New Spa owner - Questions regarding water changes, biofilm, and @ease

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Some folks with tubs use small SWCG's that hang in the tub to add their chlorine each day. Do a search on them.
 
Ok so the whole having super high CC in the tub was kind of driving me nuts. Just because I'm weird and I like to understand things I ended up calling @ease today to question them about their product and here is what they told me.

Smartchlor registers as Combined chlorine/total chlorine in testing. They said my free chlorine was too high and thats why my combined chlorine was high and that if I lowered the free chlorine to the .5-1 mark the combined chlorine would also drop.

I then questioned them about PH and they said that with smartchlor keeping PH in the right range is critical for the product to work correctly and that if it was needed to drop the TA until the PH became stable in the correct range. (At least that advice seems correct)

I am not totally sure I believe all of that but it was interesting to hear their point of view I guess? Since I am draining anyways I put the inline system to 0 and will see what happens before Sunday when I drain and refill. Still planning on going with the TFP method.
 
I seem to recall this same CC issue with someone else that had a @ease system. If I recall correctly that person just did a slam and over a few days the CC went down to normal.
 
Here it is. New Hot Tub - More to Learn

The OP in that thread had @ease, and even though it doesn't list MPS or anything else, he had really high CC just like certified106 is having. I had dug into Frog's website and found they list that their @ease system will show up as CCs on a test. The OP in that thread did a slam for a few days and got the CCs down to normal.

We hadn't figured out why that was. The only thing we noticed was Frog's comment on testing on their website and that the ingredients have two different types of dichlor, one which isn't what we normally think of when we talk of dichlor. That has to be something to do with it, but I'm not a chemist so I wouldn't know why.
 
So I just had a wildly successful trip to the grocery and hardware store for some spa chemicals which feels weird to say lol.

I was able to get granular CYA off the discount shelf at Walmart, big bag of baking soda, a couple of Gallons of bleach, and Muriatic acid. I am going to go ahead and just add the CYA so i don't have to deal with buying DiChlor.

Interestingly enough I set the frog @ease cartridge to 0 and when I checked levels today after using it for an hour or more last night my FC was at 2 and my CC had dropped to around 12.

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jseyfert3 said:
Here it is. New Hot Tub - More to Learn

The OP in that thread had @ease, and even though it doesn't list MPS or anything else, he had really high CC just like certified106 is having. I had dug into Frog's website and found they list that their @ease system will show up as CCs on a test. The OP in that thread did a slam for a few days and got the CCs down to normal.

We hadn't figured out why that was. The only thing we noticed was Frog's comment on testing on their website and that the ingredients have two different types of dichlor, one which isn't what we normally think of when we talk of dichlor. That has to be something to do with it, but I'm not a chemist so I wouldn't know why.
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Wow that was a really interesting read...... Seems like they were experiencing the same thing as me.
 

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That’s not dichlor. It’s a chlorinated dimethyl hydantoin (DMH) similar to the brominated DMH compounds. Chlorinated DMH is used as an oxidant for bromine activation and it will show up as a mix of FC and false CC’s on the DPD test. Those compounds add NO stabilization to the water.

You need to use dichlor, not that stuff. It’s essentially what they make toilet bowl tank cleaners out of.
 
JoyfulNoise said:
That’s not dichlor. It’s a chlorinated dimethyl hydantoin (DMH) similar to the brominated DMH compounds. Chlorinated DMH is used as an oxidant for bromine activation and it will show up as a mix of FC and false CC’s on the DPD test. Those compounds add NO stabilization to the water.

You need to use dichlor, not that stuff. It’s essentially what they make toilet bowl tank cleaners out of.
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Thanks for clearing that one up for all of us. Man after reading your post above I'm real excited about soaking in toilet bowl cleaner water.......lol

Hopefully after tomorrow I will have the tub cleaned and converted over to bleach so everyone stayed tuned for more questions haha.
 
40 Minutes of Ahhsome Purge, 20 minutes per zone with full air on. Not a ton of stuff. Some greenish/yellow foam but not really that much. That stuff starts drying really quick!! After 40 minutes the water looks a little oily/scummy. In the process of draining it now.

 
That yellow/green stuff is some biofilm gunk and the oily look is from lubricants used on the tubing. Still good to get rid of it and now your tub is very clean. You may experience an increased chlorine demand at first if there’s any residual Ahh-some left in the plumbing. You can either drain again or just keep the chlorine elevated until it subsided.

Look forward to seeing if your chemistry is more stable.
 
JoyfulNoise said:
That yellow/green stuff is some biofilm gunk and the oily look is from lubricants used on the tubing. Still good to get rid of it and now your tub is very clean. You may experience an increased chlorine demand at first if there’s any residual Ahh-some left in the plumbing. You can either drain again or just keep the chlorine elevated until it subsided.

Look forward to seeing if your chemistry is more stable.
Click to expand...

I committed to this thing so I think I'm going to fill/run and drain. Refill and start working on the chemistry. I feel pretty good now knowing I didn't have tons of junk hiding in the pipes. From some of the pictures I had seen I was envisioning a much bigger mess.
 
So I'm filing with rinse water for the first rinse and decided to start checking numbers jsut to see where I'm at.

FC: 0
CC: 0
PH: 7.5
TA: 290? What in the world is this typical?
CH: 150
CYA: 0

I'm guessing with a TA like that it's going to take a long time to knock it down? How would you go about it?
 

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