it was actually 13 or not after shocking it and we had used it on Sunday, to me I thought that seemed like a lot of demand but I whave only been doing this a week so I'm not sure.

I wanted to see what happened if I shocked it agian. I ended up shocking again last night and it hit FC:15 at about 20 minutes after shocking. I checked it this morning and it was down to a FC: 13 level. I will check it agian when I get home this afternoon and see where it is then. I have no idea if that acceptable or not I just wanted to watch it and see what it does.
 
Fun stuff. Next time I drain I'm going to go straight dichlor (instead of bromine)to see if I can achieve the high decay rates that all y'all are getting. Maybe my ozone generator is helping more than I thought. Since ozone eats chlorine I should easily achieve these high numbers and get a better appreciation for FC behavior in a clean spa.

The other suggestion I have, if you have reason to question your sanitizer demand, is to purge again. I had to purge twice -- thing is, you dont know if you're done until you have a spa dosed with ahhsome releasing no new material. So in my case the third purge didn't release anything new and I had the cleanest known to man lol
 
Certified106 said:
So just to chime in here on the discussion, I shocked mine Sunday night to a calculated FC: 13 at 7PM When I checked it Monday evening at 6 it was down to FC:6.5. Not sure if it was actually 13 or not after shocking it and we had used it on Sunday, to me I thought that seemed like a lot of demand but I whave only been doing this a week so I'm not sure.

I wanted to see what happened if I shocked it agian. I ended up shocking again last night and it hit FC:15 at about 20 minutes after shocking. I checked it this morning and it was down to a FC: 13 level. I will check it agian when I get home this afternoon and see where it is then. I have no idea if that acceptable or not I just wanted to watch it and see what it does.
Click to expand...

So at almost 24 hours later my FC was at 9.5. not sure if that's good or bad? Does it decrease faster at higher FC levels?
 
I think you are saying 3.5 ppm loss at nominal 13ppm . That might be ok for your spa. Have you purged twice with ahhsome ti prove squeaky clean? If so then maybe that's just what you get. I'll have to reserve judgement until I experiment myself as all my data is bromine and I see 2ppm drop at those nominal levels, over 24 hrs. All covered and no load
 
Certified106 That's a chlorine demand of 37% which I think is pretty good. I have an ozonator which I guess may be part of the issue with the FC dropping quickly. I didn't soak last night and it was at 5ppm. I just tested it and I got 2.6 so CD of 48%. Better than the 62% I had the day before. That seems like a valid measurement since I did not soak last night and therefore took bather load out of the equation I think. I think it will take some multiple tests to see where I actually am and try to either account for bather load or take it out of the equation.
 
Yea that's the only way to establish decay rate: eliminate the variable of bather load by waiting until soaker contaminants are oxidized, and eliminate the variable of biofilms by purging. Now I'm anxious to test this myself with chlorine and the chlorine eating ozone

Btw if have always interpreted the 25% decay rate as measured at a nominal value that is within normal ranges, i.e 1-3 ppm FC and 4-6ppm bromine . You'll get a different %decay rate at 15ppm than you will at 3
 
So decay rate will be different at various starting ppm levels? That was something I was wondering about. CD is very different if you burn up 2 ppm starting at 15 rather than 3. A comparable CD starting at 3 ppm would only mean a loss of .5 ppm. So how do you find your true CD? Seems like it can be all over the map based on your starting point.
 
That has been my experience with bromine and an ozone generator. with chlorine I simply haven't tested. but consider that if the 25% rule of thumb were completely accurate, you would never see zero, so this observation, along with my bromine experiments confirm that the decay rate of some percent is only meaningful at a specified nominal value. for example, I saw 2ppm decay at 20ppm and 2ppm decay at 16, which told me that (for my bromine spa) the natural decay rate under no no load is best expressed as "2ppm" -- but thats for high sanitizer levels! when things dropped down to lower levels where my ozone generator could start to contribute, I saw the "percent decay" rise considerably but the actual ppm loss was very small (1ppm to .5ppm is 50% decay but a very attractive performance indeed!). I regret that I can't turn off my ozone generator...

so my point is that the decay rate expressed as a percentage would only be meaningful at some nominal value and if you choose that nominal value to be within the normal accepted ranges, you are considerably more accurate, imho. that is, measure FC decay at 2 or 3ppm cause you wouldn't want to get in at much higher than that anyway. I'll have to do some chlorine experimentation myself but really interested in your data too
 

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