Hotsprings ACE to Ozonator

[crossnelson]

After many bad ACE cells over the past 4 years Watkins is providing me with an ozonator for my Grande. This was my first spa so i do not know anything about caring for a non salt spa. My pool is salt and i use the BBB sytem with it with no problems. Any input in how to manage my spa would be great. Thanks

 

[chem geek]

This thread on another forum gave many examples of people having trouble with their ACE systems. The boron-doped diamond electrodes are very sensitive to calcium carbonate (and calcium phosphate) scaling and they tend to not last as long as they should and they are expensive to replace.

Since your ACE spa used a salt level in the 750-1500 ppm range, you could use a ControlOMatic TechniChlor that uses 2000 ppm salt. At around $220 it's not too expensive to replace and it should last longer than your ACE cells and is not nearly as sensitive to calcium carbonate scaling.

If you want to go with a manual dosing approach, then you can use the Dichlor-then-bleach method described in the Pool School article Using Chlorine in a Spa. An ozonator works well if you use the spa every day or two, but if you only use the spa infrequently such as on weekends, then the ozonator isn't great because ozone reacts with chlorine more than doubling chlorine demand (loss) in between soaks.