Hot Tub Water Testing?

[Madison Mike]

I'm wondering if anyone here has a business or side business testing and or maintaining other folks hot tubs. I can see making a go at it with the pool industry, but is there any market for water testing spas? I have looked in my area for water testing, and the only businesses that do the water testing were the dealers. I am talking about going to the residence and testing on site, as opposed to them bringing in a sample of their water.

 

[Isaac-1]

There are a couple of big differences between hot tubs and pools, and they both revolve around the fact that hot tubs are much smaller.

1, It is industry standard practice to dump the water and refill about every 3 month, pool owners would not accept that.

2, Because they are so small you get wildly swinging chlorine levels before vs after each use.

These factors tend to make people, even ones that should know better a bit more casual about hot tub testing.

Ike

 

[chem geek]

There are services that maintain hot tubs. I know my cousin uses one for his hot tub at a beach house they use only on weekends. Typically it's a once a week visit for service so usually a bromine system is used with tabs in a floating feeder since it's not practical to use chlorine without dosing more frequently, most especially if an ozonator is used. Some services do use chlorine with an ozonator and hope that the ozone is enough to keep the spa from going south -- sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't since it depends on how long the ozonator is on and how much of a residual it leaves in the water that is usually turned down to 80-90ºF when not in use.

The main problem is that there should be disinfectant/oxidizer dosing after the spa is used since the bather load in a spa is far, far higher than in a pool and is what requires the most dosing. So even using a service doesn't help very much if one doesn't dose after each soak, especially if they use the spa a lot or with many bathers.