- Jan 5, 2011
- 2
Have used our Sundance Chelsee hot tub since end 2008 with no problems. It lives at our holiday home in the Pyrenees in France, when we return to England we empty it and turn it off, as power outages can be common in this mountain region and we don't ever want it to freeze.
All has been good until we filled it on our return to France last week. As soon as we turned the jets on the water was filled with hundreds of flakes of ....well, who knows but some kind of mould maybe. Emptied the water, refilled, adjusted PH and added bromide, turned on jets again, still a lot of bits but not as many. Since then I have washed out main filter 3 times and fished out any remaining flakes with a nylon sieve. my water now is pretty much flake-free.
questions:
what are the flakes?
now I have mechanically removed them is the tub safe to use?
how can I stop this happening in the future?
As a postscript to the last question, I noticed this time when we took the cover off there was quite a bit of rain water in the tub which had blown in under the cover. when we empty we use an air compressor to empty pipes so I know it was completely empty when we left it. we plan to rig up an additional cover to stop such water getting in but could this be the cause?
I will post my chemical readings if you want but as this happened on fill-up (i.e. before any chemicals were added) I'm not sure how relevant current readings are.
and one final point (sorry guys this is a bit of a saga isn't it) my pool guy tells me just to put in 1 bromide tablet per week as the ozonator keeps water clean but doing this my test results have always shown bromide levels to be on the low side. could a couple of years of under-sanitising be a factor?
thanks so much for any help you can give 2 Brits!
All has been good until we filled it on our return to France last week. As soon as we turned the jets on the water was filled with hundreds of flakes of ....well, who knows but some kind of mould maybe. Emptied the water, refilled, adjusted PH and added bromide, turned on jets again, still a lot of bits but not as many. Since then I have washed out main filter 3 times and fished out any remaining flakes with a nylon sieve. my water now is pretty much flake-free.
questions:
what are the flakes?
now I have mechanically removed them is the tub safe to use?
how can I stop this happening in the future?
As a postscript to the last question, I noticed this time when we took the cover off there was quite a bit of rain water in the tub which had blown in under the cover. when we empty we use an air compressor to empty pipes so I know it was completely empty when we left it. we plan to rig up an additional cover to stop such water getting in but could this be the cause?
I will post my chemical readings if you want but as this happened on fill-up (i.e. before any chemicals were added) I'm not sure how relevant current readings are.
and one final point (sorry guys this is a bit of a saga isn't it) my pool guy tells me just to put in 1 bromide tablet per week as the ozonator keeps water clean but doing this my test results have always shown bromide levels to be on the low side. could a couple of years of under-sanitising be a factor?
thanks so much for any help you can give 2 Brits!